Education
Higher Education at a Crossroads
Higher education appears to be poised at one of those crossroads—unless you believe it’s been walking down the wrong road for years. The cost of going to college has skyrocketed. The competition from online and research alternatives and from entrepreneurial and social ventures after high school are siphoning students away. More are questioning the value of a college education and deciding that it’s just not worth it.
On his blog, Seth Godin lists five reasons he thinks higher education is about to crash and burn:
1. Most colleges are organized to give an average education to average students. We no longer live in an industrial economy that demands standardized students. In a networked, global economy, we need to teach students how to think critically, solve problems, work together, and be creative. Most colleges fail to do that for the majority of their students.
2. College has gotten expensive far faster than wages have gone up. Godin includes a chart that shows the inflation of tuition and fees compared to medical costs and the cost of living. Since 1978, tuition and fees have risen by a factor of 9.5, medical costs by a factor of 6, and the cost of living by a factor of 3.2. We hear a lot of outrage over medical costs, which suggests that outrage over the cost of college is likely not far behind.
3. The definition of “best” is under siege. According to Godin, colleges send millions of pieces of junk mail to high school students to boost the…
29Apr2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedSchool Districts Saving Money
Public schools are desperate for money. Their funding has been frozen or cut for years, when adjusted for inflation, while the demands on their resources have grown. So what would they do to save this kind of money?
- $4 million saved through energy savings
- $300,000 saved by changing the utilization of preferred healthcare providers
- $366,000 saved my changing how it manages and controls its database
- $2 million saved annually by shifting how it purchased energy
- $4 million saved over a three-year period through a cooperative interagency bidding process for employees’ healthcare services
The three school districts that realized these savings are part of an education reform project, called North Star, developed by the American Productivity & Quality Center (APQC). You can read a white paper on the project here. What the districts did to save this kind of money was to implement a North Star plan with seven components:
- Learn from existing North Star schools to spread reform faster and more cost-efficiently
- Identify processes and outcomes, gaps, and best practices in a process and outcome measurement database available at APQC—if you contribute your district’s data
- Public training on process and performance management (PPM)
- Finding, learning, sharing, and comparing data and best practices in PPM
- Virtual networking through communities of practice
- A process maturity model for assessing your PPM system
- A PPM knowledge database
The focus of the North Star project is on two areas that are prominent in the Baldrige model: process and performance management. As Jack Grayson, founder, chairman and CEO of APQC and the author of the white paper, wrote, “the bulk…
31Mar2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedWho Are a High School’s Customers?
A recent article in the Christian Science Monitor described the value of analyzing data for high school educators. (“Numbers Game Grows in Education, Healthcare,” March 4, 2010–no link available). The article uses the California Partnership for Achieving Student Success (CalPASS) as an example of how “data-driven discoveries are helping to revitalize educators’ efforts.”
CalPASS has a database of more than 355 million student records from kindergarten through college. It uses business intelligence software to analyze the data and provides reports on its findings.
One study found that students who stopped taking English courses after 10th grade required the same level of remediation in community college as students who continued to take advanced English courses through 12th grade. Teachers naturally wondered how this could be true, which caused them to examine the differences between what they were teaching and the expectations of community colleges. According to Brad Phillips, executive director of CalPASS, “educators learned that high-school courses emphasized literature, while community-college courses covered writing and grammar, and four-year colleges emphasized analysis and argumentation. As a result, officials changed high-school teaching to create better alignment.”
From a Baldrige perspective, this means that high school teachers identified community colleges and four-year colleges as their customers, identified their customers’ requirements, and changed their curricula to better meet those requirements.
That’s an excellent start but I’m not sure it will solve the bigger problem, which is preparing high school students to succeed in life. The changes high school officials made should help their students be better prepared for college, but are…
15Mar2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedWhat’s the Real Value of a College Education?
The Baldrige Criteria are all about asking the right questions to help you understand and improve how your organization operates. If your organization is a college or university, here are four fundamental questions recently posed by Fast Company:
- What do you really learn in college?
- Is what you learned in college really what’s producing the value?
- Or is it simply the mere fact of having a college degree?
- Or maybe there’s something more subtle going on—that is, people who go to college tend to be more motivated or hard-working and would have ended up succeeding whatever they did?
“Infographic of the Day: Is College Really Worth It?” by Cliff Kuang suggests answers to the these questions in an intriguing graphic. The key points are:
- Two million high school graduates enroll in college each year. One in three drops out after the first year, which wastes $9 billion.
