Yesterday the Big 10 and PAC 12 NCAA conferences announced a new scheduling alliance that will increase the number of games among their member schools – some of the most respected in the country. Analysts lauded the move, citing its potential from intersectional branding and promotion.
Big 10 commissioner Jim Delaney said, “Because there’s no overlap (geographically), it really helps… It allows us to extend our reach to become more national, while also sort of maintaining the essence of the competition that we have within our own region… It’s a natural fit.”
What can public education learn from this? Plenty.
The Big 10 and PAC 12 are reacting to a new world order in college athletics that requires them to compete more on a national scale then on their traditionally regional scale (i.e. the Midwest and the West Coast). They are responding to ferocious competition from the insurgent Southeastern Conference (SEC) which has come to dominate the recently established Bowl Championship Series (BCS) as well as radical re-alignment of other major conferences. In short, they are responding to a dynamic and more fiercely competitive marketplace.
Sound familiar, public education?
It should. The state’s recent decision to uncap charter schools is a major competitive influence that will, at first, massively affect districts struggling financially and academically. Ask the folks in Willow Run what they think of a Northern Michigan University authorized charter operator actually building a new school in their district. The next frontier for the charter operators will be those districts that think they are secure from this competition.
When assessing competition, smart organizations do a SWOT analysis, cataloging Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. We should be doing the same in the Grosse Pointe Public School System. Upon doing this analysis, you identify your gaps, then you set goals. I do not feel we have done this nearly as thoroughly as we need to, which is why I voted against the rather anemic district goals the Board was presented in our last meeting. I’m please a majority of the Board joined me in rejecting them and I look forward to a smarter, more specific plan being developed.
But the Big 10 / PAC 12 announcement spurs thoughts of Opportunities in response to the competitive Threat of uncapped charter schools. These two conferences are tapping into their rich history and leveraging the combined brand value each brings to their partnership.
Regionally we have the same Opportunity. Like the Big 10 and PAC 12, traditional public school districts do not have “geographic overlap,” as Jim Delaney mentioned. We do, however, share common interests with like school districts who also face stiff competition not only from charter schools, but other private schools as well. Now is the time to explore progressive new partnerships that enhance our combined Strengths. I see a few logical areas where we can start:
- Common Core Standards and Curriculum: The state of Michigan has obligated public schools to adopt the Common Core Standards, as have nearly every state in the country. Yes, we need to have local involvement in curriculum development, but why not distribute this across traditional public school districts with similarly high standards? Like many districts, we’ve had to reduce our human resource investment in curriculum development, but Common Core presents new opportunities on this front – and now instead of each school staffing curriculum development ourselves, many like districts can pool resources for an even better result.
- Common Assessments: Once Common Core Standards and Curriculum are in place, this opens the door for more meaningful assessment tools than standardized tests. These would be mid-year and year-end assessments that, for example, every student enrolled in Biology would take. So not only could we normalize how our two high school Biology students compare with each other, we could also compare this to high schools across the Metro Detroit area (or further).
- Technology Infrastructure: I referenced this in a recent blog, but this is an area of low hanging fruit. If a large volume of districts pooled their technology spend and were able to create a cloud based infrastructure of servers and applications, we could make a dramatic forward step in our technology plan that we could never do on our own, perhaps not even with a technology millage. This would also allow us to centralize pooled support and infrastructure management.
- Online Educational Content: One of the barriers to adoption of more online course work has been the concern as to whether it meets the high standard we have locally (as opposed to use of Michigan Virtual High School). But with Common Core Standards and joint curriculum development, we could then take the next logical step and create our own digital learning content to enable locally flavored flipped classroom learning at a level acceptable to school districts with equally high standards. This might even be able to expand our course offerings as well. We undoubtedly offer courses not available to other like districts and I’m certain the reverse is true as well.
This all amounts to a limited and logical version of the “crowd sourcing” movement that has turned many an industry on its ear. Daniel Pink in his book Drive references this repeatedly. Wikipedia overtook Microsoft’s Encarta as the preferred encyclopedia. Firefox snatched massive swaths of market share from Microsoft Internet Explorer and Apple Safari. Linux is the preferred server operating system for a quarter of all enterprise servers, beating out products from Microsoft, HP, and IBM. What do these have in common? They are all “crowd sourced” or “open sourced” products.
One of the many broad lessons of the Internet era is that everything and everyone are inter-networked. Connected. To try to operate in isolation is a very poor decision. Michigan’s charter school legislation is a wake up call to public education. It sends a clear message from the state to the local districts:
- You exist at the grace of the state. We control your funding. We are no longer patient with what we consider a poor return on investment.
- If you are falling short of the expectations of your constituents, we are obligated to provide them with an alternative.
- The uncapping of charter schools and possibly a move to force open enrollment provide us with means to do so. If you choose to not compete, that’s your prerogative, but know that we will enhance the capacity for other options.
Traditional public school systems, the ball is now in our court. Let’s not squander the great opportunities that are presented to us if we choose to combine our resources.