Mike, I agree. On the upside, the media are catching on to Diane Ravich's narrative. It's time for people that have been viewing for sport to stand up and lend a shoulder to get policy moving in the right direction.

Here's what I think: The core problem of public education is that conservatives have been dedicated to destroying it for several decades, and they're succeeding. Edutopia does nothing to stop that.

As for the model projects it focuses on, been there, done that. I was a teacher, education researcher, and textbook editor in the 60s and 70s. Aside from computers, there isn't much that's new in these projects. We chased the same goals, used the same buzzwords, celebrated the same victories. All to no avail.

Sure, it's nice to have something like Edutopia. But the life-and-death issue for public education is political, not pedagogical. I think Lucas's money would have been better spent on lobbying.

They put in a lot of hard work too. I would like to mention that I generally see a group of k-12 folks from Maine at the AAAS annual meeting. They go to the TIMSS, 2061, and Singapore Math symposia to learn about what's happening instead of waiting years for a consultant to tell them third or fourth hand.

King didn't mention Seymour Pappert telling him that the computers would facilitate a project curriculum. My own district tried dumping a load of laptops on a regular textbook curriculum and got nowhere. Pappert and Negroponte are quite specific about how it works, contrary to reports from failed projects.