SALT LAKE CITY, May 15, 2013 — /PRNewswire/ — The American Academy, which partners with school districts across the United States to serve students who have dropped out of school or are at risk of doing so, has announced the appointment of former America’s Promise Alliance president Marguerite W. Kondracke to its board of directors.
The announcement comes as Kondracke is receiving further acknowledgment of her contributions to children and families in the form of the Return on Education Lifetime Achievement Award for her four decades of work as a social entrepreneur and public servant.
In response to a need she recognized for working parents to care for their children, Kondracke co-founded Bright Horizons Family Solutions, the nation’s largest provider of employer-sponsored childcare. Later, as the chief executive for America’s Promise, which was founded in 1997 by Gen. Colin Powell to make children a national priority, Kondracke helped energize a conversation on the dropout epidemic that has prompted nationwide action.
“Marguerite has done so much for our nation’s children,” said American Academy chief executive officer Ray Kelly. “She’s a tenacious fighter and her track record at building organizations is incredible, so we’re thrilled to have her on a team dedicated to improving the lives of at-risk students.”
A rapidly expanding part of that effort is The American Academy’s NoDropouts program, which leverages the flexibility of online learning with the power of personal support to help at-risk students succeed. The program is in use by more than 80 school districts across the country.
“There is so much potential in each student that is too easily written off when the circumstances of their lives overcome their ability to keep attending school in the traditional way,” Kondracke said. “What NoDropouts promises is a chance to carry on with the flexibility and support students need to overcome those obstacles. That’s changing lives — and I’m so excited to be part of it.”
Prior to her service at America’s Promise, Kondracke served as special assistant to U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander, staff director for the Senate Subcommittee on Children and Families, and commissioner of Tennessee’s Department of Human Services.
For more information on The American Academy and its NoDropouts program, visit NoDropouts.com.
Contact: Jeff Beck, 801-877-1551, Jeff.Beck@NoDropouts.com

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2013/05/15/5422248/marguerite-kondracke-joins-board.html#storylink=cpy

Matthew Goldstein, who oversaw an expansion of the city’s public college system and set out to raise its prestige with a new honors college and other measures, announced on Friday that he would step down after 14 years as chancellor of the City University of New York.

In an interview on Friday, he said that having been the longest-serving chancellor by far, he felt the time was right to leave. “I had an agenda that was in my mind when I first accepted the invitation to do the job, and we have succeeded beyond that agenda, things I never envisaged we would be able to do,” he said.

When Dr. Goldstein, 71, came into office in 1999, a mayoral task force had just labeled CUNY “an institution adrift.” The task force called for the university’s total restructuring, to transform it from a confederation of loosely affiliated institutions into a coherent entity with more consistent standards and effective practices. Benno Schmidt, a former Yale president and an author of the report, later said of CUNY, “The word chaotic doesn’t even begin to describe it; it’s moribund.”

Dr. Goldstein had administrative experience, having previously led CUNY’s Baruch College, and, briefly, Adelphi University. But reforming CUNY posed enormous logistical and political challenges. The university now has 490,000 students at 24 colleges and professional schools. It is jointly funded by the city and the state, in addition to tuition, which is now $5,730 at the four-year schools. And with the overwhelming majority of its students coming from New York City public schools, the university’s success is somewhat dependent on the quality of education those institutions offer.

In an important initiative, Dr. Goldstein raised the admissions standards at CUNY’s top five four-year colleges — Baruch, Brooklyn, City, Hunter and Queens — and carried out a policy, which was proposed before his arrival, that required applicants who needed remedial classes to begin their studies at one of CUNY’s community colleges. The average SAT scores of freshmen entering the top colleges rose to 1147 last year from 998 in 1999, according to CUNY. But the changes had the additional effect of altering the colleges’ racial and ethnic profiles. As these colleges began accepting more Asian and fewer black and Hispanic students, critics denounced the new policy as discriminatory.

Dr. Goldstein added more than 2,000 full-time faculty positions. He also opened new schools and initiated new degree programs, including: the Macaulay Honors College, which began luring some of the city’s top public school graduates, including one winner of the nationwide Intel Science Talent Search; a school of public health; a graduate program in journalism; and a new community college meant to keep students on track toward a degree.

To help pay for these innovations, he sought out private donors in a way that CUNY never had before. During his tenure, CUNY’s annual fund-raising rose to almost $250 million from about $50 million. He assiduously cultivated allies in City Hall and Albany, was chairman of the city’s 2010 Charter Revision Commission and was appointed chairman of the New York City Regional Economic Development Council by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo.

In a prepared statement on Friday, Mr. Schmidt, who is now the chairman of CUNY’s board, said: “Chancellor Goldstein has led the unprecedented transformation of CUNY into the premier integrated urban university in America. By all indications, CUNY’s outstanding reputation, rising enrollments, increased standards and enhanced resources should be attributed in large measure to his exemplary and courageous leadership.”

The CUNY board will conduct a national search to replace Dr. Goldstein, who earns $490,000 a year, and receives a $90,000-a-year housing allowance. He will step down this summer.

A recent push by Dr. Goldstein called the Pathways Initiative, a program to establish common “learning outcomes” across the entire system, has met with defiance from large swaths of the faculty. The program sought to make it easier to transfer credits from one CUNY college to another, and to lessen what Dr. Goldstein considered a burdensome number of core courses that some colleges required.

Critics described it as a way to centralize control and stint on instruction. The union representing CUNY faculty and the university faculty senate have brought two lawsuits to try to block the initiative.

“I think he has done a number of really wonderful things. I think he has had a number of really good ideas,” said Sandi Cooper, a history professor at the College of Staten Island and a former chairwoman of the university faculty senate. But, she added, “I think the worst idea he had was Pathways, and even worse than the idea was the way he stuffed it down the faculty’s throat,” resulting in what she said was the worst morale since the fiscal crisis of the 1970s. “Otherwise his achievement is terrific.”

By COREY KILGANNON

Not many people have heard of Macaulay Honors College, a school in New York City with 1,770 students and just one athletic team: the Marauders.

But the team has qualified for a coming World Cup, giving students something to rally around and bringing some recognition to the school, which is part of the City University of New York.

“We like to say we’re the best looking sports team at Macaulay because, really, we’re the only team,” said Jenna Jankowski, 20, an English major who helped start the team. “At least we have a good monopoly on school support.”

The sport the Marauders play? Quidditch, a real-world adaptation of the sport played by wizards and witches in the Harry Potter books and movies.

Macaulay is one of three teams from New York City that qualified for the sixth annual Quidditch World Cup, being held this weekend in Kissimmee, Fla.

The other two are a team from New York University and a team not affiliated with any school, the New York Badassilisks, who practice, as the Marauders do, on a nondescript open space in Central Park near West 86th Street.

“It’s basically a big dirt patch, a dust bowl,” Ms. Jankowski said. “You cover your mouth and eyes to keep the dust out.”

There, the Marauders often scrimmage with the Badassilisks, whose players range in age from 18 to 45.

The team, its name a play on “basilisk,” a giant serpent in the Harry Potter books, grew out of a Harry Potter meet-up group about three years ago, said one of the team’s members, Michael E. Mason, 33, who manages two Doughnut Plant stores in Manhattan. “I embody both the jock and nerd side,” he said. “It’s a hard-core, physical, tough, intense sport. And if you doubt that, then come out on the pitch and get hit.”

In the J. K. Rowling novels, Harry Potter played the game with his Gryffindor teammates on flying broomsticks.

The human adaptation, known as Muggle Quidditch — Muggle being Ms. Rowling’s word for “nonmagical folk” — is a full-contact, coed sport combining elements of dodge ball and rugby on an elliptical field. And yes, the players straddle brooms.

There are seven players to a side — three chasers, two beaters, a keeper, and a seeker — and three kinds of balls: a quaffle, a snitch and bludgers. The chasers try to get the quaffle — a slightly deflated volleyball — through one of three hoops guarded by keepers. Beaters throw the bludgers, dodge-ball-style, at the chasers. Seekers chase the runner who has the snitch — a tennis ball — tucked into a sleeve attached to his shorts.

The game has spread to hundreds of college campuses. The World Cup, which for the last two years was held in New York City, will have about 80 teams this year, including squads from Canada, France and Mexico.

“It’s gotten to be a lot bigger than just Harry Potter,” said Alex Benepe, 26, the commissioner of the International Quidditch Association, which organizes the World Cup and has 250 dues-paying teams.

Mr. Benepe’s father is Adrian Benepe, who stepped down last year as New York City’s parks commissioner. Now his son is the commissioner in the household he shares with his parents on the Upper West Side.

“Maybe it’s Freudian, maybe I inherited it from my dad,” Alex Benepe said with a laugh.The younger Mr. Benepe, a marketing consultant, is known to wear a tuxedo, scarf and top hat at tournaments, along with a cane adorned with a golden snitch.

He was, he said, among the first to play quidditch as a competitive sport, at Middlebury College in Vermont in 2005, when he was a freshman. A friend, Xander Manshel, suggested that they all borrow some brooms and play the game, using the Harry Potter series as a playbook. Soon, Mr. Benepe was running a college league. In 2007, after reading about the quidditch World Cup in “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,” he formed an intercollegiate association and held the first real-world World Cup, with Middlebury taking on Vassar College in the middle of Middlebury’s campus. Quidditch is attracting talented athletes who are not Harry Potter bookworms. Tackles are commonplace. So are broken bones and twisted ankles. There will be a concussion expert at this year’s World Cup. Its practitioners say it is serious, but never too serious.

