Greatest New Idea – The Parents
Richard Salbato 2-20-2012
I
have written many times about the importance of education for all people’s
future out of poverty and in fact how the founding fathers felt in the most
important natural resource of any nation.Our
education has become one of the worst in the world and those who are graduating
cannot read or write. People who are trying to hire workers complain they cannot
even find people who can be trained. Even in minimum wage jobs people apply who
are un-bathed and dressed like hobos.
Everyday
there are horror stories about our schools, what they are teaching, abuse of
students, rape, unsafe, and learning nothing. Nonetheless, all government wants
to do is give unions more money. In fact, most of the so called Stimulus Bill
went to keep teachers from being fired for one year. A complete waste of money
since the following year they were fired anyway because the states could not
afford them.
The
power of the unions is so great in
This plan is the brain child of Scott Oki, a Microsoft senior executive. His plan is The Parents Union.
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Three
years ago, former Microsoft senior executive, Scott Oki had an epiphany. Encouraged by his wife Laurie, the 62-year-old
Frustrated by
the slow pace of public school reform, Oki visited public and private schools
nationwide, read everything he could about education, talked with experts, and
came to a realization: While there is a plethora of ideas on how to improve
learning outcomes for children, few tools exist to effect systemic change.
In his 2009
book, Outrageous Learning: An Education Manifesto,
Oki pointed to disturbing signs that K-12 public education in the
A
self-described “serial entrepreneur” and community activist, Oki is passionate
about his ideas and an ardent proponent of no-nonsense, “evidence-based” solutions. The former software innovator minces few
words about his misgivings about public education. “The current school system is driven by formula,” he said. “Nothing
about it makes any sense. It’s a broken, archaic way of managing schools. As a
parent, I should have the flexibility to send my child to any school, but there
is no flexibility in the system.”
In Oki's mind, the chief
roadblocks to change are clear. A hidebound educational bureaucracy resistant to reform, coupled with well-organized teachers unions. “So long as the
Oki also is
strongly in support of doing away with tenure and establishing merit-based pay
for teachers. “Public schools don’t need
more money. Most of that money has been misspent,” he said. “More should be
spent on classrooms and decentralizing the school system. We spend 43 cents on
the dollar supporting a central bureaucracy.”
Parent’s
His solution has been to create a new parent’s union to
complement the WEA, the statewide teacher’s union.
“Children have
no voice," Oki explained. "WEA represents 82,000 educators and is a
powerful lobby.” Oki’s goal is to
recruit a membership of 250,000 parents in three years.
“Given that the
Washington State PTA [WSPTA] has a membership of 148,000 and the AARP has a
Oki believes
his new organization, named The Parents
Union, would mobilize parents and concerned
The Parents
Union, as Oki envisions it, will be a self-sustaining, membership-based
organization. The Oki Foundation has already committed $250,000 for start-up
and raised more than $800,000 from private individuals, corporations, and other
foundations. Oki is close to recruiting a president and CEO and has enlisted the
support of such civic leaders as former
Oki’s
plan also addresses his problems with school governance, which he says is a
big factor in the ineffectual delivery of quality public education. “There’s so
much waste and inefficiency now.
Greater local
autonomy and parental engagement, he maintains, would provide a platform to
debate substantive issues with public education. In his blueprint for The Parents
Union, Oki’s business plan concludes that parents are the missing link in the
system.
“There is clear
evidence detailing the benefits of parental engagement, including increased
student achievement, better social skills, and a higher chance of graduating
from high school,” he writes. “Furthermore, engaging parents and families can
be incredibly cost-effective; schools have to spend $1,000 more per student to
achieve the same gains that accrue from increasing parent involvement.”
Oki’s
parents union is not the first such union in the U.S.: Green Dot Public Schools, which turns around dysfunctional high
schools in Los Angeles, Calif. within a union frame, spun off a parents union
years ago and a number of other parents unions have also cropped up around the
country, including unions in Chicago, New York City, Texas, and Connecticut.
Still, Oki
explains that his proposed organization is unique in that it is the first
statewide parents union in
Oki —
himself a graduate of Hawthorne Elementary School, Sharples
Junior High (since renamed Aki Kurose Middle School), and Franklin High
School — recalls a meeting with U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan in
New York City, arranged by his former Franklin classmate — then U.S.
Commerce Secretary Gary Locke. Upon hearing Oki describe his project,
The key
tool of The Parents Union is what Oki terms the
Knowledge Action Network (KAN) — a parent-driven, proprietary technology
platform. “
Among the
information gleaned from the network, parents will be able to submit reviews of
individual teachers at their children’s schools and access reviews written by
other parents. Aggregating school ratings and rankings would enable parents to
choose which schools match their children’s needs.
The network
would also alert parents to issues facing local and state school systems,
provide access to information about school board meetings and agendas, and
provide an online “bulletin board” for information sharing about school- and
district-specific issues. Armed with up-to-date data, Oki believes, parents
will be empowered to advocate for change at the state and local level.
