America’s educational system is falling behind. We must find innovative
leaders with a vision who can prepare children for the future they
deserve.
In the summer of 1918, as tuberculosis, bubonic plague and a flu
pandemic threatened America’s newly crowded cities, the chemist Charles
Holmes Herty took a walk through New York City with his colleague J.R.
Bailey. Herty posed a question: Suppose Bailey discovered an
exceptionally powerful medicine. What institution would allow him to
take his breakthrough from lab experiment to widespread cure?
Bailey replied, „I don’t know.“
That alarming answer moved Herty to propose a visionary solution — an
institution that would encourage research and development throughout
the country. It would find its value, Herty said, „in the stimulus
which it gives“ to research, thought and discovery by practitioners in
the field.
Nearly a century later, that vision stands as the National Institutes
of Health. Its record, from deciphering and mapping the human genome to
finding the source of AIDS, leaves no doubt about the NIH’s ability to
stimulate innovation.
Today, the shame of our cities isn’t bubonic plague; it’s ignorance. In
our urban areas, only one child in five is proficient in reading. On
international tests, we rank behind the Czech Republic and Latvia; our
high school graduation rate barely makes the top 20 worldwide. As
columnist David Brooks has noted, educational progress has been so slow
that „America’s lead over its economic rivals has been entirely
forfeited.“ Under-education may not end lives the way infectious
diseases do, but it just as surely wastes them. For all the hard work
of our good teachers, our system is failing to keep pace with the
demands of a new century.
As our next president confronts this reality, he should look to Herty’s
inspiration. We need a new, results-driven mind-set at the Department
of Education that will drive pure educational innovation and „scale up“
proven experiments and novel ideas that work. The federal government
stands in a unique position to meet these needs.
The evidence for making a national commitment to innovation in
educationis compelling. Today, many of the most promising solutions are
emerging from entrepreneurial organizations that embrace freedom and
accountability. Indeed, such social entrepreneurs represent a growing
force. They have started nimble, typically nonprofit organizations that
work in partnership with creative mayors and school superintendents.
Entrepreneurial charter schools such as KIPP, Uncommon Schools, Aspire,
the Inner-City Education Foundation, the Alliance for College-Ready
Public Schools and Green Dot demonstrate what a single-minded focus on
excellence can achieve with low-income students. These public schools,
open to all students, are dedicated to the idea that college success
and wide career choices must be a reality regardless of the ZIP Code of
a child’s birth. And they are proving what’s possible, sending students
from the poorest neighborhoods to college at rates typical of far more
affluent communities.
Other innovators also have taken a fresh look at the crucial question
of how to attract, prepare and keep teachers and leaders in the
toughest schools. Teach For America, for example, flips the
conventional wisdom on teacher recruiting, making inner-city classrooms
an object of hot competition for the nation’s top college graduates.
Likewise, New Leaders for New Schools has brought hundreds of new
principals to the inner city. Organizations like these demonstrate how
innovators can support improvement in our existing school systems — an
essential part of large-scale progress.
To call these solutions a drop in the bucket, as some critics do, is to
miss the point. The federal government, through the NIH (and other
programs such as the National Science Foundation, the Small Business
Administration and the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency), has
proved that it can multiply innovations in many fields and spread the
most successful ones. Yet, historically, the federal government has
constrained its investment in education entrepreneurship to
comparatively small, isolated programs, limited efforts in a
bureaucracy that resists change. To fix this, there are key steps the
next president should take.
The first is to expand innovation incentives and free them from the
earmarks and conditions that have blunted past initiatives. Too many
innovators spend too much time and energy raising money to stay afloat
and expand. Adequate incentives, coupled with rigorous accountability,
would remedy this. We should include two complementary programs, a
„Grow What Works“ fund and a fund to provide research and development
money for promising early stage initiatives. Today, the federal
government invests less than $1 billion annually in education
innovation — a paltry 0.2% of our $500 billion total national spending
on education. Compare that to the $28 billion we spend on biomedical
innovation, a full 1% of our $2.6 trillion on healthcare.
Beyond new funding, the federal government must use its influence over
state and local policy to sweep away regulations that hamper innovative
thinking, such as caps on the number of public charter schools allowed
and excessive restrictions on how teachers are trained and
credentialed. In addition, it can use the power of the purse to direct
competitive funds to states that embrace urgent innovation. States
control 70% of public education funding; a push for state support of
entrepreneurial education efforts could have a huge effect.
Finally, two efforts already underway must get a strong push from the
next administration. One is the move toward a common set of standards
for what students should be expected to know and be able to do: Every
American child deserves to be educated to the same high standard, and
innovators everywhere require a common target. Then, to make shared
standards work, a national data infrastructure must be built to assess
educational progress.
The enormously promising educational innovations sprouting across the
country, from South L.A. to Newark, N.J., to New Orleans, cannot be
allowed to remain exceptions — pleasant human-interest stories about
amazing but tiny programs. At a time of slipping national
competitiveness, as whole communities are denied a chance at America’s
opportunities, results-driven, urgent change must be an ethos that
pervades national education policy.
The starting point will be the choice of the next secretary of
Education. He or she must be an entrepreneurial thinker, not
necessarily someone who’s run a business but someone who grasps the
importance of combining the freedom to innovate with close attention to
results, and will welcome the efforts of a new generation of educators.
The American national spirit embraces improvement, pragmatism and
merit; we figure out what works, and we build on it. It’s the spirit
that moved Charles Herty to argue for an institute to stimulate
breakthroughs in American health. If we are to maintain our standing in
the world, and do right by our people, our next president must spark
our education system with the same spirit of invention.
Cory Booker is the mayor of Newark, N.J. John Doerr is a partner at the
venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Ted Mitchell is
chief executive of NewSchools Venture Fund and president of the
California Board of Education.
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