“One thing joins us all together: you have to be the kind of person who wants to ride a broomstick,” said Bryan Hall, 22, one of the captains of the N.Y.U. team, known as the Nundu, a word used in the Harry Potter books to describe a leopardlike creature. “You know there’s a sense of ridiculousness to the sport and so no matter how competitive it gets, you have to take a step back and say, ‘O.K., I’m playing quidditch, I’m riding a broom.’ ”

The N.Y.U. team practices at East River Park in Manhattan. The team is a mix of Potter fanatics and serious athletes who are not so wild about Harry, said Mr. Hall, a senior.

The same is true of the Macaulay team. Since Macaulay students take classes throughout the City University system, its players come from all five boroughs, including three City College soccer players and a Lehman College tennis player. Other members, like Ms. Jankowski, have no real sports background.

“We started it as fans and turned into athletes,” said Ms. Jankowski, who lives on Staten Island and takes classes at the College of Staten Island. She built the team’s first hoops with the help of her father, a carpenter, and drew stares while carrying them on the subway to practice.

“People see us carrying hoops and brooms,” she said, “and some of them have wound up following us to practice, to watch.”

As Mr. Meyer noted, “I’m proud of the ambitions and accomplishments of our students, many of whom are the first in their families to attend college. Macaulay’s New Media Lab will help ensure that our students graduate, not only with an outstanding education, but also with the practical hands-on job training they need to succeed in the 21st century economy.”

Twelve Macaulay Honors College students – selected during a rigorous application process – are now participating in the initial and highly coveted
New Media Lab workshop. These creative, interdisciplinary non-credit sessions are led by Mr. Hecht, who is CEO of entertainment studio Worldwide Biggies, founder of Spike TV and former President of Nickelodeon Entertainment. “This is an opportunity for Macaulay Honors College, as a public institution, to become a leader in the field of media and technology,” observed Hecht. “The New Media Lab will be training the content creators of tomorrow.”

The New Media Lab project has been conceived as a long-term program to unfold in four phases. Its goal is to study, experiment with and produce transmedia content by understanding the modes of user engagement in which digital audiences watch, learn, play, connect, collect and create.

Students will: obtain job skills; create a portfolio of projects; and learn how to develop and produce transmedia content to tell a story across multiple platforms and formats. After Phase I, the current workshop, the project will work towards developing the New Media Lab course for credit. Its evolution into a major and its expansion into a Macaulay Center for New Media Studies is in the planning stage.

About Macaulay Honors College

Macaulay Honors College at The City University of New York offers exceptional students a uniquely personalized education with access to the vast resources of the nation’s largest urban university and New York City itself. Selected for their top high school records and leadership potential, Macaulay students receive a full-tuition scholarship, a laptop and technology support, and a $7,500 Opportunities Fund to pursue global learning and service opportunities. A Cultural Passport provides access to museums, libraries, and other treasures around New York City. Macaulay students enroll in one of eight CUNY senior colleges (Baruch, Brooklyn, City, Hunter, John Jay, Lehman, Queens and Staten Island). For more information, see macaulay.cuny.edu.

To listen to some people talk, the demolition of the old Interstate 195 through Providence represents the most significant economic opportunity for Rhode Island in a generation. With some 20 acres of land in downtown Providence soon available for development, officials envision the Jewelry District teaming with life science companies and cutting-edge research.

“Tear it down and they will come,” Gov. Lincoln D. Chafee said. “This is an unprecedented opportunity,” added Jim Bennett, the city’s top economic-development official. In a state with stubbornly high unemployment and a constant pall of pessimism, the aspiring rebirth of the Jewelry District to a so-called Knowledge District provides a bright spot and a potential lure for private investment.

This year, Brown University opened its new Warren Alpert Medical School in the home of a former jewelry factory. Officials and local business owners say that medical research and creative companies already dot the neighborhood and serve as a magnet for like-minded companies. That environment attracted Anne De Groot and her medical-research company, EpiVax, to the neighborhood eight years ago. Now with a growing company, EpiVax needs more space. “I’m all totally about being in the Jewelry District,” De Groot said. “Somebody build me a building, I’ll move in.”

Economic-development officials want more of her kind. The R.I. Economic Development Corporation – led by new directors appointed by Chafee – has retooled itself to focus on building a Knowledge District. Legislation enacted this year established tax breaks for life science companies that create jobs in the area. The law also set up a commission to oversee the excess highway land and combine a multistep, city-permitting process into a single state entity. Officials say that while important, the land represents a mere piece of a broader strategy to use the neighborhood to catapult development throughout the city and the state.

“The 20 acres is a bit of the tail wagging the dog,” EDC Executive Director Keith W. Stokes said. Officials repeatedly take pains to note the amorphous boundaries of the Knowledge District. They point out that toymaker Hasbro Inc. and gaming-company 38 Studios are just blocks away. They note the proximity of Johnson & Wales University and the Rhode Island School of Design. They also note attractions such as Providence Place, nine art galleries and the Providence Performing Arts Center. The governor is banking on such attractions and the city’s educational and health institutions to lure upand-coming life science companies. He also wants to boost all levels of public education, repave streets and even improve the sewer system.

