At the end of Jonathan Alter's
interview with Bill Gates and examination of his work on education policy, Alter writes, "The father of disruptive software is ready for another revolution." In tech circles, "disruptive" has a very specific meaning: "A disruptive technology or disruptive innovation is a technological innovation that improves a product or service in ways that the market does not expect, typically by being lower priced or designed for a different set of consumers." But here's the problem: Gates' work on education does not follow the disruptive model. He's not creating an idiot proof model that can work at great scale for minimal cost. Rather, the founder of Microsoft is acting like, well, Apple. His work is based on extremely elegant models that are high cost and have little ability to scale. Alter writes:
Whenever he gets depressed about education, Gates says he visits one of the more than 60 KIPP schools nationwide, where the energy is palpable and the results irrefutable. He's also proud of his foundation's support for other innovative schools like the Green Dot schools in Los Angeles, Aspire Public Schools and Hidalgo Early College in California and the Noble Street Network in Chicago. At YES College Prep in Houston, 95 percent of the students are African-American or Hispanic and 80 percent are poor. But since 2000, every student has gone on to a four-year college. One hundred percent. Conventional schools with comparable demographics face dropout rates of more than 50 percent and send only a handful to four-year colleges.
And Kipp is indeed incredibly impressive. But what's not clear is that it's replicable. For instance, David Levin, one of KIPP's founders,
told The New York Times that a crucial element of the school's success is " teachers who work 15 to 16 hours a day." And we can say with some confidence that the situation is even starker than that: The KIPP schools are the most promising education labs in the country. They choose from the most talented and committed reformist educators in the country. But there are only so many teachers who will make their job into an enduring crusade. What of the schools that just get, well, normal teachers? Can KIPP endure without them?Which is not to dismiss the possibilities for reform nor the promise of KIPP. Their methods may be an improvement even if they're diluted during replication. But it's not clear if that's true. The problem for education, in part, is that this country has too many kids for each teacher to be not only experience, but also superhumanly motivated. One of the tough questions of school reform is making achievement an outcome of good
systems rather than simply extraordinary
individuals. Because you can replicate systems. But there are only so many extraordinary individuals, just as there were only so many people willing to pay thousands for a computer and only buy it in the ways and at the vendors that Steve Jobs chose. Bill Gates, of course, knows that lesson better than most.
At the end of Jonathan Alter's interview with Bill Gates and examination of his work on education policy, Alter writes, "The father of disruptive software is ready for another revolution." In tech circles, "disruptive" has a very specific meaning: "A disruptive technology or disruptive innovation is a technological innovation that improves a product or service in ways that the market does not expect, typically by being lower priced or designed for a different set of consumers." But here's the problem: Gates' work on education does not follow the disruptive model. He's not creating an idiot proof model that can work at great scale for minimal cost. Rather, the founder of Microsoft is acting like, well, Apple. His work is based on extremely elegant models that are high cost and have little ability to scale. Alter writes:
