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According to strategists like Sun Tzu and Carl von Clausewitz, there are two basic ways to win a war: you can either defeat your opponent militarily, or you can starve them by cutting off their resources.
Is there a lesson here for folks in education reform? I think there is.
It seems to me that the education reform work of the past few decades has all focused on combat strategies. We “attack”, so to speak, by instituting new requirements – standards, assessments, etc. – and by pushing for new models of public schooling (charters).
But what we’ve seen is that our pushes have all been blunted, subverted, and ultimately used to reinforce the status quo. Set academic standards, and what was meant to be a baseline floor becomes a ceiling. Require assessments, and the cut scores are set so low that almost every school looks like a high performer. Insist on charters, and then allow the state department of education to act as the authorizing body, ensuring that nothing markedly different gets through. (And then reduce the funding those charters get just to make it interesting.)
We see all of our work come to naught – all the while pumping ever-greater levels of money into the system.
What if we stopped trying to fight? What if we realized that we can’t reform a monopoly from the outside, and that there’s no incentive to do it from the inside? What if we tried a different approach?
What if we shifted our focus to a war of attrition?
Imagine what would happen if we stopped trying to reform the system, and instead just said, “Clearly, we have different ideas about education. So we’re dropping out. If there are parents who want what you offer, that’s fine. I don’t, so I’m sending my kid elsewhere – which means you won’t be seeing the money he represents any more.”
Granted, this already happens to an extent: homeschooling and private schooling pull around 10% of school-aged kids out of the public system, and have for some time. But what if we boosted that number to 20%, 30%, 50%, or higher?
Of course, not everyone is cut out for home schooling, nor can everyone pay the often-high cost of private schooling. What we need is our own Henry Ford – someone who can tap a great public need by revolutionizing an industry, providing a quality product at a price that makes it accessible to a much broader market.
Can some entrepreneur out there come up with a way to provide a solid education for $300 a month – the equivalent of a car payment? Surely at that price you’d peel a lot more kids off the public system.
And if that were to happen – if you were to substantially reduce the funds flowing into public education, thereby reducing its size and influence, while at the same time showing what’s possible at a markedly lower cost – I expect that you’d start to see the kind of reform of the system that most of us have only wished for.
Is that right? And where’s the revolutionary model that produces solid results at a market-friendly price?
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13 comments:
A market friendly price isn't simply friendly to the buyer. It's friendly to the seller. The seller gets to make a profit.
Henry Ford found an economy of scale: a way to increase production without decreasing value, so he could increase his profit.
Where is the economy of scale in a school? Homeschooling is the opposite of economy of scale. A school that does work on such an economy of scale ekes that out where? In the curriculum, right? Is there anywhere else to eke it out?
People didn't think it was gauche, or distasteful, or evil to make a profit on a car the way that people DO think it is to make a profit in the education world.
How many parents support for-profit schools? how many teachers? How do put people in a for-profit classroom when they feel disapproving of profits?
30 kids at 300 a month is roughly 10k a month. That has to cover the salary of the teacher and the rent on the building, as well as all of the insurances and administrators to prove you're in compliance with whatever state regs you have.
Let's say, between outright salary and benefits, you are paying 50k a year to the teacher. (not unreasonable to imagine 10-20k in benefits, is it?) That's 4 of your 10. That leaves 6. Can you find a building for that? Find a compliance officer? An administrator? I don't know. (When I read Joanne Jacobs' Our School, I was disappointed by the lack of details like this--how tight was their budget? What did they pay, etc.)
Who would opt out of a school to one with no lunch? no sports teams? no art classes?
The best for profit schools are on the very high end of the tuition line. Is that what hte market really wants?
I think it's worthwhile to explore the value of this war of attrition. I think, too, it's worth exploring first WHAT THE GOAL of SCHOOL IS. Why are we looking for schools in the first place (as opposed to doing it ourselves--what are our goals in finding a school?)
