By sailing around the world, Bill Pinkney hopes to get Chicago students excited about education and to illustrate the “importance of setting goals, persevering, and mastering the basics,” he says.
The only drawback is that Mr. Pinkney has so far raised only $120,000 of the $250,000 he says he needs in order to set sail.
A successful black businessman who grew up in a single-parent, welfare household on Chicago’s South Side, Mr. Pinkney hatched his plan to circumnavigate the world in a 47-foot-long sailboat as a way to get today’s inner-city youths--many of them from backgrounds similar to his--"actively enthusiastic about learning,” he explains.
And in visits to more than 25 Chicago schools during the past year, he has shown that students can become excited about mathematics, literature, and physics when the coursework is linked to an exciting sea voyage--one that students would be able to follow through radio reports broadcast into their classrooms.
But so far, much to his surprise, Mr. Pinkney has been unable to convince the business community--particularly black-owned businesses--that his project has merit. “It’s frustrating on the one hand and embarrassing on the other,” he notes.
Nevertheless, Mr. Pinkney says he is not about to give up. He now hopes to set sail by late this month.
Lamoni (Iowa) Community School Superintendent David Clinefelter should be permitted to continue operating his private, for-profit computer-software business out of his school office because the business is related to education, the state board of education has decided.
Four Lamoni-area residents had complained that Mr. Clinefelter had, with the local school board’s approval, been using the school system to subsidize his business, which developed a computer-based system for classifying non-textbook curricular materials.
Because the software business “is educational and thus relevant to the business of operating a school district,” the state board of education ruled, Mr. Clinefelter should be allowed to continue operating it from his school office.
Mr. Clinefelter, who has reimbursed the school for supplies and other expenses, has said he will donate any profits to a university’s educational-research program.
