Global Strategies: Use some for-profits for online public education

"But policymakers shouldn?t thwart innovation and penalize the students of New Jersey (substitute Oregon) by barring outside providers from helping the public educate all students to realize their fullest potential. That would be a mistake and leave out some important partners worth leveraging." - Michael Horn

I am an advocate for more online education, especially in high school and above. I think education needs much more innovation, that much more innovation is possible, and that innovation is not going to all come from teachers and administrators; so private companies and investors can be useful. Michael Horn has a Forbes blog post ?Education Debates in New Jersey Around For-Profits Miss Big Picture? put concerns over ?for-profits? in a context I share (here):

?.. This suspicion around for-profits?or outside providers in general?isn?t new. But having outside providers serving public education isn?t new either. The three major textbook companies that have dominant market share in our public schools are for-profit firms, for example.

The reason school districts don?t create their own textbooks is that they realized that there were benefits to a division of labor. Historically it?s been a better investment to buy textbooks, rather than build them from scratch, as districts could benefit from the vast economies of scale that the major textbook companies could realize and that districts?limited by geography in their scale?could not. In addition, districts benefited in some ways from these companies being able to attract capital to invest large sums of money in improving their products and services year over year for the existing educational paradigm.

Those benefits from scale will likely be even more pronounced in the world of digital learning, as digital learning platforms can scale in unprecedented ways. As new providers leverage never-before-seen volumes of data from students around the world, localities will benefit. The reason is that providers will be able to take the data to improve their services and better personalize learning for all students, especially the long tail of students that districts often struggle to serve. Furthermore, there should be massive network effects in digital learning, where the more people use a platform, the better and more useful that platform will become. We?re starting to see this play out with the non-profit?Khan Academy, for example.

In addition, for-profit firms?bring a few specific advantages?that are?worth harnessing?namely around their ability to attract capital (something one would think public educators would like given the complaints about there not being enough money in public education), their ability to attract top talent, and their incentives to scale to solve the problem that the customer pays them to solve. When it comes to digital learning specifically, these are important advantages we should leverage in the same way we benefit enormously on balance from companies like?Apple?and?Google?and we don?t each build the products and services they offer from scratch in our local communities.

Of course for-profit firms bring some downsides as well, which tend to be the flip side of their advantages??

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Source: http://daveporter.typepad.com/global_strategies/2012/10/use-some-for-profits-for-online-public-education.html

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