“My belief is, create a good environment for business to flourish and good things will happen,” Chafee said. He reiterated his opposition to dangling financial incentives to companies looking to expand. He called deals such as loan guarantees, tax breaks and grants an unnecessarily risk of scarce taxpayer dollars. Yet, Chafee leads a state competing with other states drooling for life science investments. Massachusetts established a Life Sciences Initiative in 2007 and pledged to put $1 billion over the next decade into attracting companies in the industry. Houston has cultivated the Texas Medical Center and North Carolina fostered the Research Triangle Park.

Both parks received a boost by capitalizing on the research of local universities. Stokes said that could happen here, too. Plenty of graduates from local institutions start companies in Rhode Island. But they have found little reason to stay and grow in the Ocean State.

“We’ve been an incubator for New England,” Stokes said. “We’ve got to stop that.” Now is the time to come up with a game plan for how to keep them here and woo new companies and developers, Constance Howes said. The president of Women & Infants Hospital chairs the Innovation Providence Implementation Council assembled by the Greater Providence Chamber of Commerce. “You have to have people who are willing to take the financial risk and it’s unclear how many businesses will be ready to do that right now,” Howes said. “So right now is a good time to make the plan and find out who has the dollars to make that plan happen.”

Bennett, the city economic official, said people with dollars might spend them more freely if the state restores the Historic Preservation Investment Tax Credit. The program offers tax credits to those that rehab historic structures, which abound in the Jewelry District. For its part, the city can tap existing loan programs and streamline construction regulations, Bennett said. Officials will also need to sort out what belongs in the district if, in fact, demand explodes and land becomes limited.

Stokes said that land offers a chance to complement, not replace, local businesses. He said that one of the charms of the area is keeping an eclectic use of space. If land – of which now there is plenty – does run out, the state will encourage businesses to set up in nearby places such as Pawtucket. “We would fail if we were to dislodge an existing base of commerce and replace it with something new,” Stokes said.

Jewelry District Association President Arthur Salisbury would like to see one industry dislodged: the nightclubs in the northeast corner of the district. With some 3,700 seats for patrons, the clubs have been the scene of drunken revelry and shootings.

“This is our major problem right here,” Salisbury said, standing at the corner of Friendship and Richmond streets, with the nightclubs in the background. As with any redevelopment, battles over who will develop the land are sure to come. In the case of the Jewelry District, much debate is likely to revolve around how much land goes to nonprofit institutions exempt from city property taxes.

The law passed earlier this year requires institutions to negotiate a payment in lieu of taxes with the cashstrapped city before a purchase of the old highway land or pay the full tax bill. The requirement came at the cash-strapped city’s urging.

Chafee, who signed the bill, also expressed a desire to explore the state leasing the land to a private developer, who would then pay city taxes on any structures built. The state would provide a percentage of the lease revenue to the city.

It’s a better plan than asking the state to give the city money in return for hosting nonprofits, Chafee said. Such payments, already in use elsewhere in the state, are subject to the whims of the General Assembly and budget constraints, the governor noted.

Regardless of the buyer, developers will need to pass muster with the commission lawmakers established earlier this year. Chafee said he sees commissioners he appointed serving as “bureaucrats” handling development rules, rather than marketing the land and shaping the broad vision. Marketing the land, Chafee said, will fall squarely upon the shoulders of the state’s elected officials.

“A lot of work’s been done,” he said. “Now’s the time to reap the harvest.”

At its northern end, Eddy Street in Providence starts with parking lots. Move south and there’s the old motor shop that’s been turned into residential condominiums. Then there’s the new Brown University medical school.

Across the street is land slated to become a park. Down the road, there is a police substation, an appraiser, a real estate office, more parking lots and a crumbling, defunct power plant. It’s a street with a hodgepodge of businesses, indicative of the wider neighborhood known for years as the Jewelry District, in a nod to its once-vibrant jewelry-manufacturing history. But starting about three decades ago, the neighborhood shifted from jewelry to offices. Now, as state and city leaders try to rebrand and reinvent the area as the Knowledge District, business leaders there say the roots are already firmly planted.

“That would be great because that’s often what I think it is,” said Malcolm Grear, founder and CEO of Malcolm Grear Designers on Eddy Street. The design firm has leveraged its creativity, expertise and skills to develop marketing campaigns for clients around the world, including the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. And there are other firms with a creative bent and plenty of “knowledge,” argues Jewelry District Association President Arthur Salisbury. So he cringes when leaders try and brand the area the Knowledge District, saying it already has plenty of intelligence and diversity.

“We’re a little bit of everything and that’s what we want to be,” Salisbury said. Just look at Eddy Street. Approximately 25 businesses abut the road and employ more than 225 people in positions as diverse as gas station attendant, insurance agent and medical-school professor. The Jewelry District, however, is much larger than one street. Generally regarded to resemble a pie wedge, the district is pie-shaped, with interstates 95 and 195 forming the crust and the Providence River and Pine Street the edges. Neither the city, state nor the neighborhood association has ever completed an official inventory of businesses or jobs in the area that has grown organically since the jewelry industry largely left two decades ago. As officials tout the potential for the district to become a hub for life science research, the neighborhood has found itself in the limelight. And that spotlight has unearthed a district without an identity easy to pin down.

