Educating the Next Generation of Entrepreneurs

Submitted by Matt September 01, 2009

4.6 (5)

We must ensure America's education system empowers entrepreneurship in order to retain our nation's competitive edge in the global economy. The entrepreneur's education, like all true innovators, is an eclectic and diverse one. It involves instilling personal values of personal responsibility, hard work, and perseverance. It also involves developing a creative mind, and an interdisciplinary approach. Our current public school system has extreme difficulty filling this need. In order to produce the leaders of the 21st century, we need competition and choice in education. We should empower school choice, letting individualized approaches flourish and quality institutions succeed.

Toward that end, here are three reforms we recommend to help America's education system adapt:

1. Teacher freedom and autonomy

Teachers' unions and education bureaucrats have thrust a one-size-fits-all approach on our public education system. Unions tend to support policies which treat all teachers alike, such as promoting based off of seniority and time served instead of performance or results. The result of this one-size-fits-all system is that good teachers are lumped in with the bad ones, and it becomes nearly impossible to effectively evaluate teacher performance. It is an outrage that a great teacher and an awful teacher will make the same amount of money, and no one is doing anything about it.

Teachers, like all entrepreneurs, should be paid based on performance and merit. It is not difficult to take into account the unique challenges of an individual teachers' situation (i.e. dealing with troubled children) in an evaluation. Moreover, quality teachers have nothing to fear from an honest accounting of their performance.

2. Parent choice

By law, students are assigned a public school district based on their geographical location. This works okay when the location is upper-middle class with a quality public school, but it is disastrous in urban areas where quality is markedly diminished. It is exceptionally difficult for parents - especially those of lesser means - to send one's child to a different public school if they wanted.

Why are we forcing our children to remain in substandard institutions? Why are we fostering an educational monopoly? Rather, we should use public resources to empower freedom of choice, allowing parents to send their child to the public or private school of their choice. School vouchers can help by providing lower-income families with the means necessary to attend the schools that wealthier children have traditionally chosen.

By empowering freedom of choice, we can help level the educational playing field across America. By doing so, we can increase quality and make sure that our children are prepared to become the next generation of entrepreneurs.

3. More room for education entrepreneurs

The Harlem Children's Zone is a shining example of what entrepreneurial innovation can do for America's children. The HCZ, a semi-private institute in New York’s most infamous ghetto, was founded by Geoff Canada, who realized that a traditional public school would be insufficient to achieve the kind of changes necessary to improve the lives of at-risk children. The HCZ combines health, education and social services and delivers them from kindergarten through college in a variety of innovative programs. Currently, 88% of children under 18 in the HCZ’s 24-block core neighborhood are already served by at least one program. 70% of the Harlem Children Zone’s funding is private, and the private support has allowed a level of experimentation in programs that no public school can match. Its new charter school, The Promise Academy, is housed in a $42 million building, with a teacher-student ratio of 1 to 6, state-of-the-art science labs, a first-class gym and a restaurant-quality cafeteria serving only healthy food.

The HCZ is the darling of the national media and has been cited favorably several times by the President. Unfortunately, the opportunity for new education entrepreneurs like Mr. Canada is still heavily restricted by policies. All schools, public and private, are subject to many wnloadFile.do?id=295">legal restrictions on their ability to expand, innovate, and compete with existing schools. Additional state-based rules like caps on the number of charter schools that can exist at any one time further restrict entry and stifle innovation.

There's a reason Geoff Canada didn't start a public school. To solve our education crisis, we need the creative energies of entrepreneurs. To empower this progress, our first priority is to remove the red tape which stands in their way.

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