- One out of five students can’t balance a checkbook.
- One out of two students can’t correctly analyze prose like news editorials. (How can a democracy function if our supposedly smartest young people cannot think critically?)
- The average college freshman spends over ten hours a week partying and eight hours a week studying—and more than 63 hours engaged with media and technology (games, cell phones, TV, social networks)
- 57% of students need six years or more to get their degree
Kenneth W. Monfort College of Business (MCB) received the Baldrige Award in 2004. In the Results section of its application summary, available here, it responds directly to the first two questions above:
- What do you really learn…
Lessons from High-Performing K-12 Schools
If you’ve been looking for K-12 education processes and results to benchmark, check out The Education Trust. Each year it honors high-performing schools with its Dispelling the Myth Awards, about which it writes, “These schools don’t offer simple answers or easy solutions, but several common strategies emerge from their practices. They provide a rich curriculum coupled with strong, focused instruction. They have high expectations for all students. They use data to track student progress and individual student needs. And they employ purposeful professional development to improve teachers’ skills.”
The Education Trust’s Web site offers a number of reports and presentations that use success stories to address everything from value-added data to state accountability systems to the achievement gap between white, minority, and low-income students.
For example, you can download the following PowerPoint presentation: “Raising Achievement and Closing Gaps Between Groups: Lessons from Schools and Districts on the Performance Frontier.” The report begins with positive news about progress in reading and math in elementary and middle schools. The good news doesn’t extend to high school, however, where achievement in both reading and math has been flat since 1984.
And then the news gets worse. Of 29 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries, the U.S. ranks 24th in math and in math problem-solving. We rank 21st in science out of 30 OECD countries. You can’t argue that the low achievers are holding us down because our high socio-economic students rank 23rd out of 29 OECD countries in math. You can’t even argue that immigrants are hurting our…
15Dec2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedA New Bottom Line for Schools – and the Rest of Us
Business thinking has corrupted our schools, according to Anthony Cody, a teacher and teacher-coach in Oakland, California. In an article posted December 3rd on Teacher magazine, Cody notes that business people saw a shocking flaw in our education system: “There was no bottom line. Unlike a business, schools had no balance sheet at the end of the year—no ‘metrics,’ no way to directly compare one school to another. No way to tell which school was a good return on our investment, and which was wasting the public’s money.”
To fix the flaw, a profit-minded accountability movement pushed for clear standards and tests to measure performance on those standards, and No Child Left Behind emerged.
It will not work. “As a culture and a species,” Cody writes, “we have too many problems that cannot be solved by a one-dimensional view of profit and loss.”
The truth is, focusing solely on revenue and profitability as the single bottom line for business doesn’t work, either. It’s why the balanced scorecard was born. It’s why the triple bottom line—giving environmental and social considerations equal weight to financial ones—has gained traction. And it’s a big reason we’re in the mess we’re in today with global warming and a broken healthcare system and greedy financial institutions and income that, for most Americans, hasn’t gotten much better in years. When all that matters is profit, nothing else matters.
Business thinking has corrupted education. It’s corrupted healthcare. It’s even corrupted business. New thinking is needed. “We must not trade our judgment and our…
3Dec2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedInspiration for a New Education System
“For too long, we have educated people for a world that no longer exists.”
Russell Ackoff
A leader in systems thinking, Russell Ackoff has been called the “father of operations research.” He was a Wharton professor from 1964 to 1986 who continued to lecture and speak until his death at age 90 on October 29, 2009.
One of the areas he wrote and spoke about was education from kindergarten through college. In 2008 he teamed with Daniel Greenberg to write a book, Turning Learning Right Side Up: Putting Education Back on Track. In it, they wrote, “Mass education was explicitly developed to mold naturally unruly children into compliant, obedient young people. Inspired by the Industrial Revolution, schools were, and still are, designed and operated as much like factories as possible. Incoming students are treated as raw materials to be processed into saleable products. Creativity is actively suppressed, and in most schools conformity—which is anathema to creativity—is valued instead.”
The Information Age is burdened by an antiquated education system and everybody—and all institutions—suffer as a result.
Democracy suffers from ignorant citizens who cannot think critically about the issues before them, who are easily manipulated by lies and distortions, and who weaken government by allowing self-serving special interests to dictate the agenda. That’s a failure of our education system.
Business suffers from ignorant employees who cannot solve a problem or come up with a creative idea or act independently without clear direction. Too many even need remedial help in reading and math. That’s a failure of our education…
19Nov2009 | Steve George | 1 comment | Continued