“It’s probably mor than meets the eye but it’s still a lot of mishmash and potential,” Gov. Lincoln D. Chafee said. A mishmash that started arriving as the jewelry industry began departing in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Companies with names like the Speidel Co., the Gorham Manufacturing Co. and the Roberts Paper Co. closed up or moved elsewhere. A few companies involved in the jewelry trade still work out of the district. But rather than employing hundreds of people in big plants, they are smaller operations and few and far between, said John Mesrobian, owner of S & M Enameling Co. on South Street.

“Jewelry is pretty much dead” in the district, Mesrobian said. The industry lost to places such as China, where labor is cheaper and environmental laws more lax. In the industry’s wake small businesses cropped up. Nightclubs arrived when the city created a de facto nightlife district by steering liquor licenses to the area near Friendship and Richmond streets. Combined, the clubs can legally hold about 3,700 patrons, according to the neighborhood association. In 2007, Brown University came down off College Hill across the river and purchased 14 properties. Besides the university’s new medical school, the Ivy League institution keeps a biology lab and an entrepreneurship center in the area and this month started renovations on Dyer Street to move its continuing-education program there.

Brown says it now has about 1,000 faculty, staff and students in the neighborhood. With that, the area has started a shift toward an emphasis on research and education. “Without anybody planning it or consciously directing, it has many of the features people would hope would be in the Knowledge District at some point,” said Richard Spies, executive vice president for planning at Brown University. For years, Brown let existing tenants stay in the buildings and that left the neighborhood largely the same assortment of businesses, as some academics struggled to classify the neighborhood.

“It’s still searching for a new identity,” said D. Scott Molloy, a professor of labor and industrial relations at the University of Rhode Island. “I think with this emergence of health [care], that may be the forthcoming way to identify the area.” For some business leaders, that identity already exists. Dr. Timothy Babineau, president and CEO of Rhode Island Hospital, said that the area already boasts life science research. But its under-the-radar state makes selling the area to new companies frustrating. “No one wants to be the first person to jump in the pond,” Babineau said. “What I tell folks is we already have people in the pond.” To back up the statement Babineau turned to the R.I. Economic Development Corporation, where he serves on the board of directors. At his encouragement, the board formed a subcommittee to inventory the Knowledge District. In June, the 17-member committee said it tallied 784 businesses operating in the Knowledge District, which it defined broadly to encompass downtown and the Washington Park area as well as the Jewelry District.

The study found more than 530,000 square feet of space in the area used for scientific and medical research. Brown University owns 14 properties. Johnson & Wales University owns 18 buildings and leases space in another three. Lifespan operates its Coro Research Center. Rhode Island Hospital runs a liver-research center and The Miriam Hospital has a center for weight control and diabetes. Not all the companies are big and not all made it into the EDC report. Fulcrum Product Development on South Street has sat for a decade in the heart of the district. Since moving in 10 years ago, the company has renovated its building and employed interns from the nearby Johnson & Wales campus.

“We knew this was going to be an up-and-coming area because they’ve been talking about it for so many years,” President Douglas Stern said. A popular one too. Leeds Mitchell IV, vice president at MG Commercial, said office space is only available in small chunks unappealing to high-tech companies. So he has struggled to find locations for companies in the biotech and Internet industries. “There are not a lot of options right now” in the district, Leeds said. In July, CB Richard Ellis-New England reported that 68,265 square feet of space in the district is vacant, representing a 15.5 percent vacancy rate, up from a 9.7 percent vacancy rate five years ago. Commercial presence, however, is only one side of the story. The district is also home to about 250 residents, according to the neighborhood association.

Many of them, including Salisbury, call former factories home. And if you’re Salisbury, your view has certainly changed. From his dinner table, he once watched traffic jams along the elevated Interstate 195. With heavy equipment grinding up and carting away the last pieces of the highway, there’s now a swath of vacant land prime for development. And that has government officials excited.

“The potential’s all there,” Chafee said. “Now we’re ready to realize it.”

Joseph DiBattista remembers opening his jewelry plant on Chestnut Street in Providence in 1964. Manufacturers, platers, wire formers, stampers, enamellers and other businesses lined the streets. Signs boasted the names of some of the biggest designers in the world. Blue-collar workers gathered for lunch and, inevitably, the topic of jewelry came up. There was little question that Providence – and specifically its Jewelry District – reigned as the jewelry capital of the world.

“It was a very lively, precious neighborhood,” said DiBattista, who sold his business in 1989.

In the early years after Europeans first arrived in the area, however, there was little to suggest that such an industry would rise to prominence. The city founded by Roger Williams was, after all, a simple seaside community filled with more farmers than jewelers.

