A call for a New Rules community platform centered on education and public schools
By Tom Foremski - August 11, 2005
I wrote about the issue of Silicon Valley's terrible public schools earlier this year. I got some great responses on the subject. But Dan Gillmor berated me for berating Silicon Valley. "Berating doesn't work," he told me at a recent event.
Well, not berating Silicon Valley doesn't work either then, at least it makes me feel better, if nothing else.
But I also realized that there is a lot of work being done by leading Silicon Valley companies such as Cisco, Sun, HP and many others, around the subject of education. And they all seem worthy projects, yet the results of all that do-gooding are hard to find.
Here's my take for a "new rules" philanthropic education effort, (and it means we ditch the non-profit company approach, even if it means losing that tax deduction, I'll explain.)
And please, take the following and add to it, or change it, or whatever else needs to be done to change things, these are just a few ideas to maybe develop an open source business model that will make a big difference in our communities, and become a blueprint for other communities too. This is a work in progress:
New Rules Community Platform
-Let's combine most of the local educational efforts by tech companies into one organization, say call it SVFuture.
-The mission of SVFuture would be to enable public schools to use digital collaborative technologies to communicate with their local communities and to tap the many sorts of resources within those communities. The premise is that there is a tremendous amount of knowledge, material, and volunteer labor within each community, to enable every public school to become a center of educational excellence.
-SVFuture would use open standard open platform technologies.
-SVFuture is not a not for profit, it is schedule C or S or LLC--but the idea is not to be limited by the limits on not for profit companies.
-At SVFuture it is OK to make a profit because it means it becomes self sustaining, it does not require further handouts or distractions in begging for supporting funds.
-SVFuture is a "not for loss" company rather than "not for profit." It is an idea borrowed from Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank, a not for loss business that makes micro-loans and has created an enormous amount of value in the developing world.
-SVFuture's mission is to offer free collaborative and community building software to schools. I'd like to see a wiki in every school, for example. I've mentioned this to Ross Mayfield , CEO of SocialText, and Joe Kraus at JotSpot. They like the idea. And wikis are simple technologies that can help schools by drawing on the resources of the community.
-SVFuture would help build a type of "Craig's List" community around each school, plus a teacher/class blogging platform, plus a request for supplies or skills from classrooms, plus sharing of community resources both physical (e.g. projectors, meeting rooms) and people (teacher assistants, baby sitters, etc.) Schools would become the centers of their communities, because we know that more parent involvement in schools leads to better education.
-SVFuture would collect best practices, templates, etc, to share with other schools.
-SVFuture would offer a public wi-fi service to the community around each adopted school for a fee that covers costs. It would charge commercial and government establishments higher rates for this service.
-Because SVFuture is a normal commercial entity, the objections of Verizon or any other company to municipalities/public organizations offering public wi-fi at low rates would be removed. In fact, SVFuture rates might even be higher than from a competitor, but the social value returned would be recognized by its customers and they would willingly pay a premium.
-SVFuture revenues would also come from the community: local advertisers, ad postings, classes in computer skills, etc.
-SVFuture might experiment with different tech architectures, such as harvesting spare microprocessor cycles from the community. Wireless bandwidth could be shared more openly by each household, for example, (the way it once was.)
-SVFuture would be a commercial company in other ways too, it could pay competitive salaries for example. This would enable "not for loss" companies to attract larger numbers of talented people.
-SVFuture if it can be made to work, would help make wireless, and wired broadband a reality sooner, rather than later for many communities. That means the US builds its 21st century infrastructure faster, and more efficiently.
-SVFuture would show that doing good can be made profitable and sustainable.
But we need somebody to take it on and lead this new rules educational initiative, or something like it...anybody want to make history?
In the meantime, send me your ideas, let's compile an open source business model around education.
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August 11, 2005 | Permalink | Comment | Category: Thoughtleaders | Subscribe to SVW
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Comments (3)
Technology is great, but when you raise your sword and shout "wikis for all!" well... let's see how we can make that one work.
Schools ARE a center of their communities, they don't need to "become." The fact that the schools are struggling is so outrageous precisely because it affects the daily lives (as well as future) of a huge number of people, and a cross-section of the community.
The biggest challenges right now:
* Teacher training, and teacher connectedness (i.e. they work all day by themselves, and if they have a problem with a student - where do they go?)