Society used to have certain reasons for having schools--to create an easier to govern citizenry, to limit poverty or the need for state intervention, to inculcate one set of values into varieties of immigrants, etc. Parents' goals are not the same as society's goals. Some parents want vocational training for their children: they want their children to be able to get a "good" job. Other parents want "a well rounded" education for their children. For some, that means a classical education. For others that means an "exploring critical thinking" education. For some, it means better social experiences, or personal growth in terms of sports, leadership opps, etc. These goals can often be in conflict. Do we even have a societal set of norms of what we hope education achieves now? Certainly ed schools have a different set than my preferred society has.
Are there enough parents whose goals match up to create a definition of a "solid education" as you called it?
Over and over again, I see that the main problem is one of competing desires: I do not know a big enough market yet for what I want for any Henry Ford to manufacture it. I don't think that even here on KTM, there is really a definition of "the system most of us have only wished for." What does the common denominator for all of us look like?
Maybe we'll just have to wait until Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age comes to pass, and virtual teachers and AIs teach children--that way, worldwide, there could be a wide enough market for the niche I live in, (even if what I want is for them to be taught something subversive.) I am not yet sure the majority of parents prefer the automobile.
The P word describes, perhaps, the least understood concept in the history of mankind. P is used to increase shareholder value by either growing the company (reinvestment)or being distributed to the owners (dividends). It is not evil, rapacious, hording by cigar smoking robber barrons.
U.S. Public education spends about 150K per teacher annually (490B for 3.2M teachers). So while it is not a for P entity it does in fact have cigar smoking robber barrons who rapaciously siphon off your cold cash before it gets to the children.
You can't easily choke this hydra because the barrons have it set up so that if you chose not to consume their product or if you don't need their product at all, you still are forced to pay for it at the point of the tax collector's gun.
Me, I'd opt for profit every time. At least you get managers with fiduciary responsibility that have to fight for their P in an open, transparent system.
When Galaxies Collide
You both ask lots of really good questions - questions I don't have answers for. Fortunately I'm not actually proposing to start the school, just suggesting a different way to look at education reform :-)
I will offer a couple of thoughts though. I think the economics could in fact work: you can start by limiting your focus to just the elementary grades, which are much cheaper to run (this is what Chris Whittle did). And I also don't think you have to look at tuition as your sole source of revenue. Public schools get very little true community support, but a school built by and for the community could make community support a core revenue stream, perhaps doubling what you receive per child, either in money or in-kind services such as accounting, buildings, and the like.
And yes, I know that they'll still pull money for public schools out of all our pockets whether we like it or not - but if we're looking at this as an exercise in education reform, the issue is not what they take from us, but what the schools actually get. And I believe most districts receive funds based on how many kids actually enroll - isn't that right?
Of course, pulling lots of kids from the schools may not work - you can look at the Detroit district to see that they still may not change their ways despite huge drops over time. But if it were to happen everywhere, it could have an effect - and at least the kids who escaped could get a good education...
"Set academic standards, and what was meant to be a baseline floor becomes a ceiling."
That's NCLB. Our schools and state were very proactive about this. With just a little bit of change, our schools are "High Performing" (in getting most all kids up to the cutoff). They have even used this to say that the school provides a quality education. We still use Everyday Math and kids get to fifth grade not knowing their times table. As much as public schools hate NCLB, it's really their saving grace. They would do best to jump on the bandwagon. Meet those low expectations and then nobody can touch you.
"I don’t, so I’m sending my kid elsewhere – which means you won’t be seeing the money he represents any more."
It doesn't work that way here. Twenty to twenty-five percent of the kids in our town go to private schools. Typically, these are parents who set higher standards and have and would be willing to offer their own time and experience to the school. They get fed up and leave. So, some of the most vocal voices for change have left but they still have to pay property taxes. Two-thirds of our town's budget goes to the school. There is attrition (for a variety of reasons) but the cost per student keeps going up.
Attrition will only work if the money follows the child. That's why our town and state fights and limits charter schools. A couple of years back in Mass. a high school tried to get a charter status with a focus on science and high expectations. You should have seen the fight they had. It looked like they were against high expectations. What they were really against is loss of control and money. They don't care if kids go off to private school.
I'm still hopeful about charters, but some states are even pro-active about those. They allow free choice between existing public schools. This limits the number and variety of school choices. It's much nicer to go to a charter school in your own town than it is to send your child off to a public school in another town. My brother-in-law says that this has forced some improvement, but it is limited.
