As A Citizen: I want my children educated

#As A Citizen: I want my children educated As a Citizen I want my children educated so that they will have more opportunities than I did.

I find the role of government in education fascinating. Given that we all believe that children should be educated and provided the tools to succeed in our world, it has become a question of “how” we should do this. There is so much passion wrapped up in parents wanting the best and to get a leg up on each other that the churn is hard to ignore.

Sal Khan, founder of the Khan Academy, wrote a tremendous book called “The One World Schoolhouse”. It pointed that our existing education system is seeped in assumptions and decisions that are now outdated.

Ideas like separating children by grade, teaching subjects in discrete blocks, and having summer vacation are the hallmarks of the US educational system. More importantly you look at the entire idea of having an A, B, C, D, and F grading system and you realized how closely that idea came from the industrial revolution. When do we decide that these ideas have become “idea debt” that needs to be reevaluated?

In this article I walk you through an analysis and provide a way to judge success for Education based on Objectives and Key Results.

Where to begin

Product management is about dynamically adapting a system to the needs of the moment. This is what software engineering practices can give back to the rest of the world. We never get the satisfaction of having a set of durable requirements. The lesson learned through repeated failure is that you will always know the least when you start building something. So what would happen if we apply the ideas of agile development to the education system?

I think the first step is to identify the objectives that we absolutely need to achieve. These are the moral beliefs that we hold true about the education system. I would also consider that the role of government is to provide for the commonwealth of the society. The following are how I would separate out what the government should and should not do.

The government should…

Provide the standardized testing As a society we all benefit from a uniform way of judging mastery. Providing dynamic tests that prove mastery should be the foundation of education. As a country we should have testing and make it free to verify that our children are at the acceptable level that is set aside. By this I mean that we should pay people to figure out how to create tests that allow us to know if our children are failing. These tests should be made so you cannot simply teach to the test. Key results would include the reduction of the number of test prep courses and tutoring. These tests should be available for anyone in the world. It would be an online test that immediately provides a score and a way to prove certification of that score.

Provide the infrastructure In this case I think that the government should own and maintain the schoolhouses and physical infrastructure needed to have schools. This should also include maintaining the internet at these locations.

Schoolhouses would be leased to schools based on an ability to show that they are satisfying the market in their area. Essentially track the Key Result of a waiting list for each school. This means that each school would need to have a waiting list that families would apply for and the depth of this waiting list would be transparent to each other.

For that reason the government would need to provide a standardized waiting list as part of the infrastructure so that the government can figure out demand. The waiting list would need authentication so that citizens cannot game the system by loading it up with names. Thus a set of rules like picking your first, second and third choice for schools.

Other aspects of the infrastructure would be transporting children to the schools in a safe way. Currently we have a bussing system. That should extend to a certain radius around a school.

Provide the financing Schools should not have to fight to be profitable. One Key Result would need to be the salary of the teachers. Teachers deserve to have teaching as a full time job. They should be able to buy a house and pay an average mortgage wherever they are. This should not be considered a side job that their spouse needs to financially support. For that reason, I would track the teachers salary divided by the average mortgage payments based on the estimated housing prices in their area.

If the teachers salary is too low for their area, then the government should add funding until this number has reached a level that a teacher can buy a house.

As part of this bargain for financing the school should be transparent with their accounting. There should be an acceptable level of costs for administration of the school and for sunk costs. All of this data would be cleaned of personal information and provided back to the public so that they could see the financial costs and make their own analysis of cost benefit for the schools in their area.

Provide an application process for forming a school We need more innovation in schooling. If the government allowed schools to be more like specialized startups you would quickly bring out the entrepreneurial spirit of its citizens. The application process should be dynamic with a fail fast philosophy. A key result from this would be the schools selected would be able to fill up their waiting list. As a result of fulfilling the application they would be provided with a space in a schoolhouse and augmented financing for the teaching staff.

Help focus on underserved populations Unfortunately the realities of a free market means that the wealthiest people will be catered to. One role that the government can play is to incentivize schooling in underprivileged populations simply by increasing the salary limits of the area. This sort of accounting can be shown in the publicly disclosed data and the resulting test score increases.

The government should not…

Decide on the textbooks and technology If the government controls the testing then they have the leverage to standardize what everyone needs to learn. That doesn’t mean they need to decide everything else. Schools should have the autonomy to add additional material to help them differentiate from each other. If they are able to communicate this and it matches the market of their target population then you will see the waiting list for that school increased. A key result from this would be the increase in startups serving the school population.

Employ the teachers directly The teachers need the autonomy to teach. The hierarchy only needs to extend as far as the school. The teacher union is a response to the absurd rules that the government has placed on this group of people. It is my belief that if we just paid them a decent wage and took care of all the worries that are involved in teaching they would no longer feel as much a need to unionize. Regardless, the Union is not the problem, it is just an indicator of the real problem of too much top down control. Allowing teachers to easily move between schools uses the market to everyone’s advantage.

Sign for contracts with corporations This means that the government should not be able to be lobbied by companies that want a monopoly on any contract service for the school system. This can be done on a school by school level.

##The schools should… Focus on teaching I know this is obvious but I think it is also a metric that should be pulled out. At the end of the day I would wonder how many hours the teacher is actually teaching, and how much of their time is spent dealing with the bureaucracy created around them.

Allow for nutritious foods No child should be hungry. We are a wealthy country and this should never be a problem. Feeding the students should be one line item in each school’s budget that the school should not have to be responsible for. They should, however, manage to turn that money into food for the students. I think all schools should have separate contracts with food providers. You need many companies to be able to provide food for a school so that the food providers will compete with each other and find ways to increase nutritions and food value.

Conclusion

I see a symbiotic relationship between government and the schools. I believe that education needs to be a hybrid of public and private organization. We need to allow teachers to solve their own problems and not create new ones for them with confusing politics. However we also need consistency and a way for education to reach every student in the United States.

After doing this analysis here are the objectives and weighted key results I would use to decide if we are effective. It is split between a set of OKRs for the Department of Education and the schools themselves. Each side would be held accountable to these metrics with their success intertwined.

OKR for the Education Department

• Objective: To provide access for all citizens to a superior education
  • KR: (weight: 30%) Students of each school show a mastery of the specified education as judged by the scores derived from standardized tests
  • KR: (weight: 30%) Teacher salaries are high enough at all schools to allow them to purchase an average house within 3 miles of the school.
  • KR: (weight: 10%) Distance from home to a school is less than 1 mile or a transportation option is available in population densities of areas with population density greater than 10 children per acre
  • KR: (weight: 10%) Waiting lists for schools is less than 10 people
  • KR: (weight: 10%) All students should have access to nutritious food
  • KR: (weight: 10%) Standardized budget reporting is done in 100% of the schools

OKR for a School

• Objective: To provide a superior public education for all students.
  • KR: (weight: 35%) Students of each school show a mastery of the specified education as judged by the scores derived from the standardized tests.
  • KR: (weight: 35%) 80% of teachers time is devoted to teaching
  • KR: (weight: 10%) All teachers do not work more than 40 hours per week.
  • KR: (weight: 10%) All teachers salaries are high enough to allow them to purchase a school within 3 miles
  • KR: (weight: 10%) Overhead, not counting facilities maintenance, for running the school does not exceed 15%

My vision for this education is that all of the data would be scrubbed of personal information and provided to the community so that media outlets can help watch for anomalies. Each school could have it’s own dashboard and the Department of Education could be judged by how the schools are doing. At the heart of this are the students and how well they are learning in this environment. Using clear objectives and well constructed metrics we can have an education that is world class.