Wednesday, October 20, 2010

Competition: Support the Losers

In this mini-series on competition, I will explore the differences between public schools and the corporate world and build my case that competition will not magically mend the ills of public education.

I was perusing the news websites the other day when I came across an article about the recent partnership of Facebook with Microsoft’s Bing to create social-network enhanced web searches.  The blogsters were predicting the downfall of Google as the social web took over the content web.  While an interesting debate, what struck me was this quote from a Google spokesman:

"We welcome competition that helps deliver useful information to users and expands user choice," said Gabriel Stricker, a Google spokesman, in an email to Computerworld. "Having great competitors is a huge benefit to us and everyone in the search space. It makes us all work harder, and at the end of the day our users benefit from that."
This caught my eye because competition has been a big theme in recent public education reform efforts that seek to use the power of competition to bring positive development and improvement to schools, like it supposedly has in corporate America.  

OK, this article also caught my attention because I happen to know the spokesman and  I suspect, in reality, Google engineers are just going to let this go as a passing fad (though I have no inside info on this one).  Nonetheless, the statement is a great example of how corporate America views competition, when they are not too busy suing each other over it.

If you read this blog, you know that public education reform is being pushed by the billionaire pseudo-reformers like Bill Gates (see, my tech example wasn’t so far off topic after all!) and the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, who embody the corporate model.  As such, these foundations and their money are largely driven by competition.

Just this week, the Broad Foundation awarded its $1 million prize for scholarships, The Broad Prize for Urban Education, to an Atlanta, Georgia district that had closed achievement gaps and shown more improvement in its test scores than its competitors. 

The successful are rewarded, and those who do not measure up are ignored and left to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.  In the marketplace, these less competitive institutions may just fold.  In education, we are talking about schools and the populations they serve. 

We have corporations that are too big to fail, and yet these pseudo-reformers seem to want public schools to fail to weed out the weak links.  Where will the kids go?

While Billy G. and Eli B. wave their invisible hands with invisible wands of competitive fix-all, just think about all the Joe-the-Plumbers out there who are struggling to make ends meet.  The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer.  That is the ultimate end-game of corporate America.

Do we want that for public education?  Do we want to create a system of haves and have-nots?  Public schools are too important to fail.  Current reform efforts are creating a class of have-nots within the educational system that is resulting in kids being left behind.

Stand up for the losers, reclaim public education!

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