GOPideas... ideas done right

Tom Friedman wrote an excellent column yesterday detailing the educational challenges facing the United States, but his analogy between banks and schools is exactly wrong because the right prescription for banks is exactly the wrong prescription for schools. Banking should be boring, predictable, regimented and stale --- which is exactly how our educational system is managed; and that’s the problem.

Banks became financial weapons of mass destruction when they stopped doing "banking" and began to experiment with "financial innovation." Traditional banking was (and should be) the most basic and simple of professions: you get money at X rate, you lend it out at X+Y rate to people who will certainly pay you back and you collect the money from them and keep the difference between what you collect and what you pay out in interest. You don't make loans to people who can't pay it back because, well, you're the one getting paid (not some counterparty in a derivative transaction).

Our educational system is exactly the opposite: public schools can't pick whom to enroll or spend money on. They can't bill parents more for difficult kids. Kids are shuffled through many layers of school before becoming adults --- and they don't have collateral that society can repossess if they fail. However, the scariest part of Friedman's analogy is that our educational system is premised on what banking should be based on: being boring and predictable.

I have two parents who are teachers, friends who teach at the high school level and still pal around with multiple former professors and none have been able to convince me that my core belief of the US educational system is wrong: it is a glorified babysitting service that is designed to promote homogeneity in thought and practice.

For example, how many years of math or English does a high school student need to take: 1,2,3 or 4? Every school I have ever seen is 4. Exactly 4, without exemption. Perfect verbal score on the SAT: 4 years. Write a blog daily: 4 years. Editor of the school paper: 4 years. Mathematical genius: 4 years. The same regimented approach is adopted with math --- and moving that way for the social and hard science. This moves directly against the global meritocratic world in which our current generation of students will live --- a world in which success is defined by accomplishment, not duration. 

Recent research has shown that the less flexibility a company provides, the worse the employees perform --- for very obvious reasons: if you are told what to do, how to do it, when to do it and where to do it, with the full knowledge that regardless of your performance, you will still suffer the same fate (read: 4 full years of math), the incentive to perform is weak --- which is exactly what occurs in today’s schools.

Instead, let’s make education performance-based: have some entity (local, state, federal) set a standard for educational competence in each subject area. Once that competence level is reached, the student is no longer required to engage in that subject. This will address most important and least discussed issue in education: student motivation. Second, make the standard something relevant and externally verifiable. As Friedman correctly points out, winners in the global economy will be those that solve practical problems, not do theoretical work. The best example of this is a course taught on the psychology of Facebook by BJ Fogg at Stanford. The assignment was simple: build a Facebook application and your grade will be based on how many people download it (not its technological sophistication, whether the teacher liked it, its social value, etc.) --- clear, easy and (thanks to Facebook’s transparency), externally verifiable.

The results of setting a competitive goal blew away the instructors. One class, in one semester with 80 students built over 50 apps (they were done in teams) that ended up being downloaded by 10,000,000 people, generated $1,000,000 in revenue, had a daily audience of over 1,000,000 people, witnessed three companies be formed and two of them sold --- all in ten weeks.

As a Republican, I’m pro-money and pro-market --- not as an end, but as a way of keeping score. So here’s my deal: every university should review their computer science and psychology programs and those classes that have shown equal or better return (80 students starting from scratch make $1,000,000 in ten weeks) can keep teaching they way they are. If they don’t meet that goal, the system changes. Period. No discussion. No debate. The market has spoken --- and innovative teaching has won. Whether or not “education professionals” think this is a good/valuable/appropriate is not relevant --- the global economy doesn’t care about how you feel, only about results. And the results of our educational system suck.

The economic displacement should be minimal: the geniuses who were able to turn financial toxic waste into AAA bonds have the innovation needed to take a moribund system and make it creative. And all those old school teachers can have the newly regulated banking jobs: doing the same thing, with the same people, the same way --- every day.