Jim Goodnight's Message for Obama

Posted by: Steve Hamm on January 22

Jim Goodnight runs the largest and most successful private software company in the world, SAS Institute. It makes analytics and business intelligence software. But when Jim dropped by our NYC office recently he had something else on his mind: education reform. For years, Goodnight has been interested in education. He set up a private school in SAS’s hometown of Cary, N.C., and has adopted a cluster of public schools. The most far-reaching thing he has done is develop an online package of educational materials for high schools, SAS Curriculum Pathways, which provides content in English, mathematics. social studies, science, and Spanish. He recently made the package free to all US educators and their students.

Goodnight advocates provisioning one computer per child in schools, and he notes that drop-out rates have declined significantly in the North Carolina schools that have been using the SAS Curriculum Pathways software. Now he’s urging the Obama administration to push the use of the software nationwide. “If Obama’s in favor of improving education, let’s do it right. It’s got to involve a curriculum,” Goodnight told me. “We have the most complete set of curricula available, so let’s not reinvent the wheel.”

I leave it to education experts to evaluate the value of this package compared to the alternatives. But the main point is this: Obama has made it clear he wants ideas from the people. Leaders in the tech industry have been complaining for years about the education system, immigration policy, etc. Now is their chance to come up with innovation solutions to the country’s problems, like Goodnight has, and help make things happen.

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