One of the hidden costs to more choice and having the money follow the child is that huge numbers of affluent parents would then get the education they want for free. Town budgets will rise dramatically. But choice will also allow kids from the inner-city more control over their destiny. There might (finally!) be a KIPP school in their neighborhood.
Charter schools is where the battle is. Attrition will work only if there are good choices. Otherwise, parents will do what they have always done; make the best of a poor situation.
Some parents are still fully invested in the public school concept and in deferring all decisions to the school administration. Many see issues only in terms of money; more money good; less money bad. They don't have a choice mindset.
Back when my son was in private school, one parent seemed relieved that it wasn't a charter school ... because that would be like taking money away from the public school and her child. However, if there was a charter school in our town that offered an education that she really liked, her child would be gone in an instant.
Or maybe you achieve attrition with more natural catastrophes:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/07/us/07orleans.html?_r=2&sq=education%20new%20orleans&st=nyt&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&scp=1&adxnnlx=1210705221-eqvtOfLJ08qbRSPOP+FVcQ
Changes at New Orleans Schools Bring Gains in Test Scores
...
The number of fourth graders who passed a state promotional exam increased by 12 percentage points over the previous year, and eighth graders improved by four percentage points.
School officials also noted significant increases in the numbers of students with passing scores in the test’s various components — English, math, science, social studies and reading.
Since Hurricane Katrina, most of the schools here have been taken over by the state, and are run either by Mr. Vallas or as citizen-controlled charter schools. The local school board and administration — long notorious for corruption and political interference — have been neutered.
Classes are smaller, many of the teachers are youthful imports brought in by groups like Teach for America, principals have been reshuffled or removed, school-hours remedial programs have been intensified, and after-school programs to help students increased.
The value of using only tuition in a for profit model is that you can really be a private institution. Once you allow funding sources from other places like "the community", you've increased your stakeholders again, and you're back to the place where you aren't in control, because "the community" has its own ideas of what's an acceptable "education". If you're a for-profit private company, you have the most autonomy, and that's the best for implementing your ideas with the least number of stakeholders.. For-profit public companies have external shareholders to be beholden too, as well--that also poses problems.
Re: starting with lower grades for the quick-n-dirty model, I think this is an interesting idea, since we've seen two sides of the coin on the progress of lower grades: first, we've seen that study Catherine cited where the first grade teacher (Mrs. Appledaisy?) affected the kids' IQ scores permanently, but we've also seen that DI gains are lost by the middle school grades. Why is that? Are we simply regressing to the mean (the natural IQ, if you believe in it?, or some other explanation if you don't?) Is the k-4 stuff necessary but insufficient?
Maybe I'll try to find the time to investigate preschools. some must be organized as for-profits. How many, what do they do differently, where is their economy of scale, etc....
But I don't think it's enough to stop at the analogy of attrition. Unless we actually EXECUTE on it, we're still sunk. That's what I've come back to over and over again. It's nice in theory to refer to "maybe we need a Henry Ford", but every day, there are thousands of people with ideas as good as Ford's who simply DID NOT EXECUTE on it. What Ford did was build the darn company, with blood and guts.
What to do though, when the monopoly is a creature of the state? My Paroxynein solution is to build something that creates a hostile environment for the beast. You won't kill it legislatively. Let's face it, this is a $500B monopoly. That's bigger than Wal Mart! Not only is it huge and therefore in league with lots of vested interests, it has many, many heads. There's no single place to insert the shiv.
But your paroxynein solution seems to claim the economy of scale comes from no infrastructure. Is that really the issue?
And why would your school be any better than what's out there now?
Isn't the issue the need to have an economy of scale on the curriculum?
What's the right curriculum? How big a spectrum of students can fit in your curriculum? How good do we need the diagnosis/assessment of students to be, to know who belongs where, so that our curriculum does support them?
This still doesn't address the cohort of parents who think school is for social interaction, sports, etc. And it doesn't address the problem when the parents don't want the same things...
I'm not supposed to be reading this.
And I still haven't read Paul's new blog (see! I do have willpower!)
Nevertheless, this is obviously the conclusion I've reached. I found a web site a couple of months ago that said parents need to "secede" from the public school system, and I think that's a good term.
Secede.
