David Warlick weighs in on the idea of Beta Schools, and he gives us another piece of the puzzle:

In my opinion, the greatest need for beta flexibility is the standards — the “what” that we teach. Consider that the World Wide Web came into existence less than 15 years ago, and it’s been only ten years since it began to approach the mainstream. So much has changed in the last ten years. Yet, in cases that I am aware of, state standards and textbook adoptions are only updated every five years, and and it has been my experience that pressure is applied to change the standards as little as possible, more for the convenience of education system than for the effective socialization of our children for their future. Please correct me if my observations are wrong.

He goes on to talk about how hard this will be to accomplish in our current educational / political landscape, but he, like Christian and me, holds out hope that, well, maybe it could.