A New Day for Apple and Philanthropy.

Apple is notorious for leading the way when it comes to innovation. They are also notorious for not being overly generous when it comes to giving when compared to how much money the company pulls in. That is, until now.Yesterday, the widow of Steve Jobs, Lauren Powell Jobs announced that she will starting a $50 million to create high schools with new approaches to education. According to an interview published in the New York Times, Ms. Powell Jobs says, “The system was created for the work force we needed 100 years ago.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.’ ”The initiative is called XQ: The Super School Project and 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, curriculum and technologies. By fall next year a team of judges will pick five to 10 of the best ideas to finance.The XQ project is the highest-profile project yet of the Emerson Collective, the group that Ms. Powell Jobs uses to finance her philanthropic projects.Ms. Powell Jobs said that while she was committed to ensuring that the new schools are public, she was unsure whether they would be charter schools. She pointed out that she, like most Americans, is a graduate of a public high school. Plans for a national tour to collect ideas for the project do not include a stop at her alma mater in New Jersey, West Milford High School.Learn more here.