“My wand would wave over the current structuring of the progress that kids make through school, and I would make it all based on the mastery of concepts and courses, not on seat time or quarters or semesters,” Mitchell said at a 2010 Google forum titled “Innovation in Education: The Next Generation of Education Entrepreneurship.”
He also spoke about the need to “reconceptualize what we think of as the role of the teacher” and create a pipeline of “the most talented people” into education, find ways to assess them and help them “grow as professionals” but “exit them” if it “isn’t working out.”
These are the views of a venture capitalist who is set to become the next undersecretary at the U.S. Department of Education, pending confirmation in the U.S. Senate.