“In 1786 there was nothing to indicate that a century later the flats and fields of the west side would be covered with jewelry shops,” wrote Welcome Arnold Greene in a history of Providence published in 1886.

The industry received its start far from what became recognized as the modern Jewelry District – broadly defined as a pie wedge bounded by Interstate 95, the Providence River and Pine Street.

In 1794, Nehemiah Dodge established himself as a jeweler and clockmaker on North Main Street, near what is today Roger Williams National Memorial Park. Dodge took up a specialization in costume jewelry – relatively inexpensive necklaces, earrings and watches that appeal to the masses.

By 1810, competitors arose and about 100 people worked in the industry, according to Greene’s history. By 1820, that number had risen to 300 men producing jewelry valued at $600,000. Over the coming decades, the industry would grow and work its way south toward Broad Street and then Eddy Street, as jewelers searched for land to host their shops and factories.

In 1897, a loose association of jewelers would form the New England Manufacturing Jewelers Association, the forerunner to the Manufacturing Jewelers & Suppliers of America. For years, the association would maintain its headquarters in Providence and become a leading voice in the industry. (In 2009, the association moved to Attleboro.)

By 1880, the U.S. Census showed 142 jewelry shops in Providence that had invested $2.8 million in capital. They paid some $1.6 million in wages and sold some $5.4 million in goods. It was a maledominated industry, employing 2,411 men, 675 women and 178 children. From there, the industry mushroomed.

“Once this place had an international reputation, you wanted to be here,” said Ned Connors, a preservation consultant.

The jewelry industry gave rise to other businesses, some related and some not. The Roberts Paper Co. opened a facility on Bassett Street in the 1920s to supply packaging to the jewelry industry. Many jewelry barons constructed buildings too large for their needs and rented the extra space to small startup firms, whether jewelry-related or not.

Outside of the factory walls, aspiring businessmen opened bars, bakeries and restaurants to cater to workers and visitors. “Just because we call it the Jewelry District doesn’t mean everything happening here was jewelry,” Connors said.

But jewelry firms stole the spotlight. Often started by two partners, some would live relatively short lives, succumbing to economic downturns. Others would pass from generation to generation, and their owners gained prominence for their wealth and their inventions.

Fred I. Marcy & Co. would perfect the French concept of a lever button, in which a hinged button slips through a hole and is then tilted to keep cloth together. Levi Burdon invented seamless, filled wire, which stimulated the chain-making industry. The Speidel Co. gained prominence as one of the first companies to manufacture the metal watchband.

“They made everything, from A to Z,” said D. Scott Molloy, a professor of labor and industrial relations at the University of Rhode Island. At first, they would work in modest buildings. Around the turn of the 19th century, impressive five-to seven-story brick factories supported by heavy timbers and boasting arched windows, granite sills, corbelled cornices and smokestacks arose in the district. In the ensuing decades came reinforcedconcrete buildings. One factory – the Coro Building – would gain distinction for devoting a whopping 160,000 square feet of space to a jewelry operation. Later, steel-frame buildings with long, horizontal bands of windows would dominate the industrial look of factories not just in the Jewelry District but across the state.

The national government would recognize the architectural importance of the buildings the jewelers left behind in 1984 with the approval of the roughly 19-acre Providence Jewelry Manufacturing Historic District. The recognition by the U.S. Department of the Interior provides prominence while allowing property owners access to federal historic tax credits. In 2009, Providence commissioned Connors to take another look at the district and its inventory of
buildings originally compiled in the mid-1980s by Rick Greenwood, now deputy director at the R.I. Historical Preservation and Heritage Commission.

Connors upped the historically significant building count to 29 from 19 and tweaked the boundaries. His recommendations now head to the state preservation commission for review and then the National Park Service for approval. But jewelry alone does not define the area’s history. The factories displaced wooden houses that dotted the landscape. The area attracted residents who cut across demographics. Workers who labored in factories to the north by day would return to the area at night. Marine tradesmen worked at docks along the Providence River.

And even members of the elite took up residence. Providence Mayor Thomas Doyle lived in a Federalstyle building that stands today on Chestnut Street. “This was a cheek-to-jowl residential area,” Connors said. Now all that remains from the time are three historic houses, spared from the encroachment of factories, parking lots and – in the mid 20th century – two interstate highways.

The later part of the 20th century would also bring a shift in development. In 1977, Brier Manufacturing Co. – a jewelry maker – went bankrupt. That year developer James Winoker purchased the company’s home at 222 Richmond St., converted the factory to office space and built a parking garage next door. In would move the Big East basketball association, Brown University’s investment office and others (including Providence Business News). During the next two decades, Winoker and his partners would buy more properties, assembling a collection of more than a dozen. Winoker converted them to offices for accountants, attorneys, nonprofits and government agencies. As they arrived, jewelry manufacturers squeezed by the shifting global economy left. “It was a slow death,” of the jewelry industry in the district, Winoker said.

