What Schools Can Learn from Corporations

2009-07-05T09:26:00.000-07:00

First, let's be clear: it is possible to have a conversation about what goes on in schools without taking positions for or against, say, the ascendance of standardized testing or the rise of charter schools. A Swiss-like neutrality is a good thing, since it helps adults stay focused on students if they refrain from butting heads with each other.

Standarized tests exist because society is at a loss to find a better mechanism for accountability. How much testing is "enough" or "too much" is something about which reasonable people can disagree without getting snippy. Likewise, charter schools exists because society wants to see new educational models tested. "School reform" does not exist in a vacuum; instead, it is an experiment-based attempt to "do better."

We need to. Most students, even those graduating from high school, can't find on a global map the countries where our armed forces are fighting. I've taught 6th Graders who could not -- not individuals, but virtually the entire class -- tell you that 1-1/2 equals 3/2, and 8th Graders who could not identify the object in the sentence He sold a comic book to his friend. When a student allegedly ready for college cannot tell you the significance of Pearl Harbor, what a hard drive is, or whether ready is an adverb or an adjective, we -- the society depending on them to communicate and work effectively -- have a problem.

These students will, all too soon, be applying for jobs in a workplace battered by recession, in which the average work week has (by some accounts) sunk to 33 hours as companies under-employ millions. So many employees are limited to under 30 (or even under 20) hours to skirt benefits, or are replaced by "temps," that stitching together a fulltime income is getting trickier.

Ensuring access to future workplace success -- or stacking the odds against it by under-educating our youth -- is the big motivating factor here. In fact, "motivation" is the name of the game. So many students come to school unmotivated -- Why do I need to know this stuff? -- that it creates downward peer pressure. In the down-the-rabbit-hole world of our complex media culture, knowing the runner-up on American Idol matters much more than knowing how to solve a quadratic equation, explain what proteins or antibodies are, or grasp how a Congressional bill becomes a law. But one thing is for sure: they will never be paid to know who the American Idol runner-up was.

How individual school districts "create space" for new initiatives may always be controversial, but we need to do something differently. Perhaps there are valuable lessons to be learned from our colleagues in the for-profit world. One thing that for-profit organizations do well is to motivate people. It is debatable how "healthy" that is in specific instances, wherein consumers are motivated to buy "this" or "that" whether or not they genuinely need it. But it is certainly a robust thing, this capacity to motivate people to want what you are offering -- which is the teacher's bottom-line challenge in the classroom.

How do corporations do it? Many ways, but two come quickly to mind.

First, they make the content of their messaging as compelling, tactile, and vivid as possible. They bring out the cameras and the lush landscapes and the slick editing techniques, and they deliver communications products that elicit strong, positive responses. In short, they make their content speak directly to the viewer. They make the viewer want to know more. They embed an impression on which they can build over time, presenting new imagery and descriptive language to reinforce the initial message.

Second, they sustain a vibrant community of third-party specialists to perform the research, production, and assessment of such messaging. The ad agency tasked with a car commercial contracts someone who, quite literally, does nothing but car commercials -- someone who knows every nuance of shooting cars on salt flats and in bright sun, of tracking cars through sharp turns and controlled skids, and of zooming in on every sumptuous detail of the leather trim or the high-tech gearbox.

Can geometry ever be as flashy as a BMW commercial? No. But it can be much more engaging than the way most geometry is taught in American schools -- out of a textbook, with a lot of pen-and-paper "x" and "y" coordinate graphing. Presented in isolation and without any tie-ins to "the bigger picture," such activities appear to the student to have no connection to his/her life. Never mind that he/she lives in a city -- the ultimate triumph of geometry, whereby topography is adapted to human habitation with the aid of thousands of x,y coordinates... You cannot blame the student: no one ever told him/her that geometry is woven into the very fabric of daily life, or that this "x,y" stuff leads past numbers and maps to the GPS in his/her car, to the ability to navigate in 2 and even 3 dimensions, to the ability to fly a jet or calculate an arrival time or pilot a space shuttle...

Exciting stuff. Which is what educational content needs to be, more and more: fun, colorful, inviting, engaging.

Education is not, at its core, a for-profit proposition. However, there is something to be said for tapping into basic human psychology in ways pioneered by for-profit organizations. The notion that schools, like libraries and other "public trust" intitutions, must eschew such lessons to maintain some kind of purity of purpose is not productive.... There are lessons to be learned. You cannot open a mind until you at least get its attention. XXX