In many of the conversations around changing the current educational system, the rhetoric and approaches borrow heavily from the corporate world. In many cases, processes and strategies that have been used with inconclusive outcomes in corporate America are touted as solutions that will fix the problems that plague education: a short list includes merit pay (which worked really well among hedge fund managers), performance management, corporate-style layoffs as a means to eliminate "underperformers," and streamlining the means to outsource school management to for-profit companies.
Instability creates opportunity, and the current state of public education is nothing if not unstable. As a result, businesses are getting increasingly interested. Where business goes, marketing is not far behind, which invariably nets us a new buzzword: the edupreneur. The narrative around the edupreneur combines the mythology of the entrepeneur as a financial cowboy, an individual with the grit to take chances, bend the rules, and buck authority; with the equally potent mythology of the socially conscious company - a business venture with the ethics to, occasionally, put principles above profits.
I came across an example of this type of edupreneurial venture recently in the form of an interview with the founders of Notehall, a company that serves as a marketplace for students that want to sell their class notes. It's remarkable only because it is such a common example of what passes for an idea in the space where people actually believe the world of education is bereft of any creative or generative thought.
The blog post that contains the interview starts with a video of the company founders on a show called Sharktank (as an aside, I had no idea this show existed, and I'm a little upset to have had my bubble burst). The video is included here for your viewing pleasure:
The actual interview that follows is the standard breathless prattle that most of these things are; basically, PR talking points masquerading as actual conversation. But one line really stands out:
Question: What do you think education entrepreneurs need at this moment in the industry to be successful? Marketing? A good idea? A network?
Response: Mentorship/Network. A good team with an average idea will eventually discover a successful business if the right hands are helping guide them and see opportunities.
In a world where solutions are valued primarily for their ability to enrich a select few, and secondarily for their ability to benefit an undefined many, this philosophy defines what people consider innovative. In other words, a "good" innovation allows a company to find an unexploited niche and profit from it - the quality of the innovation is defined by the size of the profit.
To be absolutely clear, there is nothing wrong from profiting from your work. And, if you have an idea, a dream, a vision, or a talent that you want to expand into a company, by all means, follow the dream. But bring your A game. Don't delude yourself that the educational world needs another mediocre idea with glossy marketing copy. If people want that, they can trawl the vendor floor at ISTE. But classrooms deserve better.
However, when a company gets too invested in a single solution - or worse yet, a single technological intervention - to a complex problem, much money can be wasted.
This problem can be compounded in companies heavily funded by venture capital money. An interview in FastCompany between Anya Kamenetz and Phoenix Wang alludes to the financial pressures at play; this quotation is from the second page:
There are $600 billion in public dollar investments in education around schools. But there's a disconnect between the school districts who make the purchases and the students who are supposed to use it. So oftentimes what gets pushed down to students is not really aligned with their interests.
At the same time, private and institutional investors are really interested in emerging products, but they're constrained by institutional purchasing. VCs need big exits, so they end up taking less risk.
You generally will not find much argument about the need for learning being a lifelong need. None of us ever reach a point where we can afford to stop learning, growing, or expanding.
However, the needs of people interested in profiting off the process of our learning are completely dissimilar: they want the biggest return possible, over the shortest time period. This cultural disconnect helps explain why the ideas of the business world clash with the ethos of the education world.
And, as the international financial markets still attempt to recover from the greed and excesses of the banking industry, maybe we have it backwards: perhaps education should step in and help protect these poor business folks from their own lack of understanding about the world in which we live.
Comments
False distinctions, real learning, education that is innovative
Thanks for linking to that video and our interview with Notehall.
I think that you perhaps make a very narrow and false distinction when you say that education entrepreneurs simply want to take the lessons learned in industries like the hedge funds or banking industries and simply apply them to education.
I'm not sure that's what they are doing. I do think, however, you can take the best, and the worst, from disparate industries and use those lessons for both trimming excesses in education and sharpening the tool set, and imaginations of those in the profession. I am a former teacher, and one of my reasons for leaving education as a practice was that I felt severely limited not by my peers, or their ideas, or by the students, but by the mechanisms that make school what school is now.
There is a revolution that is waiting to happen in school day structure, delivery methods for educational practices, and learning. And we all know this. All education entrepreneurs want to do, if we must speak generally, is take revolutions that have happened in tech, energy, other types of thinking and see what is natural, inchoate about education and compare them, mix them, and use what is best used, and throw away what is not effective. Nobody in education will argue that nothing is broken in education. And I am sure you can poll thousands of teachers and many of them will agree that entrepreneurship should be rewarded and encouraged. Not for the profit motive, though profit is a great thing for schools -- more resources, more learning initiatives, etc.
But for social value. I think my question to Notehall founder Sean was good. It was sincere. You want to put together a company (no judgment whether his company is actually the best or not. the market says so.), so what do you need. And your response is indicative of what education entrepreneurs need to work with, understand and commune with: there's this belief that education is somehow sacred, which it is, but it's not so sacred that new thinking should be disallowed, simply because there is a business mentality to it.
