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The new “wiki revolutions” are so explosive and happen so fast, that there is no clear vanguard to take power, leaving a vacuum. The vacuums that result pose significant challenges for everyone who cares about moving from oppression, dictatorship and fundamentalism to openness, democracy and 21st century governments.

he world is increasingly complex and interconnected, and, at the same time, experiencing an erosion of common values and principles. This undermines the public’s trust in leadership, which in turn threatens economic growth and political stability.  In the words of the WEF’s founder Klaus Schwab, we need to “concentrate on defining the new reality and discuss which shared norms are required for making global cooperation possible in this new age.”

There are traditional risks like nuclear war, terrorism, climate change, infectious diseases, economic crisis and failed states.  But new risks are emerging everywhere. Consider something as seemingly mundane as the global supply chain. The vast networks that provide the world with food, clothing, fuel and other necessities could handle an Iceland volcano and one other catastrophe like the failure of the Panama Canal. But according to experts, a third simultaneous disaster would collapse the system. People around the world would stop getting food and water, leading to unthinkable social unrest and even a disintegration of civilized society.

“The PC-centric era is over,” the IDC report says. Within 18 months, it forecasts, non-PC devices capable of running software applications will outsell PCs. In tablets, IDC adds, Apple’s iPad will remain the leader, but lower-cost tablets will begin making inroads, especially as demand for tablets really takes off in emerging markets.

It's The Integration Economy, Stupid.

Tablet & Mobile Wars Create Ubiquitous Social Computing.

Facebook Interrupts Location-Based Networking.

Facebook promises something it cannot deliver just as many promoters promise that online instruction will transform schooling as we know it. Both are over-hyped social media.

time invested in a relationship determines its quality, having more than five best friends is impossible when we interact face to face, one person at a time. Put simply …. The emotional and psychological investments that a close relationship requires are considerable, and the emotional capital we have is limited.

personal contact sustained over ten months of a K-12 school year in the hands of skilled, knowledgable, and caring teachers, researchers have shown again and again (PDF: Rockoff on Teachers), makes a difference in students’ lives. Even the best online instructional software that create “virtual learning environments” fail to come close to what students do daily as they interact with each other and their teachers.

Historically, when the nation has a cold, schools sneeze. Examples are legion. When the Soviet Union launched the satellite Sputnik in 1957, President Eisenhower signed the National Defense Education Act (1958) aimed at getting better math and science teachers National problems of drug and alcohol abuse and tobacco smoking has led to states mandating courses to teach children and youth about the dangers of all of these substances. The Civil Rights movement in the 1950′s and 1960s’s spilled over the schools across the nation. Christian groups have pressured school boards to have prayer in schools, teach creationism, and vouchers (Educational Policy-2004-Lugg-169-87). The U.S. has competed economically with European and Asian countries for markets in the 1890s and since the 1980s. Each time that has occurred, business leaders turned to the schools to produce skilled graduates then for industrial jobs and now for an information-based economy.

This vulnerability to political stakeholders is very clear now with business and civic leaders pushing schools to be more efficient and effective in competing with China, Japan, and Germany.

In big cities where the problem of bad schooling is worst, results-driven reformers want mayors to take over schools and appoint their own superintendents, individuals who will accept no excuses from teachers and principals, will fight union rules, raise test scores, and create more charter schools.

Reformy myth #1: That every state has done its part and more, to pour money into high need, especially poor urban districts. It hasn’t worked, mainly because teachers are lazy and overpaid and not judged on effectiveness, measured by value-added scores. So, now is the time to slash the budgets of those high need districts, where all of the state aid is flowing, and fire the worst teachers. And, it will only help, not hurt.

Reformy myth #2: The only aid to be cut, the aid that should be cut, and the aid that must be cut in the name of the public good, is aid to high need, large urban districts in particular. The argument appears to be that handing down state aid cuts as a flat percent of state aid is the definition of “shared sacrifice.” And the garbage analysis of district Return on Investment by the Center for American Progress, of course, validates that high need urban districts tend to be least efficient anyway. Therefore, levying the largest cuts on those districts is entirely appropriate.

Reformy myth #3: The general public is fed up and don’t want to waste any more of their hard earned tax dollars on public schools. They are fed up with greedy teachers with gold plated benefits and fed up with high paid administrators. They don’t care about small class sizes and…well… are just fed up with all of this taxing and spending on public schools that stink. As a result, the only answer is to cut that spending and simultaneously make schools better.

What does it take to get politicians and the general public to abandon misleading ideas, such as, “Anyone who tries can pull themselves up by the bootstraps,” or that “Teachers are the most important factor in determining the achievement of our youth”? Many ordinary citizens and politicians believe these statements to be true, even though life and research informs us that such statements are usually not true.

till further discouraging news for those who advocate testing as a way to reform schools comes from the PISA assessments (The Program for International Student Assessment). Nations with high-stakes testing have generally gone down in scores from 2000 to 2003, and then again by 2006. Finland, on the other hand, which has no high-stakes testing, and an accountability system that relies on teacher judgment and school level professionalism much more than tests, has shown growth over these three PISA administrations (Sahlberg, 2011).

Now, in the USA, our parents are a greater determiner of our income in life than either our weight or our height.

chool administrators have to be diligent and purposeful about staying plugged in to what is happening in classrooms and the challenges faced by their instructional staff.

Despite their claims, the corporate reformers have no proof that the harm of their tactics is outweighed by any good. They lied about their 90-90-90-90 schools. Now they’ve been caught lying about their continually improving schools. They have absolutely nothing.