Giving Compass' Take:

• EdSurge reports on the education reforms discussed at the New Schools Venture Fund Summit and says that the theme this year was how to bring more innovation into learning by drawing from past lessons (specifically efforts that failed).

• One main thing that those involved in education initiatives can take away from the event: Despite all the new bells and whistles in edtech, tools are useless without meaningful content behind them.

• Will there be a way to solve the edtech pricing issues? School districts are getting fed up.

For the past few years, the annual New Schools Venture Fund Summit has surfaced some of the resonant themes echoing in education reform: A few years ago, it featured the likes of billionaires Mark Zuckerberg and venture capitalist John Doerr. Later, conversations around equity and diversity dominated. So what about this year?

In its 20th year, the Summit had a feeling of rolling up its sleeves: People talked about the tensions of trying to have civil dialogue between people who hold different points of view; they struggled with the ongoing challenge of trying to figure out “what works” in edtech and reform, particularly when efforts don’t seem to live up to expectations. And yet the conversations were uplifted by some powerful stories of students succeeding in ways that left the adults starstruck.

“Most of today’s schools were designed for a different time and purpose. And it matched up pretty well for how we worked then,” said Stacey Childress, CEO of New Schools Venture Fund, in the summit’s opening remarks. But “the world has changed dramatically since then. We think it’s time to update our schools.”

The familiar narrative — that schools today are outdated and in need of an overhaul—has also been shared by the likes of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and education reform leaders. However, innovating schools and actually putting those calls to practice can get messy, and it appeared that one theme throughout the event was about facing and learning from those failures.

"When it comes to our work in education, many of us are reflecting on the last 10 or 20 years. Some of it led to progress, and some of it did not,” said Childress. “But we have different interpretations about why and what to do about it."

Read the full article about the NewSchools Venture Fund Summit by Betsy Corcoran, Jenny Abamu and Sydney Johnson at EdSurge.