Money For Nothin…

I receive thousands of advertisements every year, promising to have the solution to everything that ails our traditional public school system.

Like this one:

“Hello Scott,

We’ve leveraged the process of innovation in a stimulating, multi-disciplinary course that promotes the real-world skills of creativity, problem-solving, and entrepreneurship.

The course engages students at all levels for an entire semester following an industry-proven 9-step method of inventing. Working in groups, students come up with their own ideas and then create a completely new product or improve an existing product, taking their ideas from concept to a working model, culminating in a final business pitch.

Schedule a demo by April 14^th for the 2023-24 school year and receive an annual site license for $5,000. It’s 33% off of our current license fee. What’s more, you can pay in July if you need to make this part of the 23/24 budget.”

This one happened to come from a group calling themselves Inventionland Education.

Improving our traditional school system is a big business. Literally billions of dollars are spent annually trying to improve reading, writing, and math scores across our country.

And, my experience tells me that the suckier the school, the more money available to buy programs and services to hopefully improve that sucky school.

When I was a region superintendent, one of my high schools moved out of a low-performing category, as measured by the state, to acceptable performance. I remember distinctly what that high school principal said to me once he found out his campus was no longer “in need of improvement.” He said, “Scott, I just figured out I’m going to lose $1 million annually because we are no longer a “sucky school.”

I walked away from his office that day scratching my head.

Has the traditional school system become addicted to mediocrity? Has our nation’s school’s mediocre performance produced an army of reading specialists, assessment software experts, and all other sorts of school-improvement promisers that can’t and won’t go away?

When I was a high school principal, the district called all of us into a central office meeting room to meet a host of “school improvement” specialists. The idea was for each high school to partner with one of the providers with the overall goal being improved test scores by the end of the school year. I balked and told the district that I would pass “hiring” a school improvement partner. Instead, I planned to invest in the teachers already on our campus by introducing and building a professional learning community. The professional learning community’s intent would be to use the human resource already employed to improve our kids’ reading, writing, and problem-solving skills.

You see, what I knew was that about 90% of my school’s budget was already spent on teachers, para-professionals, and the like. The bottom line was that I didn’t have enough money in my budget to do both – improve my teachers and hire a “school improvement” partner.

I think I was the only principal that passed on a partnership with a school improvement provider. All the rest of my colleagues were good soldiers and signed up for external assistance.

At the end of the year, most of my colleagues’ schools continued to struggle, mainly because they basically gave their schools over to groups like Inventionland Education. My school, on the other hand, demonstrated substantial improvement in reading, writing, and problem-solving skills because we invested in our most valuable human resource – our teachers and our students.

Part of the reason why our traditional school system is struggling these days is because we’ve allowed the system to coopt itself by buying services from outside vendors who might be more interested in their profit margin than the bottom line of learning.

Could it be that, in our capitalistic, nationalistic interest to make money, our public school system has become weaker and weaker as we continue to buy program after program designed to “fix it”?

Til tomorrow. SVB