What If Schools Don’t Change?

I had this idea brewing for a while and wanted to blog about it. So here goes.

I think that the way we educate our kids is obsolete. A good summary of this argument is put forth by Aaron Eyler from Synthesizing Education.

The fact is that the “factory system” of education WAS very well-suited in preparing people for jobs throughout the 1900s-1980s or so.

I also talked about it in a previous set of posts.  Technology is revolutionizing the whole way of distributing content and media. This of course is the business schools are in. This is from the Chronicle of Higher Education today:

For decades, newspapers enjoyed a geographically defined monopoly over the lucrative ad market, the profits from which were used to support money-losing enterprises like investigative reporting and foreign bureaus. Now that money is gone, lost to cheaper online competitors like Craigslist.

Teaching is a lot more complicated than advertising, and universities have the advantage of sitting behind government-backed barriers to competition, in the form of accreditation.

…it would be a grave mistake to assume that the regulatory walls of accreditation will protect traditional universities forever.

People are starting to realize that what colleges are offering are in many cases not worth the money. From the NY Times

Most Americans believe that colleges today operate like businesses, concerned more with their bottom line than with the educational experience of students, according to a new study. And the proportion of people who hold that view has increased to 60 percent, from 52 percent in 2007.

So these are the conditions that exist today.

1. Higher and higher costs. Rising much faster than inflation.
2. Increasing dissatisfaction with the value of the product being produced.
3. Technology is creating lower cost options.

If you look at any industry that goes through a radical change, the leaders of the new industry are usually NOT the same ones who lead the old industry.

There are many examples of this.

1. Ford, GM and BMW did not make horse drawn carriages.
2. Microsoft dominated the Desktop era but is 3rd or 4th in the Internet Era.
3. Apple is the most important player in Music.
4. Amazon.com is the most important player in Books.
5. Apple has a wildly successful phone! Where is Nokia, LG, Motorola??? They had every advantage but had too much to lose to take risks and think outside the box.

What is happening here is companies that are successful think things will keep going their way. They don’t take risks and change things because they have the most to loose.

Let me tell you the story of Silicon Graphics Inc. When I was working in Military Simulation in the mid 90s we used big, hugely expensive Silicon Graphics workstations. PCs just were not capable of doing decent 3D graphics at the level we needed. SGI probably thought they would be selling $100k workstations forever, however, within a decade, PCs had improved so much that they were able to do many of the jobs formerly done with SGIs. Not all of them, but lots of the lower end jobs. You just didn’t need a SGI machine that much. End result? SGI went bankrupt. They wouldn’t change their business model and got eaten by the new guys.

The parallels to higher education are striking. They also produce a very expensive product. That product is now able to be offered at much lower cost by online rivals who don’t have the expense of a football team and a large campus.  This product isn’t as good quality but it’s getting better all th e time.  Once you get realtime voice translation on the net then you can put your school anywhere in the world and have thousands or millions of students at once. If I only have 30 students then I have to charge them a lot of money. If I have 30,000 then the costs drop hugely.  We don’t all drive around in a Ferrari do we? (well, I do. j/k)  There is a huge potential market for commodity Education products.  Here is a UN report stating that 5 Billion people will use Cell Phones this year.  I want to sell an Educational product to each of them for $1.

What about Alumni?  We teach the students for 4 years, then send them on their way with a degree.  Then they have a 30-40 year career with no more education?  Really?  Why aren’t universities offering a constant stream of additional online courses to their Alumni to keep them up to date with trends in their degrees?  That market exists and somebody will serve it at some point!

Back to the initial question: So what if schools don’t change?

It is said that “Nature Abhors a Vaccuum.” If schools don’t change then somebody else will fill that void. In the 20th century the big names in Education were Harvard, Oxford, and University of Iowa. Is it possible in 10 years the big names in Education will be Google, Apple and Walmart? Yes Walmart. They are the barbarians at the gate right now.

So if we see this coming, why won’t schools adapt to it? Well, think of the players involved.

1. Teachers – they are the ones who want to be effective in the classroom but have the least ability to create system wide changes.
2. Administrators – More concerned with budgets. Not looking longer term and certainly doesn’t want to take any risks.
3. State Boards of Education – more and more are being constrained by Washington DC.
4. Department of Education – It’s all about funding. There is never enough they say, but what is it being spent on? Computers in the classroom? Teacher salaries? NCLB? How does any of the help the person in the classroom? Technology does no good without training and ideas to make use of it.
5. Teachers Unions – Are they more concerned with education or membership? Here’s a good quote from a John Stossel article:

When The Washington Post asked George Parker, head of the Washington, D.C., teachers union, about the voucher program there, he said: “Parents are voting with their feet. … As kids continue leaving the system, we will lose teachers. Our very survival depends on having kids in D.C. schools so we’ll have teachers to represent.”

No, I am becoming more and more convinced that the current education system cannot and will not change in the time left to it. The only thing holding back the barbarians at the gate right now is accreditation. How long can that last? If people leave accredited schools for innovative, effective private schools will businesses ignore those grads? I doubt it.

This change in education has already been set in motion but the window for doing something is rapidly closing. I think the motto of the Special Air Service is especially appropriate:

“Who dares, wins.”

Game on.