But Winoker and his family saw potential in the neighborhood close to downtown and offering easy highway access. As factories moved out, Winoker and others converted the hulking structures to offices and residences. Brown University slowly moved in as well. In 2006, the university purchased 14 properties from Winoker. The purchase could set the stage for another shift in the neighborhood’s identity as officials now tout its potential to serve as hub of life science research, an idea that reached an early peak this fall with the opening of Brown’s new home for the Warren Alpert Medical School, at 222 Richmond St. But Winoker says it’s important to remember the mix of businesses that moved in as the jewelry workers moved out. “The 30-year gap was the important bridge that got us to … what we are today,” he said.

DAVOS, Switzerland — She may not have been the youngest speaker ever at the World Economic Forum in Davos, but Khadija Niazi, 12, was certainly captivating.

Hundreds of the conference’s well-heeled attendees listened intently as Ms. Niazi, of Lahore, Pakistan, described her experience with massive open online courses, known as MOOCs, that are spreading rapidly around the globe.

MOOCs are vastly extending the reach of professors at some of the world’s best universities, particularly at Stanford, Harvard, M.I.T., Yale, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania and Duke.

Ms. Niazi has been taking courses, free so far, from Udacity and Coursera, two of the earliest providers of this new form of instruction. Her latest enthusiasm is for astrobiology, because she is fascinated by U.F.O.’s and wants to become a physicist.

Education has long played a part in the annual deliberations here. But this time, many participants may have detected what Drew Gilpin Faust, Harvard’s president, described as “a lot of attention.”

The fast rise of MOOCs is one reason. Coursera, at Stanford, for example, has existed just a few months and now has 214 courses attracting 2.4 million students from 196 countries.

Stanford, in Silicon Valley, has been the starting place for many well-regarded technology efforts, perhaps most notably Google. Still, questions swirl over the economic model that might eventually emerge to finance these online courses, which so far tend to be offered free in what amounts to a global test-marketing phase.

There are many other unanswered pedagogical issues, too — can such courses teach the humanities, or ever grade a creative writing piece? — in envisioning the potential for further educating millions who previously had no access to this caliber of teaching.

“We don’t know where the next Albert Einstein is,” said Daphne Koller, a computer science professor at Stanford who, with a colleague, Andrew Ng, introduced Coursera last spring. “Maybe she lives in a small village in Africa.”

Sebastian Thrun, another Stanford computer science professor who introduced Udacity after seeing more than 160,000 students sign up for an online class on artificial intelligence in the fall of 2011, predicted that this kind of learning would eventually upend American and perhaps other Western academic institutions.

In a discussion after Ms. Niazi’s presentation, Lawrence H. Summers, the economist and former Harvard president, was more cautious. He acknowledged the potential for the courses “to be hugely transformative.”

But “what it means for American students is the smallest part of it,” he said. “This is going to take a lot of working out.”

Peter Thiel, an early investor in digital technology, said online learning meant that the best professors would eventually need to focus even more on their role as mentors to students they worked with in person.

That is one reason Mr. Thiel and others emphasized that elite universities, the incubators of the long-term research essential to most major discoveries, would still exist.

Ms. Faust, in an interview, also emphasized the role of research and new ideas. Corporations are valuable sources of innovation, she said, but “they are living under the tyranny of quarterly reports and stock prices.”

A university expands thinking and research in ways “that may be unpredictable and may be long,” she said. But the cumulative effect of each new postdoctoral, graduate or undergraduate student attending a university like Harvard, whether physically or virtually, is accumulated wisdom and experimentation, she said.

Enterprising academic institutions have taken the lead in online learning. Harvard and M.I.T., for instance, worked together to introduce EdX, which offers free online courses from each university, last year. About 753,000 students have enrolled, with India, Brazil, Pakistan and Russia among the top 10 countries from which people are participating.

Also at Davos were officials from the new Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology in Russia. The institute, also known as Skoltech, recruited a longtime M.I.T. professor, Edward F. Crawley, to aid its efforts to rival research institutions around the world and has welcomed its first 75 graduate students.

China’s best universities were also advertising their courses, although Chinese academics said that outside elite institutions in Beijing and Shanghai, the Chinese emphasis on rote learning could not compete yet with more interactive education in the West.

Dr. Koller said the value of a postgraduate education, no matter where it was gained, was shifting fast. “We have passed the stage in history,” she said, “where what you learn in college can last you for a lifetime.” After 15 years, she added, that learning is “obsolete.”

Top British universities like Oxford and Cambridge are also experimenting with online courses, which they promoted here.

Because government financing plays a large part in European institutions, both Andrew Hamilton, the vice chancellor of Oxford, and Leszek Borysiewicz, his counterpart at Cambridge, emphasized the paramount need to sustain long-term research.

In medicine, Mr. Borysiewicz argued, the span from the germ of a new idea to the bedside is typically about 17 years.

