THE FUTURE OF K-12 EDUCATION

Article by Herb Rubenstein
CEO, Herb Rubenstein Consulting

Introduction

The K-12 world is in turmoil. One major result of the “No child left behind” legislation is that public schools will be left behind when they can not meet the mandates of the legislation with the resources they have. And the recent research and scholarly literature about K-12 education is also not encouraging. When new studies on K-12 education from Stanford University come out with the title: Betraying the College Dream: How Disconnected K-12 and Postsecondary Education Systems Undermine Student Aspirations http://www.stanford.edu/group/bridgeproject/betrayingthecollegedream.pdf and major journals like Human Relations published an article from a Professor of Community Planning who has spent the last 7 years working with a community organization trying to improve neighborhood schools, for the Baltimore Public School system showing that public schools are: paranoid/schizophrenic organizations that are shaped by “obsessive-compulsiveness”- one does not need to be a futurist to know that big changes are coming to K-12 education and they won’t come easy. (See Why School Systems Resist Reform: A Psychoanalytic Perspective, Human Relations, Vol. 55(2), 173-198, 2002.

Major Threats to the Public K-12 System

The threats to the Public K-12 System are obvious. They include:

1. Taxpayer dissatisfaction
2. Unpopularity of teachers’ unions
3. Charter Schools
4. Vouchers
5. Private Schools
6. Home-Schooled children increasing
7. Politicization of School Boards
8. New Standards of Accountability
9. More teachers failing qualification exams
10. Increasing violence in schools
11. Inability of schools to raise educational outcomes
12. Inability of schools to prepare youth for college or work
13. Budget cuts and lack of resources available at the State and local levels
14. Technological advances that create alternative systems of providing education
15. Inability of schools to meet the diverse needs of a changing population

A NEW PARADIGM – AN OLD PERSPECTIVE

When one looks at the education production function little has changed over the past 100 years in public school K-12 education. The supply chain is still teachers hired by the schools. Even though the schools teach many different subjects, the supply chain revolution that eliminated the vertical integration that Marshall Fields symbolized when it owned the cotton farms, owned the trucks and the mills, owned the manufacturing that produced the clothes and owned the retail outlets that sold the goods. Today, it would be unthinkable that General Motors would own its supply chain, that it would own the companies that made the tires, the seats, the radios and electronics. That would be a disaster, like the disaster we are now facing with K-12 public schools.

Currently companies like William Bennett’s “K-12, Inc.” and Neil Bush’s Ignite Learning are developing a new supply chain to K-12 just the way Blackboard is developing a new supply chain for colleges. Discussion of these private sector ventures is beyond the scope of this white paper since in this paper I will dissect and evaluate a simple model showing how the public K-12 education system can reengineer its supply chain to improve effectiveness and efficiency in the delivery of K-12 education.
One futuristic approach for K-12 education is to follow the General Motors model and greatly diversify the supply chain. This paper presents a preliminary approach to show how schools can begin to restructure the supply chain to give economic incentives to companies that will create new teaching supply chain elements to teach, test and serve the students now stuck with an outmoded supply chain structure. It is interesting in a system that promotes “diversity” the supply chain, the value creation engine in our K-12 system is so undiversified, far more undiversified than that used by almost any private sector organization today.

The New Supply Chain System

Name one economic entity with an economic incentive to develop new and innovative teaching methods that will dramatically cut costs and increase the educational performance of public K-12 students? Possibly, one might name school book publishers or those who prepare curricula and teachers’ aids. However, given the fragmentation in the public school system and the huge costs of doing business with the hundreds of thousands of public schools in the United States, the economic costs of broaching this market are enormous.

Let’s assume that everyone agrees that if “Newco” could build a better system for teaching math from K-12 and could put its own employees in the classrooms and would be willing to have a third party give its students tests in which they surpassed the scores of the current students, and could do this for less cost per student than exists under our current single mode supply chain, this would be a welcome addition to the economic and political landscape of our public schools.

And if there were separate companies that could “rent school space” to teach history, English, physical education, the foreign languages, etc. and that there were multiple companies in each field fighting for market share based on performance, as shown through the third party test scores, customer satisfaction scores (with the customer being the student and their parents) and other factors that showed the companies merit and benefit-cost ratio, then we would have a supply chain in the public schools that looked like the supply chain everywhere else in the United States.

This multi-prong supply chain would introduce market forces into the K-12 educational system and become a “disruptive force” in an industry that has not had a disruptive force in over 100 years, except school integration. This disruptive force may take 20 years to reach maximum efficiency and effectiveness, but it represents one of the last stages of the reformation of K-12 schools.

The Inevitability of A Transformed Supply Chain

Although it is beyond the scope of this article to discuss all of the political challenges that may surface when the public begins to seek a multi-prong supply chain, it is clearly useful to discuss why this system of multiple suppliers of the educational supply chain will be an inevitable next stage of improving educational performance and reducing the cost of education in the public K-12 educational system.

In 10 years, with growing budget cuts becoming ever more prevalent, I predict a 20% reduction in overall public K-12 education. There has never been such a widespread reduction in budgets for schools in modern history in a civilized society. These cuts will cause new systems to be developed to deliver K-12 public education since there is not 20% to cut from the current mode of delivering school.

By following the Minnesota model of paying students to leave school after the 11th grade, I predict that schools will be required to provide a better education in a new format, K-10. K-10 will be followed by community colleges, vocational schools run by the private sector and other forms of continuing education for those who seek it. Universal education for 12 years will become history as governments can not afford to pay for it indefinitely in its present form.

In addition, through improvements in the supply chain offering new educational packages with efficiencies and new structures for dealing with disruptive students (which now accounts for approximately 30% of a teacher’s attention in K-12 urban schools) which will dramatically reduce their cost to the overall system of time and money, the education that our children are receiving in 12 years of K-12 schooling can easily be provided in nine, ten or eleven years. Once the American people realize that they are wasting approximately $10,000 per student for every additional year of schooling that would not be necessary if the supply chain system were modernized, and then funding will drop precipitously until schools figure out how to deliver a quality education in 10 years.

Conclusion

Educational reform has only been tried by changing the customer focus through school integration. Changing the outmoded supply chain is the only way to foster significant innovation, cost reduction, improved student performance and most importantly, guarantee every child in the United States a useful public education. While the forces may be strong that will resist the creation of outsourcing the teaching of our youth to companies that specialize in this business, the relentless pursuit of markets will overwhelm the political forces that will oppose doing in the schools what every major company has done throughout the world – create a diversified and competing supply chain to meet its needs.

The future of K-12 education will be transformed from outside of the system and today the economic models like those that support K-12, Inc. (for the home schooled market) will become center pieces in the continuing “market” evolution of capitalistic countries like the United States.

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