Educational Entrepreneurship: Why Is It Important, and How Can We Make It Work?

• In Event: Entrepreneurship in Education: An Academic Debate

Abstract

Educational entrepreneurship, ignored for so long, is now gaining our attention for three reasons: One has to do with new challenges, and the others with new opportunities.
First, American schools today confront challenges that our education system was not designed--and may not be equipped--to handle. Arrangements that may have worked adequately fifty years ago no longer suffice. Developed haphazardly over the course of two centuries, our status quo is not equal to the requirements of contemporary citizenship, employment, or higher education.
Decades of earnest efforts to reform public schools have shown remarkably little ability to alter routines or results substantively. Tides of reform have rolled out and in and out again, with little attention paid to implementing new proposals or ensuring that schools and school systems are serious about them. Do entrepreneurial efforts threaten to be merely more of the same?
The short answer is no. The problem has never been innovation per se, but a failure to root innovation in coherent, focused organizations. In public bureaucracies like America's school districts--which are led by officials who lack the tools to compel cooperation and where keeping one's head down is the safest professional approach--implementation tends to be half-baked.
Second, in the United States today, it is estimated that more than a thousand new business ventures are born every hour of every working day. This dynamism is a familiar feature of American life but not of school reform--and that is an enormous problem. In the 1960s, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that college graduates could expect to hold five jobs in the course of their lives. College graduates today can expect to hold four jobs by the age of thirty. Promising college graduates are far less willing to patiently queue up in the seniority-driven bureaucracies of the educational establishment.
Advances in technology and communications have created new possibilities for autonomy, decentralization, and customization. In 1991, when the first charter school law was adopted, the Internet as most of us know it did not exist. By 2004, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that 61 percent of households had Internet access. In 1993, just 23 percent of households owned a computer. By 2004, two-thirds did. The iPod did not exist in 2000; by 2007, more than 100 million had been sold worldwide. This technological revolution has created previously unimaginable communication and instructional opportunities.
In education, changes in policy, including charter schooling and the relaxation of teacher licensure restrictions, have made schooling more hospitable for entrepreneurs. As of 2003, more than 20 percent of public school districts had students enrolled in online courses offered by their schools. By 2005, at least one virtual school was operating in almost every state.
Finally, the advent of educational accountability has made entrepreneurship newly feasible. For nontraditional schooling or services to prove practicable, the providers must be held responsible for the results of their handiwork. Prior to the spread of sophisticated testing and benchmarking systems, the necessary tools simply did not exist.

Author

• Frederick M. Hess, American Enterprise Institute