Education Reform vs. the Social Entrepreneur

Isn’t creating significant change in society what the social sector (nonprofits and the philanthropists who fund them) is all about?  A person starts a nonprofit organization when they recognize some disequilibrium (poverty, homelessness, failing schools) and they have a theory of change that will result in righting that disequilibrium.

I think at times, however, the structures that we create in the social sector get us away from that fundamental goal.  It’s interesting to take a step back and evaluate whether or not activity within the social sector is significantly changing broken systems.

Marc S. Tucker, president of the National Center on Education and the Economy, in Washington, DC, wrote a thought-provoking and controversial opinion piece at the Chronicle of Philanthropy about how social entrepreneurial programs like Teach for America, Green Dot and KIPP are not really solving the problem of the crumbling American school system.  He argues that these programs, which are beloved by funders and proponents of social entrepreneurship, “don’t have a prayer of dealing with the problem at the scale that is needed.”  It is not the quality of the innovative programs or the ability to get results that he is at odds with.  Rather, it is the lack of scale of these programs.  They just can’t address the entire system:

But as exemplary as they are, small programs like these are not equal to the task. Teach for America accounts for just two-tenths of 1 percent of the new teachers entering our schools every year. The entire enrollment of the Green Dot schools is no larger than the enrollment of one typical high school in the Los Angeles Unified School District. KIPP schools, the object of enormous attention in the national news media, has an enrollment equal to three-hundredths of 1 percent of the 92,000 public schools in the United States.

He argues that instead of funding these “handful of small, disruptive interventions” we need to emulate the most successful countries’ educational systems by:

• Recruiting teachers from the top one-third to one-fifth of college graduates by paying them as much as the other professions they could just as easily choose to go into: medicine, law, architecture, accounting, engineering.
• Giving them the same kind of control over the way their services are delivered to their clients as the other professions have over theirs…turning virtually all of the decisions as to how the schools are run over to them.
• Adopting high-quality board examinations like those the most successful countries use, which can measure a student’s grasp of the concepts underlying the subject, the student’s creativity and capacity for innovation, as well as the student’s knowledge and ability to apply what he or she has learned to real-world problems.
• Shifting the school financing system away from a reliance on the local property tax and toward a system that makes sure each and every student has the resources needed to get to internationally benchmarked standards.

He recommends a complete overhaul of the American education system at a cost of $60 billion a year in initial investments.  These costs would eventually be offset by expenses saved.

He argues that to get this kind of systemic change donors to educational programs must “shift their attention from financing cameo programs to putting their money into groups that influence public policy. That’s where the payoff is.”

It is an interesting, bold idea.  I’m not sure, however, that I completely agree.  I think we’ve seen over the past several decades that education policy is broken.  There are so many special interests in the field of education policy, it’s unclear to me where we would pour the money.  Perhaps we needed social entrepreneurs like Teach for America and others to point out the problems within the system and offer a theory of change.  Now that they have demonstrated that there are programs that work and new ways to do things, we can now create policy around those ideas.  And with a new administration and a new Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, who has a history of reforming the Chicago Public Schools and implementing new models like Teach for America, perhaps policy reform has a chance.  It will be interesting to watch.

Tags: Arne Duncan, Chicago Public Schools, Green Dot, KIPP, Social Entrepreneurship, Teach for America

How to Scale

Continuing my series on defining and exploring key terms in social innovation, I’d like to take a look at scale.  In an earlier post defining social entrepreneurship, I discussed the key part that scale plays:

Absolutely essential to the idea of social entrepreneurship is the idea of scale. A pattern changing idea, by definition, creates a new model. And to do so, it can’t just exist in one school, in one district, in one city. To truly be social entrepreneurship, the new idea must grow to scale, to reach all of those who can benefit from the solution.

However, just as there are various ways a successful business can grow to scale, there are different ways a nonprofit can grow to scale.  There is the franchise model that we see with organizations like Teach for America, Citizen Schools, or College Summit.  These organizations have a successful model with dramatic results that they want to replicate in other areas of the country.  They raise growth capital that will allow them to import the model to other cities and regions; they bring in or recruit a staff and build the new chapter.  This can be a very successful model.

In a session at this month’s annual Net Impact (an organization for socially-minded business school students and alums) conference, panelists had some provocative ideas for how nonprofits scale.  Aaron Hurst, founder of Taproot Foundation, an organization that provides pro-bono marketing, IT, and HR consulting to nonprofits, took the franchise idea even further arguing that there must be great consolidation within the nonprofit sector:

We need to talk about how we get foundations to stop giving inefficiently…the multitude of nonprofits with similar missions…[are like] the hundreds of Chinese restaurants across New York City. All the restaurants serve dumplings, lomein…[to be efficient] they should all be one Panda Express.

I’m not sure that is the answer.  Nathaniel Whittemore, founding Director of the Center for Global Engagement at Northwestern University argued in his blog on Change.org that scale for nonprofits needs to be thought of a bit differently.  Because of the social, consensus and local nature of nonprofit organizations, you cannot simply franchise a good idea from one city to the next.  He makes a very necessary distinction between scaling an organization and scaling a solution.  The former forces a model onto the next community, without taking into account local processes, norms, behaviors, beliefs, etc.  The latter approach molds the basic solution to the new area.  He believes the successful model is Jane Addams’ Hull House, one of the first settlement houses offering social services to the poor.

For [Jane]…[scale] meant helping other socially concerned citizens found their own organizations with similar but locally appropriate models. She was far less concerned with franchising and branding the Hull House name, but cared that poor people in every city had access to the same quality of services with dignity that her organization offered.

That’s not to say that organizations like Teach for America, Citizen Schools and others don’t meld their model to be locally appropriate,  but it is still very much a franchise model.  And as you grow that model overhead becomes more expensive, quality assurance standards become harder to enforce, and ultimately, the solution may creep farther away.

The franchise model also necessitates significant growth capital.  For example, College Summit has had to raise tens of millions of dollars in growth capital to expand to 8 states with their current program and 6 additional states with a pilot program.  And growth capital can be very difficult to find.

With a model more like Jane Addams’, scale is less about the organization that brings about the solution and more about the actual solution.  You are not building a nationwide organization with a very specific solution, but rather you are building local organizations that mold the solution to be most successful in their communities.  However, because the latter is less rigid and more decentralized it would be more difficult to ensure the quality and effectiveness of the solution, and perhaps much more difficult to track outcomes.

There is much more to be learned as social entrepreneurs continue to grapple with how best to grow to scale – what that means, and what it looks like.  But it is a very necessary discussion, because the true impact of social entrepreneurship does not lie in the ideas that social entrepreneurs create.  I don’t think we have ever lacked good ideas.  But rather, true solutions come when a great idea can grow to scale and fundamentally alter an old, broken model.  How that scale happens most effectively, however, is yet to be determined.

Tags: Citizen Schools, College Summit, growth capital, scale, Social Entrepreneurship, Teach for America