That requires long-term thought, akin to the studiously elite admissions policies and research skills that have kept Britain’s top two universities among the world’s best for hundreds of years.

But at Stanford, Dr. Koller is thinking in days, not centuries. Asked about the economic viability of Coursera, she outlined three potential sources of income: students paying an optional low fee ($59, for example) for a completed course; smaller colleges licensing the courses devised by the bigger universities; and employers subsidizing courses for their workers to bridge skill gaps.

When pressed on the likelihood of each model, she said: “Get back to me in two weeks. That’s when the sign-up for the student model ends.”

Plenty of wide-eyed, ambitious, and possibly naive startups have set out to “fix” or at the very least, improve, education. You can’t fault anyone for that — with US students lagging most of the world in subjects like math and science, the sector has much room for improvement.

The problem comes when those startups try to sell software and tools to schools. The schools want to innovate. It’s just not that simple. There’s a culture clash at play. New York’s Innovate NYC Schools program is trying to change that with the iZone, a 250-school subset of the district focused on experimentation and working with new technologies. Last week the program launched several initiatives to better connect startups with schools (see below).

The problems for startups are as such: Selling software to schools is a nearly impossible act for a startup of the nimble, lean, minimally viable product ilk. If you can get in front of the right person, the school district approval process is cumbersome. There are inflexible processes involving contracts, RFPs, lawyers, layers approvals, review cycles and compliances that weren’t set up for modern day computing. The sales cycle is long and arduous. School districts are often stuck working with massive companies that have the patience to sit through their six month procurement cycles and productions.

Beyond that, schools are wary to adopt brand-new, untested technologies, because they can’t afford to get burned. If they spend the resources to implement something, they really don’t want want the startup to abandon the strategy six months later and pivot to something different. When an edtech company pivots, or worse, its product is buggy, the ramifications are much broader than the experience of “Oh no, SnapChat is down.” Schools are aware that innovation doesn’t happen without risk. They’re willing to take some degree of innovation risk. But they can’t take execution risk. “We can’t pivot away from serving lunch to 300 kids a day,” says Steven Hodas, Executive Director of the Department of Educations’s Innovate NYC Schools program.

The result? Large entities that are only comfortable doing business with other large entities.

That’s why investors and education industry experts often tell edtech startups to sell to the teachers, not the school. Take a cue from the success of freemium, bottom-up software companies like Dropbox or Expensify, and let the usage trickle up, they say.

There’s a problem with that model, though. “People want it to be true because school districts are so hard to sell to,” Hodas says. Selling from the bottom up — getting teachers to use your software — and hoping they can eventually upsell the district on a premium product will not happen, he says. It only leads to startups, some with significant adoption, hitting dead ends once they run out of money after making free tools for a few years. The procurement cycle alone is long enough for a startup to run out of money.

That ultimately means many of the great technologies being built will never be implemented. Fortunately Hodas is not a government employee merely pointing out
problems with no solution — he’s part of the iZone’s Innovate NYC Schools program, which partners schools with tech companies to help blend the disparate cultures between school and startup. New York has dedicated 250 of its 1700 schools to the “iZone.” Schools in the iZone are given more autonomy to experiment with new technologies. With 250 schools, the iZone is bigger than most school districts in the country. The idea is to give tech providers a better sense of how to sell and implement their solutions at scale.

The iZone schools last week kicked off the program. Startups that get involved with the project learn about the realities of working with large school systems early on, so they’re more prepared to meet their needs.

For some young entrepreneurs who have never had to deal with real world constraints, Hodas says, the needs of the schools can come as a rude awakening. “You want that freshness and enthusiasm and unwillingness to accept limitations, but at the same time, there are realities out there,” Hodas says. “Part of our job is to educate folks in a way that’s supportive and gives them a view of what’s necessary without scaring them away,” he says. “We say, ‘Here are some of the hoops you’ll have to jump through.’”

Beyond managing the expectations of startups, the program aims to right-size the procurement model for schools, helping them to figure out how to buy and implement good technology faster. There are success stories in edtech — Wireless Generation, a ten-year-old company offering reading assessment and professional development tools, exited to News Corp. in 2010 for $360 million. Edmodo, the social network for teachers and students, has seen widespread adoption and raised $40 million from Union Square Ventures, Learn Capital, Greylock, Benchmark, NEA and Glynn Capital Management. Schoology has also experienced traction selling its SaaS course management system into school districts.

The Innovate NYC Schools program links startups with schools through meetups and workshops attended by principals, educators, superintendents, as well as developers, project managers and data scientists (sign up here). The program is also building a database of educational products and services for decision makers in the schools to discuss, review and give feedback to various solutions they’ve tried. Lastly, there is an app challenge, where developers can submit their products for a chance to win $50,000 in cash prizes, $54,000 in Amazon Web Service Credits, and consideration for a pilot program in iZone schools.

If the iZone’s plans to link startups and schools are successful, more edtech companies will live to see — and sell — another day.