Crash Course: A Radical Plan for Improving Public Education

This is a book on education reform by Chris Whittle, who is the founder and CEO of Edison Schools, the nation's largest Education Management Organization ("EMO"). The book is not primarily about Edison. Nor is this a book about what is wrong with American public schools. No, this is that highly unusual book which, rather than simply bitching and moaning about how bad the schools are, actually sets forth a practical program to change the schools. Whittle does not want to reform our schools. He wants to revolutionize them. His vision is based on a unique premise. What is wrong with our schools, Whittle believes, is that they are the last great cottage industry. While public education is collectively a huge industry, it is very fragmented. It is controlled by thousands of school districts. No one does any research and development. No one does any systematic examination of how schools are run and how they could be made better. Whittle compares public education to other enterprises, such as the U.S. military, Federal Express and the medical health industry. The point of the comparison is that these industries have spent vast sums on becoming hyper-organized and systematically innovative. Whittle wants something similar in the schools. He wants regular spending on a large research and development budget to develop new and better ways to teach. He wants to bring the economics of scale to the industry. The way that he proposes to do this is via organizations such as his, Edison. His vision of the educational future is one in which there are five or six large EMOs which compete with each other. As he sees it, the role of the local school boards and superintendents will be to write contracts with the EMOs and to monitor their performance. He sees the EMOs themselves as becoming huge, multi-national organizations. He wants the federal government to jump-start the process with grants, such as it gives to the defense industry to develop new fighter planes. As part of the whole thing, he wants far more teacher training, elite academies to train principals and a huge raise in pay for both teachers and principals. (He also wants fewer teachers, because he wants kids to learn more on their own.) This is certainly an original vision. Whittle is NOT saying the same thing as every one else. Whatever else one might say, you have to acknowledge that Whittle is a sincere idealist, who is out there in the real world trying hard to fix education. In the end, he might found a new industry, like Henry Ford, or he might end up as a Don Quixote, but the guy certainly thinks big and wants the best for our kids. Here is my problem with his analysis. Everything that he says flows logically from the premise that what is wrong with education is that it is decentralized and that education would benefit tremendously from R & D spending, technology and innovation. He might be right about all of this. On the other hand, he might be wrong. On the face

I caught this lead after watching former Channel One CEO, Chris Whittle, speak on The Charlie Rose Show...Damn, Charlie's show is incredible...With that said, what intrigued me was Whittle's demands for innovation in...gasp!...American Public Education. Regardless of what your views are upon public education, we are currently funding a system that hasn't changed in over 100 years. In order to address change, Whittle examines a wide array of topics from classroom design, teaching requirements, budgets, class-size, technology, to creating an "ownership" culture for students. Understandably so, we have a considerable amount of fear surrounding change in the public education sector. However, Whittle brings successful examples such as utilizing private partnerships similar to the funding sources that have fueled the Department of Defense and NASA. We should explore these Edison School ideas of change not only to improve our public education of today, but also to how to propel our public education into the future. Let's take a "Stand and Deliver." approach in our communities. Find this read in order to generate ideas of how to prepare and create our students for the world today...not for the communities of thiry years ago

This book is so rich in ideas that it is hard to choose a single centerpiece, but I try. His mantra for the learning process is to empower the student. Emphasize unsupervised, independent learning. Maximize the use of technology. Have students take responsibility for their own education, and for teaching each other, especially younger students. Give students responsibility for the work of the school itself, not just cleaning up, though that's a great start, but also for record keeping and even helping with grading. In a sentence (my own), shift the role of the student from passive to active; from "The teacher teaches" to "The student learns." Today's dominant model is variously known as the "Dixie Cup" or the "Beer Stein" model. The kid opens his mind and the teacher pours in knowledge. A cup at a time. The predictable result is that kids wind up with a smattering of facts in place of what they need, a structure of knowledge. Whittle laments that public education has no R & D facility. The truth is even sadder. There is. The 24,000 member American Education Research Association is the creature of the establishment: Schools of Education, state agencies, foundations, school boards and unions, with an overlay of Federal policy. Its primary agenda seems to be social justice: the questions of equity, equality and adequacy in funding, of "closing the gap" between minority and white/Asian performance, and being the champion of society's victims: the bullied, the gay, the transgendered, the people of color and the poor. As Whittle suggests, there is not much emphasis on improving the nuts and bolts processes involved in running a school establishment. The educational statistics community often finds itself at odds with educational researchers, who tend to hold tenaciously to pet theories whether or not they hold up to rigorous statistical analysis. In addition there are many legitimate obstacles to research. It takes a large sample size to achieve statistically significant results. Institutional Review Boards, overinterpreting federal policy make it devilishly hard for universities to do human subjects research, like using school children. The timeframes in which improvements manifest themselves may be years and even decades. The upshot is that notions such as "whole language" and "everyday math" can enter the mainstream on the basis of strong advocacy more than extensive research. An EMO, funding its own research, would be at a tremendous advantage. They could more thoroughly plan their research and control most of the variable parameters. Perhaps most important, driven by the bottom line more than academic ego, they would be more likely to reject schemes that don't work. Whittle puts undue faith in the charter school model. While it is the model he knows best, it is not the only model available, or necessarily the best. Much of what he proposes would work well with private schools and home schools. Private schools could c

In Crash Course, Chris Whittle asks readers to join him on a journey of imagination that leads to fundamental change in how we, as a nation and as individuals, think and act in the matter of any society's Prime Directive: The education of the next generation. The central thesis becomes clear in the first 42 pages: The reason educational results have flatlined is because the fundamental model underlying all the effort has not meaningfully changed for centuries. Facts and comparisons pass by rapidly here. That education expenditures are on par with national defense helps to define both the magnitude and a framework for developing comparisons that is used effectively throughout the book. To summarize by way of an analogy (not one of the many used in the book), throwing more money at medieval medicine is not what brought us to modern medicine. Rather, it was the realization that folklore needed to yield to better, objectively determined disease models, which in turn lead to abandoning blood-letting for what has turned out to be much better invasive and non-invasive treatments. Chris imagines that society can be brought to a new understanding of how to go about the business of education. Conceptually, he asks us to buy into the following core concepts: The "do everything" school district model must advance to a more sophisticated, core competency and responsibility sharing/delegation model, much like has been the case in healthcare, defense, and other critical segments of government/private sector collaboration. This, in tern, will foster increased accountability and efficiency-both being required to win public trust and rebalance expenditure models. We can't continue to increase spending on education 5% annually forever and receive less than 1% improvement for the investment-the educational equivalent of the business adage "we'll loose a little on every sale, but make it up in volume". Businesses doing this soon cease to exist, and the author argues, so should schools and school districts practicing the same folly. We must recognize that education requires a "Research and Development" component that is substantial and sustained, with the emphasis on the "D". The current institutional and funding models prevent any meaningful R & D at either the Federal or State/Local levels, and what does occur lacks operational practicality. The results, Chris argues, are similar to where Ford would be if its R & D budget had been suspended in the 1920's following the early success with the Model T. A commitment to R & D also strongly favors larger institutional size-scale, Chris reminds us, is a good thing. Finally, we must develop new models or "School Designs" and "Systems" as the author labels them that incorporate the best discoveries and process improvements coming out of R & D. In doing so, we must be prepared to let objectivity, not our personal experience from our own education, determine what works and what doesn't work.