What
Is Educational Entrepreneurship
WHAT
IS AN EDUCATION ENTREPRENEUR?
The
reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in
trying
to
adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable
man.
—George
Bernard Shaw1
Historically,
much of the scholarship on entrepreneurs blurs the distinction between innovators
and entrepreneurs, who share many characteristics.
we
will define education entrepreneurs quite narrowly as a rare breed of innovator
whose characteristics and activities may lead to the transformation—not merely
the slight improvement—of the public education system.
We
believe it is important to understand (1) the qualities that define
entrepreneurs
in general, (2) those that distinguish social entrepreneurs, and (3) those that
make social entrepreneurs such a potentially powerful force within public
education today.
Entrepreneurs
In
general, it is important to understand that entrepreneurs have a vision for a
better way of doing things, thinking beyond the constraints of current rules
and resources. Perhaps more importantly, they have the passion and sense of
urgency that literally compels them to take the
risks
necessary to realize that vision. They create new organizations to make the changes
they want to see in the world—and by doing so, they inspire others to follow.
Be
visionary thinkers. Entrepreneurs’ most unique characteristic is that they
are able to think beyond the current rules and resources to see a different way
of working. One of the classic entrepreneurship textbooks, New Business
Ventures and the Entrepreneur, points out that while
most
leaders plan around the resources that are currently available, entrepreneurs
are driven by their perception of opportunity, irrespective of resources.2 As
such, in the words of successful Silicon Valley venture capitalist John Doerr,
“entrepreneurs do more than anyone thinks possible
with
less than anyone thinks possible.” Where many would ask “Can this
be done?”
entrepreneurs
are hard-wired to ask instead “How can this be done?” As a consequence, entrepreneurs
have the power to fundamentally redefine our sense of what is possible.
Start
new organizations.
Good
entrepreneurs are both mavericks and institution-builders,
as
technology entrepreneur and former President of the California state board of
education Reed Hastings has noted. For entrepreneurs, innovative ideas simply
aren’t enough: Their sense of urgency and drive to achieve leads them to take
action by creating new organizations that will
make
their vision a reality. Here, our definition differs from that offered by other
chapters in this volume. Although “intrapreneurs”—who have a vision for
changing an organization from the inside—can also be incredibly important
change agents, they are different from entrepreneurs.
The
single greatest distinction between them seems to be their tolerance for risk
and for frustration. Intrapreneurs tend to have a lower risk profile, but a
higher tolerance for the frustration caused by trying to create change within a
status quo organization. In contrast, entrepreneurs have a lower tolerance for
this sort of frustration and a higher tolerance for risk,
leading
them to strike out on their own.
Believe
they can change the way things are done.
Psychologist
Martin Seligman has found that certain people have developed “learned
optimism,” in which they believe successes are the result of their own hard
work while seeing setbacks as external and temporary hurdles they need to
overcome.3 This trait often goes hand in hand with an “internal locus of
control,” or belief that one can control his or her own fate, rather than
feeling controlled by circumstance.
Taken
together, these characteristics allow entrepreneurs to face the potential
failure inherent in creating a new organization by focusing on likely success
and overcoming all hurdles that stand
in
the way.
Social
Entrepreneurs
Within
the realm of entrepreneurship, the social entrepreneur has particular potential
for transforming public education. The social entrepreneur’s vision is not
merely to create something new in the pursuit of fame or fortune, but rather to
do so in the quest to make the world a better
place.
These entrepreneurs may create social-purpose ventures through either a
for-profit or nonprofit structure, but having a positive impact on society is a
top priority.
A
leading thinker on social entrepreneurs, Professor Greg Dees of Duke
University’s Fuqua School of Business, notes that social entrepreneurs adopt a
mission to create and sustain social value (not just private value), and that
they exhibit heightened accountability to the
constituencies
served and for the outcomes created.4 The social entrepreneurs in education
under consideration in this chapter have great potential for impact today
because they are focused on making a significant difference on outcomes of the
K-12 system as a whole, particularly for
those
students and communities who are currently underserved, rather than just for a
limited set of students. Social entrepreneurs in education are also highly
focused on outcomes. Although their organizations sit “outside” the public
education system, education entrepreneurs are still
accountable
to it; they may need to attract students to a new public charter school, entice
principal candidates to apply for a new preparation program, or deliver
improved outcomes in order to maintain a district as a customer. As such, they
have a customer-focused orientation and
a
consistent focus on outcomes, critical factors that allow them to compete with
existing providers for attention, funds, and sales.
