Judy's Journal
Book Review: THE FUTURE OF EDUCATIONAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP: POSSIBILITIES FOR SCHOOL REFORM BY FREDERICK HESS OF THE AMERICAN ENTERPRIZE INSTITUTE (AEI) FOR PUBLIC POLICY RESEARCH;
HARVARD PRESS 2008
Article Submitted by: Dr. Judith Stein
Every now and then, a book comes along that expands your educational vision and serves as a “bolt of lightning” and such a book is the one reviewed here. Those of us who worked inside the educational establishment for many years, always wondered if what we did meant as much as we thought. We toiled in the old world of “best practices” and “professional development” activities. We believed in “turnaround schools’ and that all children can learn in the ways we considered effective. Here is a book that questions these practices and looks for another way through educational entrepreneurship.
The book had its genesis in a AEI conference in 2005 hosted by Frederick Hess on the topic of educational entrepreneurship where these new explorers of educational policy and its new beginnings developed a series of policy discussions about how the notion of entrepreneurship applies to education, who these entrepreneurs are and how it fits in the culture of K-12 education; the case for and against for profit providers and how public policy affects entrepreneurial activity. This book questions whether “school choice” and the development of “parental demand” is enough without a robust “supply side” of the equation and what it would take to nurture a more dynamic and quality-conscious educational industry.
Hess, the scholars and policy makers and practitioners in this volume discuss what it would take to get a robust “supply side” of educational providers. It illuminates the two sides of the educational reform argument: In one camp are those who are bent on working through the old and established school systems and focus on “best practices” and retooling the system through professional development, curriculum and instructional leadership and the other camp which is skeptical of district wide reforms and prefers uprooting the system through parental choice and market competition. Hess states that neither of these approaches can be the answer without “supply side reforms” that recognize that vibrant markets require a sable and hospitable policy environment. The market also needs investors identifying and nurturing promising ventures and networks of technical and logistical incentives that recognize and foster quality, along with talented educators.
Hess explains that substantive change in education needs more than just injecting new practices into thousands of districts and tens of thousands of schools; rather it will require a fresh start. It will require a radical and disruptive improvement and the province of new entrants who must create a coherent organization that faithfully delivers a particular innovation at scale. “Turnarounds schools” are very seldom successful. Using the corporate world as an example, only about one-third of the “turnarounds” achieved the results.
Those who do not believe the big sluggish districts can turn around schools, look to choice-based reforms –like school vouchers and charter schooling, like allowing families to seek better alternatives and cause competition to get districts to improve. They believed that demand and parental choice would upturn district schools. However, the history of vouchers and charter schools shows that “fifteen years into the most expansive school choice program tied to any urban school system, there is no Milwaukee miracle”, no transformation of the public schools has taken place.” This was said by Manhattan Institute scholar Sol Stern one-time choice enthusiast. Even Howard Fuller ex superintendent of Milwaukee has acknowledged “I think that any honest assessment would have to say that there hasn’t been the deep, wholesale improvement in MPS that we would have thought.” Today, the Milwaukee voucher program enrolls nearly 20,000 students in more than one hundred schools, yet this growing marketplace has yielded little innovation or excellence.
The charter school market is also uneven. Even the leaders of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, have argued for stepping up efforts to eliminate the low performing charters. The proponents of school choice have done little to eliminate the hindrances which come about by licensure and state reporting systems and also the lack of efficient support systems, effective quality control or a stable political and regulatory environment.
Other chapters discuss non-profit and for profit systems which have sprung up in trying to break into the education markets. There is a discussion of the Teach for America, KIPP Academies, and New Leaders for New Schools, High Tech High and The New Teacher Project. Even these marquee efforts are hindered by difficulty raising funds and finding talent and an inadequate amount of R and D. The scale of these upstarts pales in comparison with the 15,000 school districts, 90,000 schools and 50 million students, three million teachers and more than $500 billion in annual spending.
The chapters in the book include the best minds who discuss the four main trends or issues of educational entrepreneurship. These are financial capital; human capitol; reducing barriers to entry; and tackling research and development and quality control issues.
The need for talent is explored. As Christopher Gergen and Gregg Vanourek founding partners of New Mountain Ventures noted, “Education organizations begin with an inherent advantage : the mission of education is closely aligned with the values of rising generations.” Of critical importance is building on the networks and relationships of human capital. That is how KIPP and Teach for America have played a critical role in seeding the sector with talent to recruit dynamic educators and forge links with mentors. However, the pipeline gets clogged when there is a lack of opportunities to teach and still move up in the system. The authors suggest that there be developed “hybrid positions” where young teachers could remain in the classroom and mentor other adults and design curriculum. This would reduce the incentive to leave education by talented young people.
In the area of financial capital, education industry has been massively outstripped by other sectors to attract private investment. Venture capitalists have poured just $64 million a year into K-12 business in contrast to the $7.2 billion poured into entrepreneurial health care organizations. A suggestion would be an “education X prize” which would stimulate twenty to thirty times that amount in private investment. Another tactic would be a targeted use of federal or state and district funding. This would mimic In-Q-Tel, a federally sponsored firm that invests alongside of private venture capitalist firms to enhance national security.
Quality Control in a Vibrant Sector The question of how to measure quality has only included achievement of students and graduation rate. These are great measures for motivating teachers but other employees cannot be motivated by these measures. For example, a payroll clerk should be measured by his speed and accuracy. The bottom line is some quality measures which work for some goods and services and not others.
The book also asks us to free ourselves from other assumptions that shape K-12 education now.
Function NOT Location. Today there is a need for education services providers to meet needs nationally, not limit each district to “reinvent the wheel “to serve specialized student needs. This allows providers to become good at one function and then slowly expand their reach. Dell only sold hand assembled personal computers; Amazon started by selling books. The expectation that entrepreneurs should open whole schools instead of just delivering a single important advance is a bias in education.
Another model would be to pay for services based upon student needs, not just providing dollars which follow the student to a particular school. Here the funding would go into an “educational spending account” and parents could appropriate to approved providers for tutoring, specialized instruction or other services. Another way would be to pay providers based upon results rather than inputs. For example, a school district would pay $12,000 per year for every at-risk student that got on course for graduation on time.
“Keeping the Garage Doors Open” Using the model of the two kids who invented Microsoft in their garage, Hess suggests that “Vibrant sectors enable creative problem solvers to plug into ecosystems marked by talent, expertise, capital and networks…. The challenge in a sector like education, in which the government funds and operates dominant systems, is to ensure that it is possible for such ventures to emerge from under the weight of the status quo……. Our choice, says Hess, is ultimately between trusting the authorities to fix aged and troubled bureaucracies in deliberate and incremental steps and or trusting in the ability of rising generation to seize the opportunities and tap human ingenuity to answer new challenges in unforeseen ways. If history teaches us anything, it is that this is really no choice at all……”
