Silicon Valley Leads Major Innovations & Curriculum Development In America's Public Schools

Marc Benioff, the chief executive of Salesforce, is giving middle school principals in San Francisco public schools $100,000 “innovation grants” with the challenge to behave more like start-up founders and less like bureaucrats.

In Maryland, Texas, Virginia and other states, Netflix’s chief, Reed Hastings, promotes a popular math-teaching program where Netflix-like algorithms determine which lessons students see.

And in more than 100 schools nationwide, Facebook’s chief, Mark Zuckerberg, is testing a really big idea: software that puts children in charge of their own learning, recasting their teachers as support system facilitators and mentors.

"In the space of just a few years, technology giants have begun remaking the very nature of schooling on a vast scale, using some of the same techniques that have made their companies linchpins of the American economy, " writes The New York Times. Through their philanthropy, they are influencing the subjects that schools teach, the classroom tools that teachers choose and fundamental approaches to learning.

The tech industry is also leading the way expressing their upset that Donald Trump withdrew America from the Paris Agreement on climate change.

Given the right-wing commitment to pull our children back to the Stone Age, as the test scores of America's kids fall lower and lower, tech giants are focused on creating a 21st century workforce. There are understandable debates about who's in charge among sectors of parents who believe they should determine their child's curriculum. The problem with this thesis is that as a civic society, America has a vested interest in an educated workforce. If they learn about science and evolution in the process, that is what America needs. ~ Anne