* Curriculum customization within the classroom (partly because of teacher understanding/ability/materials and partly due to the magnitude of the project)
* Improving the quality of parent-teacher interaction, which means helping parents communicate their needs as much as any kind of access issue.
* The virtual unavailability of after-school programming (San Jose has some; most places don't). This affects family life profoundly, including creating yet another generation of latch-key kids when we know EXACTLY how bad a thing that is.
* The difficulty supporting extra-curriculars, including arts. (Note: extra-curriculars are one of the key program areas in keeping kids at risk from dropping out. Might include podcasting. Might include a sculpture class.)
* The desire to give teachers as high pay as possible AND the desire to make sure teachers and students have the support staff they need.
There's already a huge amount of in-kind donations as well as volunteer time and labor connected to the schools - and no one has quantified it that I know of.
Further, the participation is wealth dependent (affording a stay-at-home parent and/or enough money to rip out those checks one after the other as a response to pleas from teachers on back-to-school night isn't easy). There's really an underground economy.
So:
(1) First, I completely agree about transparency.
I would contact CCEF (California Consortium of Education Foundations) and Grantmakers for Education at edfunders.org.
Harris Polls has put out some interesting stuff, and there was a huge report about the state of California schools that just came out about a month ago... Packard Fndn? I'm not sure.
(2) If you're interested in creating a forum for teachers, there are several outstanding academic education programs specializing in providing teacher support (there was a good one I knew of a while ago in UCLA) who might have more up-to-date information and state-of-the-art best practices to contact.
You might want to talk with McGraw Hill and/or other publishers also.
(3) Please, please, please, please don't even think about offering technology without the support. Right now, you're going to need to think "turnkey" and not "enabling technologies." Turnkey might involve finding volunteers to manage the system long-term. I believe I heard that in my local district, there's one hour per week per school of system administrator time.
(4) There's a slide making the rounds of a plot of cost-of-living vs per-pupil-funding. All but a handful of US states are on a diagonal. Vermont is the best situation with New York funding at ... well, Vermont cost-of-living. California is by far the worst with at Utah-level per-pupil funding.
The single best thing that can be done is to straighten out the catastrophe that is our ABILITY to financially support our local schools. This is a policy issue and it's crippling.
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Meanwhile, I'm looking for volunteers for my information committee for the Fremont Education Foundation, which includes both technology and marketing needs. My objective is to make our internal communications far more smooth and our public interface far more fluid. We also have publicity objectives as, like many Ed Foundations, there's confusion about our role vis-a-vis PTA and school district.
If there were a systematic way to approach these problems I'm sure it could be exported to many of the 600 Local Education Foundations in the state of California (the most desperate of whom are simply raising money in the community to hand over to the school; otoh, we have programming). Takers?
Posted: August 12, 2005 9:55 AM
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(Gah! Formatting is awful! (Firefox) Please feel free to fix/delete/whatever you need to do... sorry about that!!)
Posted: August 12, 2005 10:16 AM
Great article Tom ! Thanks for highlighting this issue.
About a year ago, we were motivated by a similar thought process and created a company called SchoolParentNet (www.schoolparentnet.com). We have built a parents network around the school system (we support public and private schools from PK-12 nationwide). Our mission is to increase parent involvement and also to encourage the formation of strong local communities. We decided to focus on parents to start with since this is one of the largest constituencies of the school system but still the most disaggregated. We will be enabling connections to teachers and administrators in the very near future.
We decided to take a commercial approach to serve this "market" need. We feel that to deliver the best solution you must have a core mission to solve a specific need. We felt that the opportunity is very large (large number of parents of school going children with huge spending power) and warranted a traditional start-up approach. As you suggested, we are indeed a "C" corp and we will use private equity to scale our operations. We have patents pending that protect the core of our business and will allow us to compete aggressively in this space. A market-driven competitive landscape is likely to foster the best solution for a very important problem.
We absolutely believe its possible to be profitable and at the same time deliver community value. We have chosen a space that will naturally result in social good. Our ad and transactions based business model has a component that will allow us to give back to the schools - as we succeed we raise funds for schools.
If anyone wants to reach us - please email us at info@schoolparentnet.com
Posted: August 13, 2005 10:09 AM