Jobs' widow commits $50 mn to create new high schools

Her husband, Steven P. Jobs, famously helped reboot Apple with the "Think Different" advertising campaign.

Now Laurene Powell Jobs is starting a $50 million project to rethink high school.

With an advertising campaign that looks as if it came from Apple's marketing department, the initiative is meant to create high schools with new approaches to education. In essence, Powell Jobs and her team of high-profile educators and designers hope they can crowd-source a solution to a problem that has flummoxed policy makers for decades.

"The system was created for the work force we needed 100 years ago," Powell Jobs said in an interview here Friday. "Things are not working the way we want it to be working. We've seen a lot of incremental changes over the last several years, but we're saying, 'Start from scratch.' "

Called XQ: The Super School Project, the campaign is meant to inspire teams of educators and students, as well as leaders from other sectors, to come up with new plans for high schools. Over the next several months, the teams will submit plans that could include efforts like altering school schedules, curriculums and technologies. By fall next year, Powell Jobs said, a team of judges will pick five to 10 of the best ideas to finance.

Powell Jobs has for years financed College Track, which helps low-income students across the country to enroll and then succeed in college. Since the death of her husband in 2011, Powell Jobs has taken tentative steps into the public sphere, including advocating an overhaul of immigration laws.

The XQ project is the highest-profile project yet of the Emerson Collective, the group that Powell Jobs uses to finance her philanthropic projects.

©2015 The New York Times News Service