Why empowr (part 10) By Johnny Cash on February 28, 2017 | |
Why empowr (part 10) Hello everyone, Together, we've been reading the Why empowr book, written by one of the empowr founders. If you're interested in why empowr was created, or want to know where it's headed, this is a good way to find out. Just joining the conversation? You can read the earlier parts here:
Part 1: Here
Part 2: Here
Part 3: Here
Part 4: Here
Part 5: Here
Part 6: Here
Part 7: Here
Part 8: Here
Part 9: Here As always, many thanks for your thoughtful comments that you left in the earlier parts; we're all reading your comments very carefully (and deleting spam and unrelated comments).
Education is broken
Many first-world educational systems are now in decline. In some countries, schools are finding it nearly impossible to recruit quality teachers, with many teachers coming from the bottom 30% of college graduates. This leads to a nasty cycle, where bad teachers fail to teach students effectively, and those weak students then go on to be bad teachers, themselves, leading to a “dumbification” of entire generations.
Combine this dumbification cycle with a lack of educational transparency which makes it very difficult for students to predict the value of potential degrees, and you begin to see why modern educational systems are in jeopardy. It was my senior year of college, and I was absolutely miserable. As I sat in class, listening to my professor drone on in a thickly-accented monotone about a programming language that had been obsolete since before I even went to high school, I slowly began to zone out and think back to why I’d come to college in the first place… After high school, I’d gone straight to the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) to pursue my bachelor’s degree in computer science. Being the giant geek that I was, I was very excited about the prospect of a higher education that taught me even more about computer science. I had thought that my college courses were not only going to teach me new, cutting-edge technical skills but that they were also going to allow me to work with professors who were as passionate about innovation and technology as I was. What I found, instead, were college courses that were years behind the times, and professors who were more concerned with their research projects than with teaching and mentoring the next generation of tech entrepreneurs. Adding to my frustration was the fact that nobody I spoke with, either on the faculty or in university administration, seemed to be able to explain to me what the hell was going on. No matter how many times I asked, I couldn’t get a straight answer as to why the courses were so outdated or how a professor made it through the interview and selection process without even being able to speak basic, understandable English. The complete lack of accountability and the unwillingness of anyone within the system to take responsibility for addressing obvious, basic problems with the school were astounding… Sitting there in class, my mind snapped back to the present. The professor was still tonelessly reciting her lecture while seemingly oblivious to the fact that she had lost the entire class long ago. And then, I suddenly made my final decision. I would not waste another minute of my time or another dollar of my money on classes and professors that had no value to me. I stood up, walked out of class, and dropped out of college. I went on to start my first business the very next day… *** To this day, many years after I first went to college, there is still very little accountability for professors; it continues to be nearly impossible to fire a tenured professor (or teacher). This same lack of accountability applies to institutions. Many of them don’t even bother to keep track of how well their graduates do after leaving school or whether their curriculums even come close to preparing graduates for the challenges of 21st century business. Schools are in Crisis My college story is not unlike what many other U.S. and international college students go through every day. In fact, many young people seeking higher education have it far worse than I did from a number of perspectives.
Here in the U.S., things have gotten particularly bad for college students. While there has only been some slow, incremental progress in updating curriculums to keep pace with the needs of our post-industrial economy, tuition hikes since I attended college have been neither slow nor incremental. In fact, tuition and college-associated fees in the United States have skyrocketed an astounding 1,120% since we started keeping records back in 1978. No, I didn’t accidentally let an extra 1 slip by. That really says one thousand, one hundred and twenty percent. This mind blowing spike in tuition means that, this year, the average four-year-college graduate here in the States will leave school almost $30,000 in debt. So what is this crushing mountain of debt buying U.S. college students? Well, between the years 2000 and 2007, wages for people with college degrees between the ages of twenty-five and fifty-four dropped 8.5% (and that was before the Great Recession). New graduates with Bachelor of Arts degrees are dealing with 8.5% unemployment and a depressing 16.8% underemployment. This means that nearly one out of every ten recent B.A. grads can’t find a job at all, and, for those who do, there’s nearly a one-in-five chance they’ll be stuck in part-time jobs, jobs that have nothing to do with their degree, or jobs that simply don’t pay them enough to afford their student debt. Additionally, despite burying their students in debt, U.S. colleges are still having trouble producing enough Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math graduates to meet the needs of our economy. These S.T.E.M. grads are critical to the global competitiveness of industrialized countries, and U.S. companies import tens of thousands of them from overseas each year. Combine our college woes with the persistently mediocre global ranking of U.S. students between the ages of six and fifteen (despite the fact that only four countries spend more per student in this age group), and one begins to understand why so many Americans are calling for serious education reforms. The U.S. isn’t the only country dealing with educational crises, either. Even Sweden and the United Kingdom, countries that for years were praised for the quality of their educational systems, have seen their students become far less globally competitive. The Solution
empowr believes that the solution to education’s woes can be found when we allow ourselves to view and treat education as a product that, like any other product, will improve dramatically if it’s allowed to benefit from the same free-market dynamics that make other products better.
In other words, we need to make it so the bad teachers can be easily fired. Second, the best teachers need to earn as much money—or more—than most of their best counterparts in industry, making teaching a much more attractive occupation for the best and brightest. Third, teachers’ performances needs to be measured and made transparent to everyone, especially the product’s customers (the students and their parents). And finally, along with access to teacher performance information, students need to have the power to choose their teachers, just the same way that we all can choose which car we drive, which mobile phone we buy and which bank we use. We all saw what happened to the car, telephone, and banking industries—really all industries—in communist countries where consumers had little to no choice: a total disaster. And we also witnessed how those same industries developed in the West, under competitive and free market economics: an explosion of innovation, quality, selection, and value. In exactly the same manner, education needs to be freed from the centralized control of governments and unions. But how do you truly measure a teacher’s performance, in order to make the above approach a reality? And how do you free educational systems so as to introduce free-market dynamics? Fortunately, these are problems that empowr has been working on for many years now, and we’ll discuss our solutions in the chapter titled “empowr’s Approach to Education.” But before we go there, let’s take a look at another phenomenon that’s quietly having an incredible impact on our lives. To understand what it is, you just need to walk into any classroom today, and you’ll notice many students paying far more attention to their smartphone apps than to their teacher. This disturbing phenomenon might actually be the perfect illustration of how education is in decline, while something completely different is taking over our attention and lives. I’m talking about Network Technology. (more) ►
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