I'm pleased to be providing leadership for starting up the Education Leadership Commons. The ELC is currently an embryonic movement dedicated to transforming education with the end-goal of enabling the scale-up of the proportion of the population holding "completions" (accredited postsecondary degrees and certificates). There's more, however. Simultaneous with scaling up the proportion of completions, investments in completions need to become mutually affordable both to education providers as expenses and to external investors in completions -- students/families, governments, donors, employers, and suppliers. In this context, my employer, SunGard Higher Education, is a "supplier" and is supporting the ELC start-up process. The intent of the start-up process, however, is to evolve the ELC into a nonprofit, non-governmental economic governance organization that does for completions what the Internet Society has done for the Internet by enabling exponential growth both in Internet traffic and in the creation of new economic and social wealth. Like the Internet, the completions production process is a common good and, like the Internet, should be economically governed to the mutual benefit of all economic beneficiaries. Not to do so is to risk a "tragedy of the commons" in which a common good is sacrificed to become, at best, primarily a government good or primarily a private good. At worst, humanity might lose the ongoing race between education and catastrophe (to paraphrase H. G. Well's distressing thought from the 1920s about the history of humanity).
Please peruse the Prospectus for a Global Education Leadership Commons, and post your comments here. The redesign of education is long overdue, and we must find find a win-win transformational strategy, rather than a strategy that keeps education providers and their external investors at unproductive odds.
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