When students are done with school, where do they live and work? They work in the largest capitalist and business-oriented economy on earth. And they will one day compete with the fastest-growing economies on earth. Or will they compete?
One of the edupreneur drives is to have social web and social learning initiatives that enable greater reach of a student's ideas. There are so few ways out there that enable a student to do something that is meaningful, right away,f or the world community.
Imagine the difference between working in virtual reality on an engineering project with real engineers in Amsterdam or Copenhagen, compared to handing in geometry homework, again.
Seriously, that's the kind of thinking that business thinking can spark. It's educational. I believe the whole process of business, entrepreneurship, and networking is in itself the pinnacle of what education teaches: learning how to learn. IT's a perpetual lifelong process.
Real distinctions, and supporting innovative thought
Hello, Douglas,
Thank you for taking the time to respond. I actually enjoyed your original post, which is why I linked out to it.
From your comment:
I suspect you misunderstand the point I am making: simply put, the desire to make a profit should not outweigh whether a company offers anything of educational value. People can start companies to sell anything to anybody; it's their right. However, when the hype around companies selling educational "solutions" is out of line with the value they actually add, that gap should be pointed out.
The gap between value delivered and value promised seems particularly large in many of the offerings marketed to schools, districts, and educators.
From your comment:
Me too - I taught for 16 years, and my time in the classroom was generally my favorite part of my day.
From your comment:
Your question was good. The answer to the question indicates a mindset that underestimates what people actually need.
And "the market" often doesn't know what it's talking about. Five years ago, you make an awesome, risk-free investment by buying bundled mortgages. And Bernie Madoff was the go-to guy to get really rich.
From your comment:
Education is not sacred. It is, however, important - important enough that we bring the best ideas in from wherever we can find them. Important enough that adoption of new ideas is driven by the merit of those ideas and not by marketing copy created by a venture funded company looking for a big exit.
Bring on any good ideas. But please, let's not confuse a good idea with any idea that can generate funding. Those are two entirely separate things.
From your comment:
This premise is fairly broad, and overlooks the basic reality that the social fabric woven into the "largest capitalist and business-oriented economy on earth" is constructed by the aggregate choices of the individuals within it. Are we going to make changes in how we consume energy? Are we going to ensure that all within our country have access to basic needs like food, shelter, and healthcare? Are we going to take steps that ensure that access to quality education is not an accident of birth but something available to all people working and living within this country?
In short, it's not as deterministic or simplistic as some people working for educational change might frame the question. And, more importantly, I would encourage people to understand that collaboration often yields better, more sustainable results than competition.
From your comment:
The definition of "meaningful" can vary, but I'd say that the process of enacting meaningful change starts with finding one's voice, and learning how to put thoughts and words into action. And there are countless ways of doing this. Every community has local politics. Start there. Many smart phones have video cameras. Use that to tell a story. The opportunities are countless, but there isn't a profit margin in supporting people as they discover them, so they remain under the radar of many "edupreneurs." But they are very visible to people who work in community development, youth development, and/or education.
From your comment:
That's not business thinking, that's just thinking. And doing well-designed geometry work, in and out of class, will prepare people to have meaningful conversations with experts. Homework isn't bad; poorly designed homework is bad. And this is where the role of the teacher, and the preparation of that teacher, and the ongoing professional development of that teacher, is critical. I would love to see more business innovation that empowered real people doing actual work, and helped them to do it better. And this is where the business outlook on returning a profit runs against what we know about tracking development in people. Change and growth is tracked in years, and most investors don't want to wait that long.
That's not business thinking, that's just thinking.
Bill is spot on here. Great teaching comes with and without technology as well as with and without outside "business" expertise.
Greatness comes through the hard work of empathetic teachers - always working with their students, and at times working with an instructional team. That team might include a learning technology expert at the institution itself, or through collaboration with an outside business.
Thinking is required; "Business thinking" is decidedly optional.
Spot On
Man...your words are prophetic. I can illustrate these points with names and faces from my experience in education. You are able to articulate many of the feelings I have as a teacher in encountering these "reforms" and those that are driving them.
I have grown skeptical of the privatization movement in education. Peeling back the onion layers of many of these companies one finds they are a tangled set of web pages and success stories and little else. Many never ask teachers what might help, what they need or even know a single student. Until they arrive in your district and change the way we operate. Often so profoundly they cannot simply be pushed out and these changes don't always help.
How does business feel about things like poverty, teaching responsibility, character, self discovery, community, challenge, failure, creativity, people and humanity. Not sure they'd rank above
profit.
I babble...I must get back to thinking of a way to start my own business. :)
Between this and the one I read from the Washington Post http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/guest-bloggers/de-legitimizing-public-educati.html
I think my day is complete.
Terrific work! This is the
Terrific work! This is the type of information that should be shared around the web. Shame on the search engines for not positioning this post higher!
I think the irony of this
I think the irony of this blog post is that the author as well as this entire site is dedicated to the very thing the post derides. ;-D
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