SwampFox

Educational entrepreneurs

Last week, Swamp Fox commented on the need to improve higher education, and James responded, "I feel too much emphasis is placed in developing higher education & research centers when the primary and secondary schools still leave a lot to be desired."

Well OK. How do we create a public educational system that meets the needs of all children? Let's look at this as the entrepreneurs we are. (This topic has a strange way of riling some people up, so if your blood pressure is rising, take a breath and read the last paragraph first).

There is a wide spectrum of ways in which students think and learn. And there is a wide spectrum of circumstances from which children come. For some percentage of children, the way we deliver public education today matches up well with how they learn and the support they receive at home. Most of these children do well, and some even excel. But a large segment of children are failing under the current system.

As educational entrepreneurs, would we enter this market targeting the students doing well? No. While there is room for continual improvement, these students are well served by the market leader and this would not be a good place to enter the market.

Naturally, we would target students not well served by the status quo. How might we do this? We'd be most successful by developing a new model of delivering education that better matches the needs of underserved students.

One of the underlying assumptions of public education is that students go home to educated parents who value education and can help with homework. Now it would be ideal if each student had that support structure, but that is not reality. There are many underprivileged children whose parents are unwilling or unable to help them succeed. So what if we developed a school where 100% of what is required to be successful is delivered during the school day.

Perhaps in our innovative school underprivileged children begin class at 8:00 am, get out at 3:00 pm, participate in organized athletics until 5:00, go home for dinner, and return to school at 6:30 to do their home work until 8:00. Basically these kids are immersed in a culture of excellence with a high work ethic and high expectations. This would be similar to the immersion into a culture of excellence experienced by students at the Governor's School for the Arts and Humanities and the Governor's School for Math and Science.

Many will perceive this model as too radical. Many of the best entrepreneurial organizations are attacked as too radical when they are first started. So we do some market research and find, in fact, that schools on a similar model do exist. In the spring I met Jack Markell, who is Treasurer of the State of Delaware and a Democrat, who told me about highly successful schools in Delaware that are based on this model.

As educational entrepreneurs we think that a model like this might meet the needs of underprivileged students here. We go to the folks we work for with our concept, and they tell us this is a good idea but it is not the way we run schools here. Many entrepreneurs have had this conversation with their bosses. So in line with the great American tradition of entrepreneurship, we decide to create new value by starting our own school. We find financial backers. We recruit a talented staff. We find a location.

There is only one problem. We have no way to generate revenue. We have targeted poor, underserved students, whose families do not have the means to pay, and our new school has no way of receiving an allocation of some of the education funding spent on their behalf.

So we are left with making incremental improvements to the existing system of delivering education, which will allow us to continue to make only modest progress. Even exceptional teachers will find it difficult to meet the needs of our targeted students because the existing education model does not match up well with the students' needs. This is The Innovator’s Dilemma.

But there is hope. One of my heroes is Virginia Uldrick, founder of the Greenville County School District Fine Arts Center and the Governor's School for the Arts and Humanities. She's a preeminent educational entrepreneur if ever there was one. She tells me that entrepreneurial educators can prevail with passion and tenacity, if they have enlightened leadership. She ought to know.

I'm interested in examples you might have of educational entrepreneurs at work today. Please leave a comment below and inspire others. Then perhaps collectively we can finds ways to nurture them in doing only what educational entrepreneurs can do best.