What would you do with an extra $2 TRILLION?  According to recent research quoted by colleague Stacey Childress of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in her March 2012 Harvard Business Review article “Rethinking School”, this is the amount our nation’s GDP would have increased  in 2010 had we closed our education achievement gap with better performing nations.  McKinsey & Company in their report on the same rightly described this education gap we now have with other countries as “the economic equivalent of a permanent national recession”. 

Now I bet you don’t hear many politicians running for office talking about our recession lasting permanently.  But it can and will if left unchecked.  Perhaps we shouldn’t look to the horizon of political power, influence and policy as our saviors from a permanent lowering of the quality of life as we know it in America.  Maybe we should look downwards instead of upwards, to field-level entrepreneurs forging new pathways for learning, school and technology-fueled excellence. 

Childress has hope and says that a “new generation of sophisticated adaptive courseware and schools that blend the best of teacher- and computer-delivered instruction are making personalized-learning approaches feasible and affordable, not as a replacement for teachers but as a way to give them the tools they need to become dramatically more effective.”

Matchbook Learning agrees with Stacey Childress and hopes to be one of many emerging voices that refuses to passively watch a generation of children miss their chance of becoming what we know they are capable of.  We have designed a teacher-centric blended model of school that leverages technology not to replace a teacher but to finally enable them to personally engage each and every student from where they are to where we aspire them to be.