{"id":70,"date":"2009-10-03T10:54:33","date_gmt":"2009-10-03T17:54:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/koorse.com\/?p=70"},"modified":"2009-10-03T10:54:33","modified_gmt":"2009-10-03T17:54:33","slug":"scott-oki-at-seattle-works","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/koorse.com\/?p=70","title":{"rendered":"Scott Oki at Seattle Works"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>One of the goals of Seattle Works is to inspire.\u00a0 As a board member, I often find that inspiration at our monthly meetings.\u00a0 On September 15<sup>th<\/sup>, we had a visit from Scott Oki who spoke to us about his current projects and his efforts to improve public education.<\/p>\n<p>Scott Oki is a former senior-vice president of Microsoft who helped develop their international operations.\u00a0 Since leaving Microsoft in 1992, he has been involved some amazing efforts in the community.\u00a0 He has served on dozens of advisory boards for both for-profit and non-profit companies.\u00a0 He also runs the Oki Foundation which tackles many societal issues.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Initially, he talked about a new social entrepreneurship idea that is geared to bringing donors closer to the people that they help.\u00a0 This effort focuses on people who are willing to donate small amounts of money to help those in need around the world.\u00a0\u00a0 With basic technology such as camera phones and free Web 2.0 cloud based services, this new organization will help donors see the impact of their contribution and build an emotional connection with the people being helped in developing nations.\u00a0 By combining this effort with social media networks, Scott talked about the tremendous viral potential of this strategy. \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>After that, he focused on his research on public education.\u00a0 I was alarmed to learn about the following issues in the American school systems:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>There are more non-teachers than teachers on the payroll of school districts<\/li>\n<li>A large number of teachers have tenure which makes them impossible to fire even when they are ineffective<\/li>\n<li>It\u2019s difficult to reward insanely great teachers due to unions<\/li>\n<li>Children are often socially promoted to the next grade instead of earning the right by merit.\u00a0\u00a0 This hurts the entire class as the educator must babysit instead of teach<\/li>\n<li>Parents have no choice in where to send their children even if they know the school is awful<\/li>\n<li>Standardized curriculums and testing have taken the creativity out of the classroom as teachers are encouraged to teach to a test instead of to the subject<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The sense of outrage in the room was palpable.\u00a0 Scott then talked about his recent book and his ideas to reform the educational system. The name of the book is Outrageous Learning: An Education Manifesto and it is available on Amazon.\u00a0 I\u2019ve had a chance to read it and it is brilliant.<\/p>\n<p>The mark of a great speaker is the amount of discussion that happens after their ideas settle into the audience.\u00a0 After Scott left, the board talked about his ideas and the impacts of the educational crisis on our generation.\u00a0 Some of my closest friends who teach in our public school systems have been laid off recently; these are people who I would consider \u201cinsanely great\u201d.\u00a0 Several other board members mentioned this as well.\u00a0 We also talked about how the WASL and the \u201cNo Child Left Behind\u201d act have affected local school districts.\u00a0\u00a0 We also asked ourselves if radical change was possible or even necessary.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019m always impressed with the diverse experiences and opinions of our board members.\u00a0 The inspiring session with Scott Oki was a great break from the tactical work around Seattle Works events and budget.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Break\u2019s over.\u00a0 SWANK is coming up fast!\u00a0 Looking forward to another amazing auction night on October 10<sup>th<\/sup>!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One of the goals of Seattle Works is to inspire.\u00a0 As a board member, I often find that inspiration at our monthly meetings.\u00a0 On September 15th, we had a visit from Scott Oki who spoke to us about his current projects and his efforts to improve public education. Scott Oki is a former senior-vice president &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/koorse.com\/?p=70\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Scott Oki at Seattle Works<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-70","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hobbies","category-personal"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/koorse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/koorse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/koorse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/koorse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/koorse.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=70"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/koorse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/koorse.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=70"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/koorse.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=70"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/koorse.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=70"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}