In many states and cities innovation is emerging as a means for achieving better results from schools. At a quickening pace school and policy leaders are coming to recognize that it is no longer possible to get the kind of performance our country needs with the schools we presently have.
And if we cannot get the performance the country needs with the schools it presently as, then new, different schools will need to be created. This requires a sustained effort at R&D that works alongside, but separate from, school operations presently underway.
Read E|E's paper Innovation-based Systemic Reform.
Such a split-screen strategy—working to improve the existing operations while tirelessly exploring new—has allowed some of the world’s most prominent and complex organizations to adapt and improve while others are overtaken by changing times and conditions. It provides platforms on which to work on the many serious questions of performance and efficiency in education.
The principle barrier to change over the years has been the system. Public education was not designed for change. Fortunately we now know how to solve this system problem. City and state-level innovation zones make the creation of new schools possible as they provide space for proper R&D to occur. They are creating new space, encouraging serious innovations in schools. The availability of new and different schools means greater choice for students, for their families, and for teachers, too.
But creating the capacity for new school creation and for innovation is only one half of the strategy for school improvement. The Other Half of the Strategy involves serious entrepreneurship, in pursuit of new and better ways of accomplishing learning.
As Clayton Christensen and others have shown, large organizations have a difficult time with changes that get at the fundamentals of how they operate. Their nature is to slowly improve what is there, building upon it.
Many are quite good at this. Some get very good. And it is necessary—an organization must always strive to be better, more effective, more efficient.
But sometimes fundamental changes need to happen. Of the one hundred most highly-capitalized American companies at the turn of the 20th century, only three were left a hundred years later. And they looked quite different. It should trouble us that our schools today look little different than those from the 1950’s.
There are periods when incremental improvements are not sufficient, and old technologies give way to new: train to plane, typewriter to computer, internal combustion engines to electric and hybrid. Sometimes the change is in how an organization is arranged, like the differences between the department store and discount retailing.
The challenge to policy makers is to let the mainline operation continue improving traditional schools, while setting up a separate space where entrepreneurship and innovation may occur.
The Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington has been analyzing the rapid growth of 'portfolio' districts across the country—those employing multiple platforms for the creation of new schools. Whether through chartering, pilot, contracted or magnet, the focus in these districts is on getting new, good schools.
Meanwhile the winds have been changing in Washington, DC. Increasingly those in the policy world are coming to understand that we cannot get the performance we need as a nation with the schools we presently have. And, importantly, they are seeing the practical necessity that follows: ‘school’ as we know it must change. President Obama and Secretary Duncan are now actively supporting this notion. More and more now, as the discouragement grows about 'turning around' existing schools, cities are moving to create different and better schools new.
*Image: Desk DIY Trade
*Image: Christensen courtesy Business Week
