274 Teaching Minds education except the one promoting more testing. They certainly do invest in that. So we are left with appealing to people who actually care about kids and their education. Money isn’t and shouldn’t be the allure here. This means that the saviors of education will have to be wealthy indi- viduals or foundations started by wealthy individuals. The health sciences curriculum that we built was funded by the Ewing Kauffman Foundation. We built it using our not-for-profit com- pany, Engines for Education. I really believe that no alternative to the nonprofit model funded by wealthy people exists. We just have to find people who care about education. They are in short supply, and they typically aren’t the wealthy people who make pronouncements about education, but I am hopeful that they are out there. I wouldn’t mind being wrong about anything I have said here. The federal government could get taken over by people who actually care about kids and not votes. How do we convince schools to offer these curricula once they have been developed? It won’t be easy. There aren’t that many schools run by people who realize that the system is broken. But they do ex- ist, however. The real problem is not so much convincing the head of a private school or the superintendent of a school district. It is more about convincing parents who fundamentally do not understand edu- cation, or teachers who have taught what they have always taught and really don’t want to learn new skills. And, in addition, there are all those state standards. The first thing that any school that wants to use our curriculum has to do is to see how they can map what we will teach into their state’s standards. If the state standards specify 2 years of algebra, we are out of luck. If they have vague science standards, we are in better shape. Either way, the state standards, passed by all those brilliant state legislatures that know all there is to know about what should be taught in high school