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Technology has completely changed the way that we communicate and interact, the way that we learn and use information. However, our educational system still has not reflected this fundamental change, and remains reliant on what Renzulli calls “to-be-presented knowledge,” with teachers and textbooks as the gatekeepers of this knowledge. However, this doesn’t reflect how our society and our information structures work today. Renzulli argues that our educational system needs to adapt to the skills and technology that we have developed as a society in order to prepare our students for 21st-century jobs and for rebuilding America’s reputation as a birthplace for creativity, leadership, innovation, and development of new technologies. This can be done through using technology to improve the way that we deliver education, as well as what we are teaching students, and improving students’ engagement in the educational process.

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States score a significant portion of Race to the Top points by opening up charter schools and pegging teacher pay to student performance—two features that are common in New York and D.C., but are virtually nonexistent in Iowa.

What do we want each student to learn? How will we know when each student has learned it? How will we respond when a student experiences difficulty in learning?

In today’s digital marketplace, students of all ages can create experiences tailored just for them. When a teenager searches for movies to watch, an online film site can provide suggestions based on past viewing history. Music lovers can create personalized playlists for everything from a workout in the gym to a study session. And when children play video games, they can choose a variety paths—based on their interests and skill levels—toward slaying a dragon or defeating an enemy. Then many of these same students walk into their classrooms and sit at their desks to absorb one-size-fits-all lessons or, if they’re lucky, instruction aimed at the high-, mid-, or low-level learner. And in many cases, there is little, if any, technology integrated into those lessons.

On the first question, research shows that teachers are the most important in-school factor determining students’ academic performance. But they are not the only in-school factor: class size and the quality of the school principal, for example, matter a great deal. Most crucially, out-of-school factors—family characteristics such as income and parents’ education, neighborhood environment, health care, housing stability, and so on—count for twice as much as all in-school factors. In 1966, a groundbreaking government study—the “Coleman Report”—first identified a “one-third in-school factors, two-thirds family characteristics” ratio to explain variations in student achievement. Since then researchers have endlessly tried to refine or refute the findings. Education scholar Richard Rothstein described their results: “No analyst has been able to attribute less than two-thirds of the variation in achievement among schools to the family characteristics of their students” (Class and Schools, 2004). Factors such as neighborhood environment give still more weight to what goes on outside school.

This award recognizes music educators throughout the U.S. for their accomplishments in teaching music in public schools.