Social
Entrepreneurs in Education
Within
education, social entrepreneurs create many different types of organizations
that seek to have a positive impact on the broader system. Some do this by
creating a new supply of public schools and school systems. For example, across
the country, a number of nonprofit
charter
management organizations have cropped up to address the diverse needs of
underserved urban communities by creating new centrally-managed networks of
small public charter schools. Other education entrepreneurs instead create
organizations that seek to enhance the capacity of the existing public school
system. These include developers of alternative preparation or support programs
for teachers and leaders, as well as creators of products and services that
help teachers
and
leaders with instruction, administration, and management.
The
power of these entrepreneurs in education is not only as developers of
alternative sources of teachers, leaders, schools and tools, but also as change
agents whose efforts spur change in the larger system. As Harvard Business
School professor Clay Christensen has found in his studies of business, “an
organization cannot disrupt itself.” In other words, organizations charged with
serving a current customer base can only “sustain” and take change so far,
while new “disruptive” innovations are the ones that move industries forward by
quantum leaps. This
explains
why, despite the best of intentions, educators and policymakers have found it impossible
to achieve better outcomes within a bureaucratic structure designed more than a
century ago.
At
this critical point in public education, entrepreneurs have three crucial
roles.
As
change agents.
Entrepreneurs
can demonstrate what is possible when resources are
used
differently and point the way toward how policy and practice might be changed
in light of what they accomplish. As such, their work has a direct impact, as
well as a “catalytic impact”
that
reverberates throughout the system. For example, Teach For America has directly
affected the lives of more than a million students and of the fourteen thousand
corps members it has trained to serve as teachers in high-need schools. But its
success has also re-shaped broader
policy
conversations around the recruitment and preparation of teachers for high-need
urban and rural settings. Another way to consider this is as “co-opetition”—a
combination of competition and cooperation in which entrepreneurs create
additional capacity for school systems
(cooperation)
while also applying pressure for change within the system (competition).
As
venues for new skill sets and mindsets.
The
organizations that entrepreneurs create often have the kind of culture that
draws and retains achievement-oriented employees who might
not
otherwise be involved in the more bureaucratic public education system. In
exchange for a merit-based culture where they can see significant results from
their efforts, these people are willing to give up the security of
seniority-based progression within the traditional school
system.
“I have all the agility in the world—and I have nobody to blame but myself if I
don’t succeed,” says Larry Rosenstock, a former urban public school principal
turned entrepreneur who founded High Tech High Learning, a nonprofit charter
school management organization
based
in San Diego.
As
developers of learning laboratories where experimentation and ongoing learning are
encouraged.
As
problem-solvers, entrepreneurs are constant learners who regularly review progress
and correct course. Since this ongoing learning process is exactly what we are
asking our public schools to embrace today, entrepreneurial organizations can
demonstrate how this new dynamic might work in a school system. For example,
entrepreneurs that create national or regional systems of charter schools are
both increasing the supply of high-quality public schools and learning
important lessons about designing aligned systems of schools as they create
them from scratch.
WHAT
CREATES OPPORTUNITY FOR EDUCATION
ENTREPRENEURS?
The
individual entrepreneur is a person who perceives opportunity, finds the
pursuit of opportunity desirable in the context of his or her life situation,
and believes that success
is
possible.
—Howard
H. Stevenson and William A. Sahlman6
Entrepreneurs
can be important change agents for large, complex systems that need dramatic
improvement. But what specifically opens the door for entrepreneurs to make
this difference? In general, something changes suddenly or slowly over time,
requiring new problemsolving
approaches.
In most cases, many changes are happening simultaneously, creating a swirling
eddy of both challenges and opportunities for entrepreneurs. Here, we attempt
to detail the different types of change so that we can better understand what
resources education
entrepreneurs
need.
Change
in Expectations
The
current system of K-12 public schooling was created in a social and economic context
that was entirely different from our current one. Compulsory public education
arose in the early 1900s as a way of ensuring that the massive influx of
immigrants would be good. American citizens and productive workers in the
country’s emerging industrial economy. At the
time,
the national population was less than seventy-five million people, with only a
small portion of school-aged children attending school and an even smaller
fraction of those completing high school or college. 7 The economy was driven
by agriculture and industry, which offered the opportunity for a variety of
skill levels to earn a living wage, often without a formal education.
