Editorial: Private innovations can be legislative gains

We need to transform our public education system — but that change isn’t going to come from legislators.

Laurene Powell Jobs — the founder of Emerson Collective and widow of the late Steve Jobs — has started a $50 million campaign known as XQ: The Super School Project, an open call to the national community to reimagine and design the next American public high school. 

Powell Jobs’ recent campaign represents the manner in which the public sector has come to rely on the private sector to improve public institutions. While the private sector has been moderately effective at inciting change without a need for legislative backing, legislators should promote social projects from private citizens— like Powell Jobs — and consider them for permanent roles in our national system.

“The [education] system was created for the work force we needed 100 years ago,” Powell Jobs said of the current educational structure in an interview with The New York Times on Friday.

This isn’t Powell Jobs’ first stab at improving education. For years, she has financed College Track, an organization that helps low-income students enroll and succeed in college.

For XQ, Powell Jobs has built up a team of experts like Russlynn Ali, who served in Obama’s U.S. Department of Education as the assistant secretary for civil rights from 2009 to 2012, and Keith Yamashita, who serves as a consultant for the campaign and has worked with several successful startups and large technology corporations. Self-assembled teams will submit their plans to revamp the American high school model over the next several months. By next fall, a teams of judges will award funding for five to 10 of the best ideas.

Jobs’ campaign is a worthy endeavor, considering that past attempts from U.S. legislators to improve our education system have not been effective. Educators have denounced the latest Common Core State Standards Initiative — an educational initiative to establish consistent educational standards in English language arts and mathematics across the states — as inefficient.

The Washington Policy Center detailed several reasons for the Common Core’s inadequacy in 2012. The initiative is not only relatively unsuccessful, but is also costly. A peer-reviewed study estimated the total cost at about $16 billion.

In 2010, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development found that the United States spent about 7.3 percent of its gross domestic product on education, which was much more than the 6.3 percent average that other developed countries spent on education.

While the United States spends more than any other developed countries on education, we don’t have the results to show for it.

The United States has an abysmal education ranking on the international scale. According to the 2012 Programme for International Student Assessment results, the United States ranked 26th in mathematics against other OECD countries like Hungary, Italy and Sweden.

The United States also ranked 17th in reading and 213th in science. OECD rankings take into consideration the progress of developed countries with high-income economies and a high human development index. Following World War II, the United States ranked first in high school graduation, but it has dropped to the 22nd rank among 27 industrialized nations in a 2012 evaluation by the OECD.

The answer to our educational crisis is not simply a matter of money, but a matter of innovation.

Private sector initiatives have been successful at addressing issues where legislative attempts have failed — by developing initiatives on a heavily innovative platform.

For example, Elon Musk — developer of SpaceX, Tesla Motors and SolarCity — begins many of his iniatives in the pursuit of innovation. SpaceX was developed with the goal of improving the cost and reliability of access to space, Tesla Motors attempts to address the climate crisis by speeding the development of electric cars and SolarCity is the United States’ second largest provider of solar power systems. 

But the pursuits of individuals in the private sector are more than personal accomplishments — they are initiatives that have direct applications to social life.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation provides grants to tackle critical problems around the world. The foundation’s Measures of Effective Teaching project, a three-year study that included collaboration between dozens of independent research teams and nearly 3,000 teacher volunteers from seven U.S. public school districts, was able to determine effective teaching methods using classroom observations, student surveys and student achievement gains. This information can be used to train future generations of educators to be more effective teachers. These findings can also help school districts develop new evaluation systems for teachers and implement new teaching standards.

The public sector often finds itself leaning on the ideas, funds and innovations of the private sector, but it should prop them up with legislative action. The private and public sectors have different strengths — but when paired, their collaboration can initiate lasting social change.