Philanthropy and Education

From Eugene Kim on spending a million on society:

How would I spend that million dollars? I would use it to start a nationwide dialog on improving education. I would involve parents, teachers, administrators, and especially the students. It seems like students are often left out of these dialogs, when in fact their insights are as profound and as important as those of adults.

The problem with dialogue is that talk is cheap. The participants in the dialogue would normally be largely self-selected. Problems I've seen in the past (my school district held town meetings across the county that both students and parents attended):

1) It is very unusual for those without a stake (either as a parent, student, or educator) to attend. Yet those people (businesses, future parents, retirees) are vital to strategic alignment.
2) Many popular ideas are financially unfeasible. Right now, 70% of my property taxes go to schools which are nearly the worst in the state. There's no more money. Even so, it is extremely difficult to receive popular support for a cut in a town hall environment (except suspiciously vague attacks on bureaucracy).

The town hall meetings turned out to be a PR gimmick and no significant change resulted. Perhaps modern collaboration tools would have helped -- I doubt it.

If it were my million, I'd develop an open courseware site that linked curriculum with the state guidelines and testing standards and allowed collaborative development and improvement (probably wiki style). The site would be useful to teachers, students, and home schoolers. I would rely on freely available ebooks for the english literature used, allowing schools to standardize on pocket ebook readers. With the remainder I would commission textbooks under a open source license. While most school systems would use a commercial printer to create copies with a traditional look and feel, future versions could be created collaboratively. With freely available and collaboratively developed curriculum and textbooks, students and teachers could together work to improve education rather than reinventing the wheel.