Projects and Research: FabLab @ School

Motivation

Few analysts agree on what makes education systems effective, but on one point there is near unanimity: improving education is extremely complex—no single solution suffices. Finland, with its progressive and student-centered model, achieves the same results in international rankings as the conservative and teacher-centered Singapore system. Teacher unions are blamed for the “failure” of public urban education in the United States, but top-flight public education systems in Canada, Finland, and Japan are staffed by teachers belonging to strong union organizations. Teachers in high performing Taiwan and Singapore are tested in order to qualify for jobs, but teachers in high performing Finland are not.

The complexity of this landscape leaves an emerging country with two options: to blindly import models from a foreign country, which rarely works in education, or to invent its own model, selectively incorporating the best practices in the world into its own cultural and socio-economic reality. But contrary to common sense, these best practices do not only speak to teachers and students – the educational ecosystem involves parents, students, policymakers, businesspeople, educators, technologists, and educational entrepreneurs. Thus, a new model for education should not only be about schools, but about this entire ecosystem. Improving student learning needs innovative businesses, universities and NGOs ready to reform teacher preparation, skilled public policymakers, creative entrepreneurs, and cutting-edge technologies.

The success of Brazil’s efforts in promoting a quantum leap in its educational system is tied to attracting the best and the brightest in all of those fields of activity to the educational ecosystem. We need to reach out to economists, MBAs, engineers, social scientists, and neuroscientists, give them world-class training, connect them with a strong sense of purpose, and inspire them with a robust vision about educational change.

Recent Press

Activities

To help accomplish this goal, Stanford University's School of Education and the Lemann Foundation established the Lemann Center for Entrepreneurship and Educational Innovation in Brazil. The Center would focus on developing new approaches to improving learning in Brazilian public schools, particularly for low-income students, and to developing new kinds of learning opportunities for such students inside and outside the public school system. The Center would do this in five complementary ways:

Postgraduate Training: training students from Brazil in the School of Education's MA and PhD programs and through Stanford's joint MBA-MA in Education program between the Business School and the School of Education. Students would be trained to play key roles in Brazil in educational policy innovation, innovation in learning design, and in innovative educational entrepreneurship.
Visiting Researchers and Professionals: host visiting educational researchers from Brazilian institutions for three or six months to attend seminars and work with Stanford faculty and Lemann Fellowship students. The Center would also leverage its privileged position in Silicon Valley by hosting as visitors entrepreneurs from Brazil who are attempting new educational tools or approaches to educational improvement.
Research in Innovative Approaches to Educational Change: The Center's four lead faculty will work with Lemann Fellowship Ph.D. students, MA students, MBA/MA students, visiting researchers, innovators and educational entrepreneurs, as well as other Stanford faculty and students, to develop and carry out world class research on educational policies, new approaches to educational entrepreneurship, and educational innovations aimed at improving access and quality in the Brazilian educational system.
Innovative Teacher Education: The Center will work with the Stanford Teacher Education Program (STEP) to train groups of strategically placed teacher educators in highly effective, innovative methods for developing high quality teachers in the context of the Brazilian university system.

Faculty

Paulo Blikstein (principal investigator) is assistant professor of Education and (by courtesy) Computer Science at Stanford University. He graduated from the Engineering School of the University of São Paulo, with a degree in Metallurgical Engineering (1998), and a Masters in Electronic Engineering (2000). After creating and directing a successful e-learning company in Brazil, Blikstein received a scholarship from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and moved to the US for a Masters' degree at the MIT Media Lab (2002). In 2003 he was awarded a PhD scholarship from the Center for Connected Learning and Computer-Based Modeling at Northwestern University, which he completed in 2009. Blikstein's research focuses on innovative uses of technology in education and computational modeling of human cognition. He adapts cutting-edge technologies for use in inner-city schools, such as robotics, computer programming, and rapid prototyping, creating learning environments in which children learn science and mathematics by building sophisticated, personally-meaningful devices. He then uses computational tools such as agent-based modeling, network theory, and machine learning, to assess and evaluate the learning that takes place in such environments. Blikstein has initiated and coordinated several educational projects with inner city students in developing countries, such as Brazil, Mexico, Senegal, and Costa Rica, and was a consultant to the Food and Agriculture Organization and the United Nations Development Program. Paulo is the co-inventor of the first open-source educational robotics platforms, the GoGo Board, now used in more than 10 countries. He has recently received an NSF CAREER award, a Google Faculty Award, and his research group won the Innovation Award at the prestigious Disney Learning Challenge competition.

Martin Carnoy (principal investigator) is Vida Jacks Professor of Education at Stanford University. He graduated from the California Institute of Technology with a degree in electrical engineering and from the University of Chicago with a PhD in economics. He is former president of the Comparative and International Education Society, and is a fellow of the National Academy of Education and of the International Academy of Education. Until 2008, he was on the scientific board of Mexico's National Institute of Educational Evaluation, Mexico's version of the National Center of Educational Statistics. He first did research in Brazil in the 1960s as part of a four-year project at the Brookings Institution with the Universidade de Sao Paulo on the Latin American Free Trade Area. Since, he taught and lectured at various Brazilian universities, including as a Fulbright Professor at Univerdidade Federal da Bahia in 1985 and has engaged in research on Brazil, including an evaluation of the PDE and a comparison of Brazil's primary education with Chile's and Cuba's, published in Brazil by the Lemann Foundation as A vantagem academica de Cuba (2009). His research on educational policy includes some of the earliest empirical work measuring the impact of vouchers and state accountability systems on student academic performance. He has authored more than thirty books. More recently, he has been focusing on what happens in schools and classrooms that affects student learning, particularly in mathematics, and the shape of changes in university systems and engineering education in the BRIC countries.

Eric Bettinger, a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is an active researcher in the economics of education with extensive ties to Latin America. His research is quantitative in nature and utilizes statistical techniques that allow him to identify causal relationships between components in education and student outcomes. Much of Bettinger's research focuses on educational vouchers in Colombia and Chile. His most cited paper shows that Colombia's secondary school voucher program led to improved academic achievement and increased college attendance. In recent years, his research has focused on students' access and success in higher education. Currently, Bettinger (along with Phil Oreopoulos and Bridget Long) is involved in the evaluation of a randomized experiment that streamlines the financial aid application process for low-income families in the United States. Bettinger is fluent in Portuguese and lived in Brazil from 1991-1993.

David N. Plank is Executive Director of Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE) and Professor (Research) at Stanford University. Before joining PACE in January 2007, he was a Professor at Michigan State University, where he founded and directed the Education Policy Center. He was previously on the faculties at the University of Pittsburgh and at the University of Texas at Dallas, where he taught courses and conducted research in the areas of educational finance and policy. He received his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1983, where he wrote his doctoral dissertation on regional differences in basic educational opportunities in Brazil. Plank is the author or editor of six books, including the AERA Handbook on Educational Policy Research and two books on educational politics and policy in Brazil. He was a Fulbright Professor at the Universidade Federal da Bahia in 1990, and worked closely with officials in the Ministério de Educação e Cultura and the World Bank on the development and implementation of policy and financial reforms in the basic education system. His current interests include the role of the State in education, and the relationship between academic research and public policy.