At the Business Higher Education Foundation (BHEF) meeting, I had the pleasure (terror) of facilitating a discussion about whether the U.S. should increase investment in education innovation. The terror comes from facilitating a discussion of university presidents and corporate executives. It was kind of like that nightmare in college of being called on by the professor for an answer that you just don’t have.
The U.S. Education system could not be designed any less efficiently if we tried. But, I don’t see our voters giver more power to Washington to control schools so we will have to deal with the inefficiencies of fifty State’s education departments and thousands of school districts from the foreseeable future.
Education standards are a perfect example. Why not have national standards that are research-based and validated as relevant to career and college success?
Such a system may exist from ACT. Apparently they test millions of students every year and it’s not just for college admissions. In order for a student to be successful - (success being defined as a ‘C’ level grade in a course; a low standard as far as I’m concerned) - ACT has also apparently profiled the tasks of over 15,000 jobs in the U.S. and have tests that measure competency for these skills. 41 states already use these tests for schools. They tie their academic standards for schools to these tests.
It seems that now it’s the employers turn to exert influence. Perhaps we can’t get to a national standard for fear of too much control from D. C. But what if the employer community adopted these standards?
In much the same way, someone can become “certified”. Java, Microsoft, or Cisco programmer…perhaps the same concept could apply to all job roles.
Colleges and universities could also openly publish their admission criteria as well. I’m certain that if we organize our talent selection around commonly understood criteria of skills that schools will organize their curriculum to deliver to that standard.
By the way, back to that panel I was facilitating…the surprising thing to me is that we do not know how much money is spent on R&D for education in this country. We may be able to quantify what the U.S. Department of Education spends on R&D but that is a small amount and one piece of the overall R&D expenditure. If you Google this subject, you’ll find that there’s all kinds of information about how much governments and corporations spend on R&D. For example, Sun spends roughly $2B on R&D annually.
The U.S. spends over $1 Trillion on education. How much do we spend on education R&D? Is that too much or too little?
Step 1 is to quantify this investment and then determine as a nation whether that amount is too little. When one considers that we are in a knowledge economy, clearly education is the foundation of the economy because it builds knowledge capacity. When you consider that higher education costs have risen at a higher rate than any industry, including healthcare, you realize we need education R&D to figure out how to more effectively and efficiently education our citizens. According to ACT, only 4 out of 10 8th graders are prepared for college (defined as able to a ‘C’ grade in college) and that number drops to 2 out of 10 by 12th grade. We need for education R&D to figure out how to change these trends. The high school dropout rate is 9.3%. The productivity cost to the economy is staggering.
Step 2 is to then decide what the percentage of R&D expenditure that our economies can provide.
Step 3 is raising the money to conduct the research through government, business and foundations.
Step 4 is to engage in the research and apply findings as soon as possible. Using Christensen, Johnson and Horn’s guidance from Disrupting Class, we need to ultimately answer “not simply what’s implementable and what works, but what is implementable and what works for whom, where and why”.