Liv Finne,
Director of the Center for Education at the
Of course,
Some
education observers have reservations however. “We are all over transparency, but
fairness is important,” said Lisa Macfarlane, senior advisor at the League for
Education Voters [LEV], a statewide reform coalition. “Schools, like
restaurants, shouldn’t be reviewing themselves.”
“And it makes no sense to compare the test scores at Medina Elementary
with those of an elementary school that is next to a housing project where
there is a constant turnover of non-English-speaking children. The State Board
of Education has done some of this accountability work,” she said.
Steve
Jobs on School Unions
I'm a very big believer in equal opportunity as
opposed to equal outcome. I don't believe in equal outcome because unfortunately life's not
like that. It would be a pretty boring place if it was. But I really believe in
equal opportunity. Equal opportunity to me more than anything means a great
education. Maybe even more important than a great family life, but I don't know
how to do that. Nobody knows how to do that. But it pains me because we do know
how to provide a great education. We really do. We could make sure that every
young child in this country got a great education. We fall far short
of that.... The problem there of course
is the unions. The unions are the
worst thing that ever happened to education because it's not a meritocracy. It
turns into a bureaucracy, which is exactly what has happened. The teachers
can't teach and
[On Vouchers]
But in schools
people don't feel that they're spending their own money. They feel like it's
free, right? No one does any comparison shopping. A matter of fact if you want
to put your kid in a private school, you can't take the forty-four hundred dollars a year out of the public school and use
it, you have to come up with five or six thousand of your own money. I believe
very strongly that if the country gave each parent a voucher for forty-four
hundred dollars that they could only spend at any accredited school several
things would happen. Number one schools would start marketing themselves like
crazy to get students. Secondly, I think you'd see a lot of new schools
starting. I've suggested as an example, if you go to Stanford Business School,
they have a public policy track; they could start a school administrator track.
You could get a bunch of people coming out of college tying up with someone out
of the business school, they could be starting their
own school. You could have twenty-five year old students out of college, very
idealistic, full of energy instead of starting a
DM: But deservedly so.
SJ: But far less painful I
think than the kids going through the system as it is right now.
[On Digital
Learning]
The market
competition model seems to indicate that where there is a need there is a lot
of providers willing to tailor their products to fit that need and a lot of
competition which forces them to get better and better. I used to think when I
was in my twenties that technology was the solution to most of the world's
problems, but unfortunately it just ain't so... We
need to attack these things at the root, which is people and how much
freedom we give people, the competition that will attract the best people.
Unfortunately, there are side effects, like pushing out a lot of 46 year old
teachers who lost their spirit fifteen years ago and shouldn't be teaching
anymore. I feel very strongly about this. I wish it was as simple as giving it
over to the computer....
As you've
pointed out I've helped with more computers in more schools than anybody else
in the world and I absolutely convinced that is by no means the most important
thing. The most important thing is a person. A person who incites
your curiosity and feeds your curiosity; and machines cannot do that in the
same way that people can. The elements of discovery are all around you. You
don't need a computer. Here - why does that fall? You know why? Nobody in the entire
world knows why that falls. We can describe it pretty accurately but no one
knows why. I don't need a computer to get a kid interested in that, to spend a
week playing with gravity and trying to understand that and come up with
reasons why.
DM: But you do need a person.
SJ: You need a person.
Especially with computers the way they are now. Computers are very reactive but
they're not proactive; they are not agents, if you will. They are very
reactive. What children need is something more proactive. They need a guide. They don't need an assistant. I think we have
all the material in the world to solve this problem; it's just being deployed
in other places. I've been a very strong believer in that what we need to do in
education is to go to the full voucher
system. I know this isn't what the interview was supposed to be about but
it is what I care about a great deal.
(Source: Smithsonian
Institution Oral and Video Histories)
The above
interview was from 1995, but it is clear that Jobs did not significantly change
his mind over time. In 2007 he reiterated that unions and lifetime
employment for teachers were at the heart of the problem. This is from PC
World:
During a joint
appearance with Michael Dell that was sponsored by the Texas Public Education
Reform Foundation, Jobs took on the unions by first comparing schools to small
businesses, and school principals to CEOs. He then asked rhetorically:
"What kind of person could you get to run a small business if you told
them that when they came in, they couldn't get rid of people that they thought
weren't any good? Not really great ones, because if you're really smart, you
go, 'I can't win.' "
He went on to say that "what is wrong with our schools in this
nation is that they have become unionized in the worst possible way. This
unionization and lifetime employment of K-12 teachers is off-the-charts
crazy."
Catholic Bishop on Public Schools
The
Catholic bishop of
In
an interview with the ABC affiliate in
“In the totalitarian government, they would
love our system,” McFadden said. “This is what Hitler and Mussolini and all
them tried to establish — a monolith; so all the children
would be educated in one set of beliefs and one way of doing things.”