After writing the last post about Friedman’s NY Times column, I’ve been thinking more about innovation and what it looks like.
It’s a hard concept to describe but while wandering through the supermarket aisles this afternoon, I found some good examples of what it doesn’t look like.
All over the store, traditional products now have companion packages that are nothing more than minor derivatives of the original, led by those single serving 100 calorie packs.
The food companies would like you to think this is innovation but these new formats are really nothing more than the same old crap in new wrapping, usually with a higher per unit price.
Now I don’t know enough to write intelligently about innovation in most areas Friedman writes about but I do know something about the subject when it comes to education.
For example, many people claim that charter schools and vouchers are important innovative concepts that will improve education for all students.
Wrong. They are the educational version of sour cream and chives Wheat Thins.
In all but a very few cases, charters and vouchers simply move students from schools that are not good at getting kids to pass standardized tests to ones that are.
The curriculum isn’t different. The textbooks are largely the same. The teaching process is very traditional. The primary goal (get every kid into college whether it’s right for them or not) remains.
The only change is that they are not public schools and that’s hardly innovative.
Then there’s the online “curriculum resource tool” introduced this fall by our overly-large school district.
Our administration would like us to believe this is a significant change for instructional practice but it’s not.
While this new online database may assist our teachers with their lesson planning, it’s really nothing more than putting old ingredients (standardized test questions and other materials blessed by the same curriculum specialists) into new packages.
100 calorie packs for educators.
And what about No Child Left Behind, supposedly the greatest educational innovation of the 21st century? Well, that’s pure crap.
NCLB is the Jimmy Dean Chocolate Chip Pancakes & Sausage on a Stick of the educational market: a mixture of mediocre ingredients that come together in a form that could be considered child abuse.
Let’s face it, in education, as in most industries, innovation rarely comes from above. Meaningful change doesn’t originate from administrators and politicians.
Genuine improvement in the way we educate our children will only come from teachers, principals, parents, community members and others who work directly with kids – and from the kids themselves.
It comes from people who are given the freedom to experiment, test new ideas, and then share what they learn with the larger community.
No argument here. Love the Jimmy Dean metaphor.
The key difference between charter schools and ‘standard’ public schools is that charter schools can choose how fast they grow.
A key concept in a successful business is growing at the rate that you can hire high-quality employees and supply high-quality goods/services. Public schools don’t get to do this — they are forced to grow based on growth in the population, often requiring that the school hire a lower-quality or less proven teacher because there just isn’t a proven, high-quality teacher available.
(It’s the same concept that helps schools that can pick their students have higher average test scores than schools that accept the challenges of any student.)
A successful charter school would take advantage of this and grow slowly, hiring great staff whenever possible. The problem is that many charter schools just plunk down a set campus size and try to instantly create a full size school, which puts them in the exact same boat as the public schools.
Also, even if charter schools all suddenly decided to grow slowly, there’d be other problems — mainly, where do all the low-quality teachers end up?
nice one, Tim. Love the analogies.