Innovation Chicken or Egg

Much has been written lately about the need for the US public school system to prepare students to be innovative. The recent NECC conference in Atlanta was reported to be about innovation (http://www.eschoolnews.com/news/showStoryts.cfm?ArticleID=7232).

You don't have to think very hard about it to see the inherent paradox in that desire.

I'll warn you that this post could be considered political. I really don't mean it to be political as much as I mean it to be as objective an observation as I can make. The fact of the matter is that the US public education system has not established itself as a model of innovation. How can it expect to be the conduit of innovative capabilities for a whole new generation of its graduates?

In the business world, there are few things discussed more than innovation. Here are a few links to illustrate what I mean:

Official Measure of Innovation (BusinessWeek)
This article discusses the need for a way to measure innovation in a business setting. How would we measure innovation in education?

Clayton Christensen's Innovation Brain
Clayton Christensen has build an empire on discussing innovation in a variety of business contexts. He has created the language of "disruption" and discussed how to leverage technology to allow customers to do things with your products that they couldn't do before. What does disruption mean in the context of public education? Who is applying Christensen's approaches to public education (besides the education entrepreneurs)?

The Why, What, and How of Management Innovation
Where are the innovations in management structure, job functions, motivation, coordination in our schools?

I know there are a million reasons why this type of innovation isn't happening within the public school system. Work rules, parental pressure to focus on basics/music/PE, political pressure, budget pressure, etc.

Some may argue that charter schools and special focus options (or magnet schools) represent innovation in public education. I'd argue that point. I've got some personal experience with these types of answers to the innovation challenge, and while there seems to be some opportunity there, most of the time these programs seem to become isolated bastions for parents motivated enough to get their kids into something "better" than vanilla public schools. They don't end up generating the kind of repeatable, scalable, sustainable changes throughout the system that true innovation will yield.

Here are some things that I think are required for a culture and environment of innovation to be present:

Rewards. Hate to beat the capitalist dead horse, but until there are clear rewards offered to those who care to innovate, there will be very little true innovation. And there are plenty of types of rewards, not just economic.

Appropriate outcomes criteria. Student outcomes seem to be the appropriate primary criteria to use. Scalability (outcome per unit of labor), cost efficiency (outcome per dollar expended), and sustainability (the success and associated cost of maintaining an innovation determined to be successful by whatever criteria) all seem to be reasonable additional criteria to measure.

Process for creating, capturing, refining, and deploying innovations. These are standard desires of any organization that wants to consider itself innovative.

How does the US public education system stack up even against this limited definition of a culture of innovation? I'll go out on a limb and say "not very well". I invite any and all who think differently to post your examples here.

Until our schools are environments where the employees (teachers and school administrators primarily) are encouraged and rewarded to identify problems, hypothesize solutions, test the solution, evaluate the test against broadly-accepted criteria, and see to it that the final solution is scalable, sustainable and cost effective, and until those employee are then rewarded in meaningful ways (economic and otherwise), then we can't really claim to have a culture of innovation within our schools. And until we do, it seems a fool's errand to think we can impart the necessary knowledge and skills for our students to become truly innovative.

I actually agree that students in the 21st century need to understand what innovation is, and I applaud the effort being put into raising awareness. I just hope that the call for innovation won't end up like the call for technology literacy, where everyone just assumed that if we say it then it automatically has happened, or that kids these days just know this stuff because they are part of the "millennial" or "digital native" generation.

The potential for technology literacy might be ingrained in our current generation of school children just because of the times, but the ability to put that potential to highly creative and highly productive use depends on gaining sufficient discipline in the broad skills and knowledge associated with digital technologies.

(By the way, beware of the anecdotes that people use to reinforce either that "we have it covered" mentality or the "digital natives will take care of their own" mentality. Anecdotes cover up a multitude of sins, and ultimately do not help accomplish what is required.)

By the same token, innovation isn't something we can just say "Let the kids run with it" and assume that we've got it covered. There is a language of innovation and there are tools for innovation. It takes more than an awareness that the world is interconnected and the ability to search Wikipedia. To really get this right will require that we start with a focus on the immense task of turning our public school system into bastions of innovation themselves.

wjk