New funding for ed tech innovation
Is needed funding for education innovation most importantly a “who” or “how much” question? Who does the funding? Who gets the funding? How much is funded? And, more interestingly and helpfully, how is the funding directed?
It would be over-the-top, ivory tower imagining to question whether billions from Gates, Zuckerberg and other tech revolution billionaires will do any good for education.
If you count the $100 million Face of Facebook donation to Newark schools a total waste – not that you should, but if you did – but he follows it with “lessons learned” and $100 billion given for personalized learning over a lifetime, you don’t have to be too charitable in your sentiments to judge that education broadly wins out. Your taste may run more toward Gates or Dell or Hewlett or even more established foundation philanthropies like Wallace or MacArthur or Ford or Carnegie. You may gain confidence from improved evaluation techniques of “effective altruism”.
Even being grateful for these gifts to educational improvement though, you’re not beholden to keep silent about how education might best benefit. These perspectives offered can serve to target or accelerate the benefits won from this praiseworthy philanthropy. So, consider a few questions which might be useful. And the beginning of a few answers for these questions:
How do your politics lean? Should government be doing all of the funding? Is that what keeps it accountable? Is accountability a matter of public feelings or is it effectiveness measured against critical objectives? Is this an either/or conundrum, or might there not be a place for public and private efforts?
Is “Race to the Top” type government funding a path toward innovation paired with public accountability? Does this sort of program encourage anything like disruptive innovation? Does education need that sort of innovation? Will school systems and established bureaucracies ever produce that sort of innovation?
Can schools, rather than systems or central offices, be the seedbed of disruptive and necessary innovations? Will it take skunkworks kinds of operations inside systems but outside schools and central offices? Do we need outside the system efforts like the Jobs widow’s XQ America: The Super Schools Project? Is something like Macarthur’s LRNG the model for advance and improvement? Can truly innovative efforts be centrally planned and politically mediated?
With the system status quo funding needed to offer any level of education to every student, plus the reality of $19 trillion federal debt, will we get anywhere asking the funding innovation questions as matters of government solution? Yes, the greatest part of education funding is state and local, and many of these governmental structures run with balanced budget requirements, but bonded indebtedness is still debt and a daunting financial reality for most all educational systems.
So, will innovation necessarily germinate outside the status quo boundaries and, consequently, need funding from outside these boundaries as well? Are there systems outside systems which can offer some of the innovation? Are charter schools and charter management companies just means around accountability or is accountability more intrinsic to the charter system than to the system mandated by constitutional authority and run by political expediency?
Are there market channels and instruments of capital flow which can both fund and measure, launch and moderate, mediate and evangelize innovations to education? Is NewSchools Venture Fund a promising model? When talking about innovation, nearly 20 years of market-driven experience is quite a history, but will the “philanthrocapitalism” as labeled by The Economist, described by The NewYorkerand exercised by tech billionaires choose simply to bypass pooled funds and paradigms because the scale of their billions call for their own mechanisms, foundations, priorities and controls?
Considering the entrepreneurial and start-up capital influence of the Paypal Mafia in so many sea change business innovations of the last several years, is there a likely correlate in education coming from a handful of brilliant, passionate, creative and highly opinionated individuals who can give many billions of dollars toward their own visions for educational innovation and improvement? Can we stop it? Should we stop it? Is this the most outrageous example of looking a gift horse in the mouth, or is it one of history’s most important awakenings imaginable to a human development Trojan Horse? Are we concerned by the Gates Foundation tenacity toward improving evaluation and personnel development in education? Should we be wary of the Zuckerberg-Chan personal conviction that personalized learning is the necessary future of education and worthy of their Facebook fortune?
While we are disruptively innovating pedagogical technique and organizational development in education, should we consider a vision for financial innovation? If landscape-change gifts from spectacularly successful technocapitalists may be of some concern for direction and influence in education, can we pursue improvements through greater leverage rather than stronger circuit-breakers? While it may be difficult to imagine a force bigger than a $100 billion hammer, it may be useful to consider the influence greater by orders of magnitude which can come from the broader movement of social entrepreneurship which birthed the billion dollar hammers in the first place. Social purpose corporations, funds for investment led by objectives of social entrepreneurship, private equity and venture capital focused on ed tech innovation, as well as potential hybrid models of public/private, altruist/capitalist, social service/business enterprise structure for schools might all serve as democratizing influences for leadership in educational innovation. Are these good just because they afflict the powerful with counterbalancing influences? Might they also be good because they offer opportunity for educational innovations to come from those teaching children and doing school rather than exclusively from those owning influence through business success or commanding influence through system control?
Everyone knows how to run a school because everyone went to school. That’s a wry, sometimes bitter, truism shared in school circles about public and parental opinion. The truth in the truism is that almost everyone does have some personal experience of school whereas most have nothing to say from personal experience about engineering or computer coding or capital formation or foreign affairs. In a democracy, we tend to give ourselves more direct influence through elected leaders in the latter two than the former. And perhaps, rightly so, because we are all affected by the latter and should have some voice. But if the engineering is genetic and the coding is a privacy and security concern, we may be much more inclined toward gaining access to the decision-making process. Certainly education is an area where we expect some broad public voice. Perhaps the funding of education through a productive variety of means is also an area where we should decentralize the influence to a degree.
Perhaps even asking all these questions is spitting into the wind. A mighty wind several hundred billion dollars strong is blowing for educational innovation. Should we just enjoy the breeze? Or, may it be of some value to hoist a few more sails on a few more masts directed by a few more sailors who are actually on the boat riding the waves? Will our schools be innovated through the backwash of rocket-fueled rotors operating from the techno-heights? Or, can we distribute the power a bit to include those rowing the boats and bailing out the bilge water and dead reckoning the ship and navigating by the stars of a thousand years of sky?