Recently, Dave Vander Zanden, CEO of School Specialty, Appleton, told a St. Norbert CEO Breakfast & Strategy audience these points about the U.S. educational process that are important to School Specialty’s strategies:
• The U.S. educational system is very slow to adopt new ideas, especially technologically-based ones.
• His company’s objective: To help educators engage and inspire students to learn. Increasingly, the initiatives focus on “accelerated learning” techniques. Slowly, he said, textbooks are on their way out as a primary learning resource.
• With only 20% of students going on to post-secondary education, the emphasis of learning must be on “the path to adulthood.”