Ecosystems & Education
K-12 public education has done a poor job over the years of leveraging community resources. Often times, we simply haven’t seen a need. Funding occurs through taxes and states legislate the educational process. When we have reached out to the community, it has largely been to ask for money, or to participate in a specified way. Rarely do we seek input or recognize expertise that is around us. There is a sleeping giant in local communities just waiting to participate and make a difference in local education.
The Purpose of Education
We could have a lengthy debate about what the purpose of American compulsory education is and it could be extremely compelling and informative and transformative. But that is for another blog. Regardless of where you fall on the spectrum between education as preparation for careers and education’s merit for its own sake, almost everyone would agree that in some way education needs to prepare students for the real world. The current American system was built to create a labor force for an industrial time. We need to look at the current and future opportunities for careers and prepare students for that world. And it can’t just be a national or international system. We need to evaluate local ecosystems.
Evaluating Ecosystems
We started the Pati?o School of Entrepreneurship in Fresno, California for a number of reasons. We believe entrepreneurship teaches skills in critical thinking and problem solving that are valuable to all students. But ultimately, our ecosystem showed it could support this kind of a school and as entrepreneurship grows in Fresno we knew there would be opportunities for our students to launch their own companies and work at new startups. New technology startups were launching, incubators and accelerators were opening and higher education and technology education programs were emerging. So it made sense to start a high school focused on entrepreneurship because we had mentors that could support our students and we had an ecosystem to launch our students into. They could start companies, work for tech companies, attend the local university entrepreneurship program, etc.
Our school was the perfect fit for our ecosystem, but it isn’t the perfect fit for every ecosystem. Which is why I am always hesitant when a visitor from another area visits our school and wants to replicate the model in their community. The community determines what model will work best. The ecosystem determines what talent exists to mentor students, what career training exists, which higher education opportunities are available, and what career opportunities exist. Our ability to collaborate with community partners and really leverage this underutilized resource is dependent upon us creating educational opportunities that understand local ecosystems. Our partners can help us learn how to do this. Personalizing learning is more than specializing learning to individual students. We also need to leverage local resources to create specialized systems.
Executive Coach and Independent Director
8 年Thanks for the innovation you're bringing to educating our kids. In addition, few people realize that many school districts actually match the larger business organizations in their communities in size, employing more people and managing larger budgets than a lot of for-profit companies. In Houston, I've found a real interest in learning from the business community -- just need more business partners to invest.
Director, Continuous Improvement at SCOE
8 年Hi Brett - I agree. We had this same conversation yesterday as we were discussing educational programs at school sites. Schools will see a program that is working at one site and want to replicate, but the program may not actually meet the needs they have OR the school may not have all the prerequisites they need to make the program work (e.g., culture). We seldom consider these important (and complex) pieces as we look at replication.
ceo @ Activepieces ? open source AI automation
8 年Thank you Brett for sharing your thoughts. A very interesting read!