Steve Jobs' Widow to Spend $50M to Unfreeze Schools

Steve Jobs' innovative spirit lives on through his widow, Laurene Powell Jobs. The Emerson Collective founder wants to revolutionize the way high school students are taught in the US, and is putting $50 million behind the initiative. "The system was created for the work force we needed 100 years ago," she tells the New York Times. As the XQ: The Super School Project website puts it, we've since gone "from a Model T to a Tesla and from a switchboard to a smartphone, but our public schools have stayed frozen in time." Sure, there's been incremental change the last few years, "but we're saying, 'Start from scratch,'" says Powell Jobs. What scratch looks like:

The XQ team asks educators, parents, students, and thought leaders to submit their ideas on how schools could and should be better, with an initial concept due Nov. 15. The multi-stage process will see winners announced next August. "We will partner with winning teams and provide them expert support and a fund of $50 million to support at least five schools [and as many as 10, per the Times] over the next five years to turn their ideas into real Super Schools." The Times notes that while Powell Jobs is "committed to ensuring that the new schools are public, she was unsure whether they would be charter schools." Read more on the challenge here. (More high school stories.)