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Funding education innovators

May 5, 2010 By

You’ve got a great idea for a new kind of school or a teacher recruitment program. How do you get the start-up money? In “Fueling the Engine,” in Education Next, Rick Hess writes about education innovators and the philanthropists that fund them.  It’s an excerpt from his new book Education Unbound:  The Promise and Practice of Greenfield Schooling.

“Greenfield is a term of art typically used by investors, engineers, or builders to refer to an area where there are unobstructed, wide-open opportunities to invent or build,” Hess writes. Or as, Mao said: “Let a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend.”

The challenge for reformers is to recognize that enabling such providers is not just a matter of promoting “school choice,” but also of freeing up the sector to a wealth of different approaches and cultivating conditions in which problem solvers can succeed and grow. . .  funding is the fuel required for innovators to thrive.

The U.S. Education Department wants to fund innovation too, Hess notes.

Over $650 million in (federal i3) funds will be awarded, and a coalition of foundations announced last week that it will offer up to half a billion dollars to match the federal grants.

. . . Remember, the i3 investment probably amounts to a third or more of school reform investment in the U.S. this year, and the follow-up $500 million will increase its impact even more. This could be a substantial boon to innovation and a spur for new providers to take evaluation and scale far more seriously, or it could result in cementing the status of popular outfits that know how to write grants, land influential consultants, and afford high-priced evaluation.

Ed Week has more on the foundations’ partnership with the feds.

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Innovation

November 19, 2009 By

This Week in Education offers this cartoon, adapted from The New Yorker..

Innovative peant butter sandwich

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Replication isn't innovation

July 13, 2009 By

The meaning of “innovation” has been twisted, stretched and distorted, writes Eduwonk guest blogger Curt Johnson of Education/Evolving.

For Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, innovation seems to mean grabbing the lessons from schools with records of high performance and grafting them on to problem schools. Finding “what works,” adopting it, spreading it around. Why not call that what it is: replication?

But what works in one place may not work everywhere, Johnson writes. Schools and teachers need the freedom to try new things that might not work out as planned. True innovation won’t be “evidence-based.”  And it won’t be easy.

(Harvard Professor Clayton) Christensen’s career rests on his distinction between “sustaining” innovation — the constant improvements that successful enterprises make in their products or services — and “disruptive” innovation in which a new and different product or business model bursts through from a competitor the established firm cannot emulate.

This highlights a critical problem with ‘innovation’. These disruptive innovations, the truly new models, are never high-quality at first. They appeal just to people not being served well by the mainstream offerings.

“Most people aren’t ready for radical change,” Johnson writes.

We need some true innovators, but we also need replicators who will build on successful school models.

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Iowa rejects independent charter schools

June 8, 2009 By

Iowa’s charter schools are run by school districts. It turns out they’re not very innovative,  reports the Des Moines Register. In essence, the state collected federal charter funding for a handful of magnet schools with no autonomy or ability to challenge the status quo.

Iowa schools, once rated the best in the nation, are slipping in national rankings.

In North Carolina, a top-scoring charter school that uses Direct Instruction wonders why the state seems uninterested in learning about their methods.

(Founder Baker) Mitchell said he feels the state is not really looking at the good things his school is doing, and he doesn’t know whether regular public schools are learning anything from the charter school.

Indeed, the state doesn’t keep track of innovations at charter schools and how they influence the public school system, said Jean Kruft , a consultant with the N.C. Office of Charter Schools.

Illinois will double the number of charter schools, including charters for five schools specializing in drop-outs.

Update: Rep. Marcia Fudge, D-Ohio, spoke at the House Education and Labor Committee hearing on charter schools, reports Edspresso:

“I’m from the state of Ohio, so I think I look at things a little differently because most of our charter schools are not public charter schools. So, you may hear me coming from a very different vantage point.”

Of course, charters are public schools by definition. Fudge’s flub wasn’t the only one at the charter hearings.

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