SXSWedu Announces 2015 Speakers

SXSW Edu 2012 Keynote speaker LeVar Burton with conference Executive Director Ron Reed, returning for the 2015 session (Photo by Richard Whittaker)

The last carbon credit has barely been purchased for SXSW Eco, and its sibling conference SXSWedu has already announced the first of its headline speakers.

Opening up the education-centric conference (running March 9-12, 2015) will be keynote speaker Charles Best, the former Bronx social studies teacher who founded public education crowdfunding site DonorsChoose.org. The site was created to allow individuals to become sponsors of teachers, paying for the in-classroom supplies that so often educators have to pay for themselves (expect a robust discussion of why exactly teachers are being asked to foot the bill for materials like pens, paper, and text books).

He'll probably be able to exchange crowdfunding wisdom with returning 2012 keynote LeVar Burton, who will give an update on his massively successful relaunch of Reading Rainbow as an online educational platform.

There's another return to Texas on the schedule, with a speech from former Houston ISD chief schools officer, now Baltimore County Public Schools superintendent, S. Dallas Dance. While he has become a standard bearer for the school reform movement, Linda Darling-Hammond, director of the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education, is a former education policy adviser to President Obama's campaign, and a critic of the Common Core Standards. Bringing a more international perspective will be Shiza Shahid, co-founder and CEO of the Malala Fund.

The conference also announced the return of its popular film series, eduFILM. The Homestretch follows three of the 19,000 Chicago students facing the trauma of going through schoool homeless; Fed Up, which puts the spotlight on the food industries abuse of sugar as the cause of childhood obesity; And Stories From an Undeclared War, a 20 year chronicle of 150 at-risk students in Long Beach, California, as they attempt to survive the hardships and almost insurmountable barriers placed in their way.

Find the full list of announced programs at www.sxswedu.com/, but expect a lot more to come. With education funding now officially the top priority for the next legislative session, there will be a lot of heat and light in schoolroom politics by next March.