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Googling our way to educational excellence
I wish I had a nickel for every time one of our supporters urged SQE to start a school - and by modelling what excellence looks like, lead other schools (especially government schools) to excel. This excellent column by Andrew Coulson shows why this plan is a non-starter. Best case scenario? Government administrators close their eyes to what’s possible. Worst case scenario? Government administrators move quickly and savagely to shut down the threat. Here’s an article from our archives giving a couple of Ontario examples.
Acknowledging that the lighthouse school notion doesn’t work, Andrew Coulson draws on historical and statistical evidence to find an approach that does work. His conclusion is compelling: an entrepreneurial educational marketplace is the best way to facilitate a scaling up of excellence.
The same free enterprise system that has given us Google, Starbucks, and Apple works in education, too—if we let it. This system works for businesses through several key conditions: freedom to innovate, consumer choice, competition between providers, price signals, and the ability to distribute profits to investors.
These same tools can allow and encourage educational success. In fact, they’re already doing so. In the Korean tutoring sector, it is not uncommon for the top teachers to have class sizes in the range of 20 to 40 thousand students, thanks to effective use of the Internet to distribute lessons. The best among them earn millions of dollars a year from profit sharing programs operated by the tutoring firms. The more effective a teacher becomes, and the larger the number of students who seek out her lessons, the more she earns.
At the other end of the economic spectrum, hundreds of entrepreneurial independent schools currently operate in the slums of Hyderabad, India, vying to serve the children of day laborers and food-stall vendors whose poverty is beyond anything in America. These parent-funded independent schools outperform the local state-run schools, and they do so at a fraction of the cost—barely four dollars per month.