OK, now you've lured me into putting up the post I had waiting in the wings.
One of them.
Imagine what would happen if we stopped trying to reform the system, and instead just said, “Clearly, we have different ideas about education. So we’re dropping out. If there are parents who want what you offer, that’s fine. I don’t, so I’m sending my kid elsewhere – which means you won’t be seeing the money he represents any more.”
The problem with this is that people in general all over the United States think education is bad, but the education their kids are getting is good. While this may not apply to those of us here on KTM, I've read these poll results more than once in different places (although darned if I can remember where now. )
Whew Allison! You're makin' me tired :>}
I'm not proposing a school system in any sense. Narrow down to perhaps one and only one target. In the private sector this is simply target marketing.
If you're the new kid on the block just attack the weak points. Remember you mostly want to be a sliver, before you go for the stick in the eye. And, you also want to cherry pick a remediation and cohort where you can deliver a serious impact.
For example, maybe you just target one grade and one special case. A nice tipping point is sixth grade math. Kids that my district churns out don't have essential computation skills at that point and it cripples them for any thing beyond arithmetic. Let their existing school take care of everything else. Design a remediation program that 'repairs' sixth grader's arithmetic.
The economy of scale comes from two things. First, there are something like 125,000 grade 6 cohorts of 30 students each. That means every day tens of thousands of math teachers get up in the morning and plan (virtually) the same lesson. In a perfectly scaled system you might envision something like a lesson delivered by 50 Cent, directed by Speilberg, collaborated by Allison. This gets created once, not (imperfectly) 100,000 times. Maybe it costs a million bucks divided by 100,000 per class. That's some serious leverage, ten bucks per class.
[maybe 50 Cent and Speilberg do it for public service and we only have to pay Allison]
The other place to get scalability is by having kids online instead of holed up in arbitrary classroom groups. Imagine being able to put together and teach to a group of 15 or so kids that had precisely the same measured zone of proximal development.
Contrast that to the poor teacher who is being asked to teach fractions in a classroom where grade level skills cross 4 or 5 grade levels.
Scalability in this domain might not result in a difference in more teacher face time just more effectiveness.
Now I really am worn out. This is a huge topic. If you get a chance read all of the 'readme' stuff on When Galaxies Collide where I've spent more time on the ugly details behind my sick mind.
This is a huge topic, and I'll happily follow up on your blog! Thanks!
But let me end here by saying I think you're right that we can't kill the beast with one blow to a single head. That's why my concern is that merely a few of us opting out may be right for our kids, but it Won't Solve the Problem. Because there's too much money left over at this point, and they Do Not Need Us.
So what, do you say? Well, I think we've reached a point where the problem is society's problem--we're leaving our poor and disenfranchised as well as our middle class and well off kids without any sense of what this country was or is, so as to understand its value going forward, and with precious little ability to actually compete in the global marketplace. That's not a good recipe for the survival of a nation state or empire.
I feel some responsibility to this problem. If KTMers or their ilk aren't able to innovate the solution, what chance do we have?
K9Sasha,
--The problem with this is that people in general all over the United States think education is bad, but the education their kids are getting is good.
I think you're really nailing the issue we come back to over and over again: right now, those of us who desperately want to change the ed system have got no leverage because we're such a minority. Sure, we opt out--who cares, who needs us anyway.
But how do we change the culture to recognize that the current teaching methods, curriculum, administration attitudes, etc. are untenable? Especially since it's difficult to see TODAY what the problem is TODAY--you only see after a while that there must have been something wrong...but even then, what, exactly?
We can't kill the beast by attrition if most people are satisfied, or only unsatisfied in hindsight.
We have yet reached the point where the majority of parents/educators/politicians/pick your demographic/ think there's a crisis in grammar school education. Until we do, who will be ready to reach for new ideas?
CEOs often face difficulties getting people to buy into change inside their organization as long as things are "good enough"--even if the CEO is saying that they are about to sail into an iceberd. Sometimes, they manufacture crises, or at least, allow inevitable problems to blow up into so that they can make their point that change needed to happen. But usually, that only takes a quarter or two. Sure, a lot of people get hurt, but it's temporary. Manufacturing a crisis where your kids don't learn isn't the same...
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