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  Leslie Pratch, Ph.D.: Education and Global Competition
Reported by Huffington Post on Wednesday, 4 November 2009 (on November 4, 2009)
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This entry is the second in which Raj and Leslie offer a tangential view, not a consensus view, and not the average view. We seek to synthesize information and ideas from different vectors and extrapolate a resultant vector in an orthogonal dimension. Raj is an entrepreneur/technologist born and raised in India, educated in the United States, who now markets green energy solutions globally. Leslie is a clinical psychologist with an M.B.A. in strategy and finance from The University of Chicago who specializes in working with private equity investors. Through writing about capitalism, economics, education, the environment, and value creation, we aspire to create a social good.
Political pundits talk about deindustrialization in the United States. These days practically any unfinished product can be made in India and China. Where education fits into this mix is important.
The Chicago Public Schools (CPS) is the third largest public school system in the United States. The split between Black and Hispanic kids in the inner city schools is appalling, the gang problem, horrific. There is talk is of putting semi-authorized veterans as guards in schools, to make a school a community center. On October 27, Juvenile Court officials, police, and school officials met to discuss ways to share information to ease the violence against Chicago students. One question was whether court officials could share information on court-involved youth with educators to prevent violence or deal with its aftermath. The statistics exist to predict which students are more likely perpetrate violence and which are likely to be victims but civil liberties\' laws prevent the police from sharing such information with educators.
In January 2009, Ron Huberman became the CEO of CPS. Huberman oversees a budget of over $6 billion. When his term commenced in January 2009, he promised to focus on safety, performance, mentoring, a reduction in teacher turnover, and a safe place for kids to go at night.
But what he describes is more management. He will be waving his arms and hoping to catch mosquitoes. We wish him luck. As one strategy professor at The University of Chicago Booth School of business put it:
Good management with a bad strategy is almost always a loser. We in the U.S. need to win on the public schools. It is vital to our country. That\'s why so many are passionate on charter schools: They work. I have asked every person who is against them why, and I\'ve rarely heard a reasonable response yet. One of the best answers I have heard is \"The teachers unions elected me and I promised I would protect them.\" That makes sense. Let\'s ruin the country but protect a union. We know how to better the education system in the United States. It is very simple and being tried with great success now: School Vouchers. It works wonders, absolute wonders. Ask your Congressperson why it isn\'t the law of the land. The Greater Chicago School System will not improve without outside competition.
Vouchers are subsidies that grant limited purchasing power to a student to choose among a restricted set of private schools. In the traditional school funding configuration, public funds for public schools flow from national and state governments and local communities, directly to school districts. A family wishing to send its child to a private school must do so with its own funds. A large-scale voucher plan would allow families wishing to enroll their children in private school have the tuition partially or completely covered by tax-levied dollars. The role of the government would be limited to ensuring that schools met certain minimum standards, such as the inclusion of a minimum common content in their programs.
In Capitalism and Freedom Milton Friedman advocates vouchers, which students may use for education at a private school of their choice. He believed that in a democracy, to be a citizen, everyone needs a basic education. Thomas Paine also advocated a voucher system because he felt that compulsory education violated individual conscience. He, in turn, followed John Stuart Mill, who believed that state-sponsored education instilled conformity.
Recently, a friend moved to Seattle. The public education available his daughter was so poor that he and his wife -- both Presbyterian -- enrolled their daughter in a Parochical school. He was impressed that the school required parents to serve a certain number of hours on behalf of the community. This practice is reminiscent of the Corvee taxes in Medieval Europe, where serfs owed a certain number of hours on the roads in the feudal domain. The Corvee was a certain number of days a year devoted in labor. If we are required to get a license to drive a car, why not require service for education? It is a reasonable experiment as an alternative to purely government-levied taxes.
Moreover, the voucher system misses the nature of schooling. Schooling involves teaching the curriculum. Parochial schools do maintain discipline. The voucher advocates presuppose that parents know what they want from the school. But do they? Do parents know what they mean by education? Is it etiquette? Is it getting the kids out of their hair so they can go to work? Is it education? Is it all three? It is not clear that vouchers would improve education because it is not clear that parents know what they want out of education. They may want kids who do not talk back. Education teaches children to talk back.
Yet all of the above focus on peripheral issues such as:
- Education is necessary for democracy to work (Freidman, Paine, John Stuart Mill)
- Moaning that public schools are not providing good education
- Competition: Parochial, private versus public. This argument assumes that by injecting competition, public schools will improve. How many public institutions have improved purely because of increasing competition? Competition works if by beating the competitor yields tangible material and monetary benefits. FedEx earns more EPS and management, shareholders, and employees share the loot if they gain market share over UPS. However the US Postal Service\'s success is not measured using the same metric.
How about focusing our dollars on teaching methodology, on pedagogy, and on a variety of pedagogical techniques? Whether it be public, private, parochial, or charter, we are not leveraging computing and communications technology to the hilt. How about getting Google, Apple, Microsoft and the Gates Foundation involved in how to bring a laptop to every kid in public school? How about video taping the \"best teachers\" from across the country/globe teaching everything from Algebra to U.S. History and delivering it to each desktop? How about interactive group classrooms, et cetera?
Raj Alur is Chief Marketing Officer responsible for global marketing and sales at Silicon Valley energy storage startup whose products will become an essential complement to all renewable energy power generation. Raj was previously a venture capitalist with Vesbridge Partners and St. Paul Venture Capital, a CEO of a Boston area wireless data startup, VP of Marketing at Lucent Technologies amongst others. He started his career as a software engineer designing operating systems and file systems. Raj holds a M.S in Computer Science from Boston University and an M.B.A. from Cornell.
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