What should the Federal Office of Educational Entrepreneurship and Innovation focus on? (Part 2)
November 4, 2008
(Please read Part 1)
Frederick Hess identified three assumptions related to problems in educational entrepreneurship – barriers to entry, lack of financial capital, and lack of human capital – which all lead to a lack of innovation. The recommendations in the Rotherham report, Changing the Game: The Federal Role in Supporting 21st Century Educational Innovation, are built on these three assumptions. I do not believe that barriers to entry or lack of financial capital are bottlenecks in educational entrepreneurship. Finally, I believe some of the tremendous innovation happening in the education space – such as Classroom 2.0, Ning, PLP, wikis, blogging in the classroom, Flat Classroom, etc. – is not expensive to scale.
The third assumption – a lack of human capital (with teachers and administrators) – is in fact the most challenging factor to achieving educational success in this country. If we were to establish the Office, I hope it would focus mostly on initiatives that directly tackle the human capital problem in educational entrepreneurship.
The education industry is similar to other service industry players in the sense that people are the biggest bottleneck to scaling success. But there are a few important methodologies to scaling success in the people-intensive services industry.
To begin with, people management needs to be a central goal of educational institutions. The hiring of outstanding individuals, the ability to quickly fire ineffective staff, and financially rewarding excellent teachers are all critical components to ensuring that the best and brightest enter and stay in the education field.
In addition, teachers and administrators should carefully consider ways to maximize their most precious resource – time. I believe principles espoused in Getting Things Done, of 4 Hour Work Week, could be applied to the education sector to dramatically improve efficiency and productivity in the education sector.
Another way to increase human capital within the services industry – or education – is to invest deeply and strategically in developing talent. In the consulting world, each entry-level consultant is usually paired with up to 2-3 senior consultants who are intensely focused on developing entry-level employees. In addition, analysts often need to attend weeks of highly targeted professional development training each year to improve their performance. Teachers and administrators could benefit tremendously from replicating this intense approach to developing internal talent.
Finally, the only other way to scale human capital-intensive services businesses such as education is by strategic outsourcing. With the emergence of new technologies, there is a national and global talent pool of individuals who can perform peripheral and core functions at the school at a much lower cost than the traditional models.
Should we build a Federal Office of Educational Entrepreneurship and Innovation? (Part 1)
November 4, 2008
Andy Rotherham, an education guru whom I deeply respect for writing the excellent blog, Eduwonk, recently published a report titled: “Changing the Game: The Federal Role in Supporting 21st Century Educational Innovation.” The report recommends creating a $450m Federal Office of Educational Entrepreneurship and Innovation to fund educational entrepreneurs in charter schools, private industry, and non profits. [I am speaking to Andy on the phone this Friday about the report; therefore please comment if you would like me to bring anything up with him.]
Even though Smart Solutions could directly benefit from this office because we could apply for funds to scale up our business, I am a bit scared about the repercussions. Instead of intensely focusing on improving service or lowering costs – I now need to keep an eye on Washington.
The federal office may slow growth in the ed tech sector over the long run because we would be lobbying for pet projects in Washington instead of focusing on client needs.
While some ideas from the report are compelling, such as funding an “Education Innovation Challenge” to invest in long-term R&D efforts in education, other ideas need to be carefully studied to understand their impact on the marketplace.
Here are some other comments from one of my colleagues:
My main question is: how would the Office of Innovation actually impact the policies that support or hamper innovation?
The New Teacher Project helps bring more effective educators into the pipeline, but despite having funding support, they were unable to open in Cleveland because of issues with teacher licensing requirements.
It would be great if the incentives created by this office could help eliminate those barriers. But the Office could end up adding another layer of federal bureaucracy