The rise of education entrepreneurship is one of the most promising developments in education in the past 25 years. But education policy should be reformed to allow for even more entrepreneurship, or the gains of the last quarter-century could be at risk. This much was made clear Wednesday at the American Enterprise Institute, which hosted a research conference on the state of entrepreneurship in K-12 education.
“So much of what’s exciting in education today is the work of entrepreneurs,” Rick Hess, an education scholar at AEI, said Tuesday. “We forget that some of the stuff we take for granted was brand new less than 25 years ago.” Hess, who was a high school teacher at the time, said that in 1990 there were no public charter schools, no iPhones or iPads for the classroom, and computers for the classroom cost $3,000 each.
Over the last 10 years alone, there have been significant improvements in the tools available to students. There’s online tutoring and resources, such as Khan Academy, and massive open online courses, or MOOCs. There are new models for hiring teachers and other school employees. Even educators’ goals and expectations have changed (for the better and for the worse), with the rapid adoption of Common Core standards.
But government is standing in the way of further innovations by making new rules that govern the educational process. For example, through waivers to No Child Left Behind, Obama’s Department of Education has pressured states into adopting the prescriptive Common Core standards. State and local governments pile on with their own rules for curriculum, procurement and more.
Instead, government could foster educational entrepreneurship by setting a final goal for education and giving educators the freedom to reach that goal with whatever methods they prefer.
“If [education] funding is channeled through rules, no innovation is possible,” said Dmitri Melhorn, a partner at venture investment firm Vidinovo. “If it’s channeled through results, innovation becomes possible.”
Fixing the problem isn’t simple, since each level of government has its own complicated, growing web of education regulations. Federal regulations on education services grew by almost 40 percent from 1997 to 2012, according to the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.
The oxymoronic nature of government’s approach to education was pointed out by Ashley Jochim, a research analyst at the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington. “[Governments] say, ‘We want you to be innovative. Here are some rules,'” Jochim said.
John Bailey, executive director of Digital Learning Now, argued that regulations should have expiration dates. This would place the burden of proof on those who want to continue the regulation and take it off those who want it repealed.
Bailey also said schools should be funded based on their results rather than their enrollment. “We fund schools, we don’t fund kids,” Bailey said, lamenting the education status quo. Bailey said the current funding system has “misaligned incentives,” implying that schools should be paid by how many students they graduate, rather than how many students they enroll.
