President Obama: Don’t just charge education, change it
Posted by michael_horn | Under Early Childhood, Higher Education, Online learning, Schools Friday Feb 27, 2009In his first address to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday, President Obama made education a cornerstone of his remarks—and properly so given the urgent need to improve education in this country. Obama also made a point of saying that it isn’t enough just to give education more resources; schools also need more reform. This echoes a piece that Clay and I authored last week. Obama elaborated that offering preschool options isn’t enough, for example. We have to continue to improve them, he said, as well as cut “education programs that don’t work.”
We hope that concrete action follows this encouraging rhetoric. One thing we remain worried about is that the money in the stimulus package targeted for schools will be used to fund a continuation of the status quo. This is borrowed money. Charging education isn’t the same thing as changing it. Budgetary crises sometimes compel us to adopt disruption—which can lead to wholesale transformation of a system to something that serves many more people far better and far more affordably.
A point that Obama also touched upon in the speech is the fact that the price of tuition for post-secondary education is higher than ever. This is a big problem. But as we’ve pointed out in many posts on this site (here and here, just to give two examples), the solution isn’t to subsidize tuition to expensive colleges through scholarships or loans. If we do that, all we’re doing once again is charging education, not changing it. We haven’t made the system any less expensive; someone is still paying for it.
Industries only become more affordable through disruption. We need teaching universities and online universities to take more market share with a more affordable model to bless the lives of many more people. Subsidies will only delay the transformation to models like Andrew Jackson University and StraighterLine.
I was fortunate to attend the recent AASA conference of superintendents in San Francisco and listened to Clayton Christensen. I can tell you that the presentation was moving to say the least. As a provider of tranformative technology, including the world’s first AI engine to score student writing instantly and with accuracy = or > a pool of expert human scorers, we’re particularly concerned that tranformative solutions are out there to improve teaching and learning if more educators would embrace these new ideas. Disrupting Class as well as the presentation at AASA certainly allows education leaders the chance to shake things up and help teachers and students even more in the future.
Some things computers do well, some things teachers do well. Ingot qualifications are designed to use contemporary social networking in the assessment process and they were designed using Clay Christensen’s theories. Time will tell if it works.
Disruptive, low-cost models for delivering education don’t make much sense for most HE institutions: why cannibalize and eviscerate revenues from your bread and butter classes?
Why not focus on new institutions, or policy / articulation frameworks that encourage students to turn to new organizations?
I think that’s a good point. That is, of course, at the heart of the innovator’s dilemma. It’s counterintuitive for the incumbent organizations to go after those low-cost models so the advantage in a disruptive situation goes to the entrant companies. Incumbents can manage the balance if they create a new autonomous model, but this isn’t a natural thing for them to do and is quite challenging–hence StraighterLine’s place in the chain.
I opine that to receive the personal loans from banks you must present a firm motivation. However, once I’ve received a college loan, because I was willing to buy a bike.