On
every front, this picture has changed dramatically. The national population has
tripled to nearly three hundred million, with forty-eight million students in
public schools. Prompted by the triumphs of the civil rights movement, we
expect more of our public schools today: it is no
longer
sufficient for a small percentage of children to be prepared for success in
college. Our nation’s postindustrial and increasingly global economy is now
driven by knowledge and by higher-order skills like symbolic reasoning,
analysis, and communication.
In
other words, the public’s expectations of the system have ballooned, such that
public schools are now expected to serve all children equally and well. This
change in expectations demands innovative new approaches. Many expect that
nearly all high school students should graduate ready to attend college, for
example, which would be more than triple the current rate of 30 percent. But
it’s not likely that we have—or should have—the political will to triple spending
in order to triple effectiveness, notes Kevin Hall, a former entrepreneur who
is now at The Broad Foundation. “The delivery system simply has to change to be
more productive,” says
Hall.
“Entrepreneurs can either access new resources or put resources together in
different ways to get to different outcomes.” In other words, this enormous
challenge has created opportunities for entrepreneurs to find more efficient,
effective ways of ensuring that all students receive a
high-quality
public education.
Change
in Market Structure
Because
public education is a public-sector institution charged with serving the public
good, public policy is the most common tool for changing its structure. Whether
at the federal, state, or local level, public policy shifts can create
entrepreneurial opportunity by requiring the people within a system to think
differently, and also by creating new “turf” to which nobody has yet laid
claim.
One
of the most significant policy shifts over the last several decades has been
the movement toward standards and accountability. As the expectations for
public schools have increased, so have the mechanisms for specifying what
students should know and be able to do
(in
the form of state standards), measuring whether they reach those standards
(assessment), and, more recently, imposing sanctions on schools and school
systems that fail to improve student outcomes (accountability).
Accountability
policies have introduced a number of opportunities—some might say “pain
points”—that entrepreneurs can address. For example, the No Child Left Behind
Act (NCLB) has created opportunities for entrepreneurs to provide supplemental
education services
for
students whose schools have not achieved adequate yearly progress (AYP) for
three years in a row. At the state level, policies that mandate the turnaround
of chronically failing schools have created demand for additional capacity to
manage these schools. In Philadelphia, state-level
accountability
has led to a change in the structure of the entire school system to support a portfolio
of entrepreneurs. Since the state took over the district in 2001, its School
Reform Commission has contracted with a variety of entrepreneurial education
providers to manage the city’s lowest-performing schools. Because the standards
and accountability movements have begun to define desired learning outcomes and
freed up the means for getting there, policymakers have created opportunities
for entrepreneurs to develop new approaches to schooling. State charter school laws
allow individuals and groups to create new public schools that are supported
with public dollars but managed independently. By specifying the expected
school performance in the school’s “charter,” these policies encourage
entrepreneurship by allowing charter school operators to use their own approach
to achieve those goals. These policies have spawned an
entire
subindustry of nearly 3,500 charter schools in forty states and the District of
Columbia, serving nearly one million students.10 The first wave of charter
schools consisted largely of individual charter schools, but these schools have
been joined by a diverse array of entrepreneurs who seek to build systems of
multiple charter schools. Policies that specify outcomes but allow different
approaches have also enabled entrepreneurs to create alternative programs for
teacher certification and school leader licensure.
One
of the best-known examples of entrepreneurial innovation in this area is Teach
For America, founded in 1989 by Wendy Kopp to recruit and prepare bright
college graduates for two years of teaching in high-need classrooms. Because
alternative credentialing regulations allowed for
different
approaches to preparation, Teach For America was able to develop innovative processes
to prepare teachers—including stringent criteria for candidate selection and
training curriculum targeted at teachers who will serve in low-income areas.
More recently, charter
school
systems like High Tech High and KIPP have begun developing their own
residency-based models. And New Leaders for New Schools has taken advantage of
this opportunity to develop a program for preparing urban principals in major
cities across the country.
Taken
together, public policies such as the ones described above have pushed public education
in a new direction. Although most of our public education systems were designed
to focus on inputs (dollars, hours, students served) and management
processes evolved accordingly,
the
emphasis of these recent policies is now on results (skills achieved,
content mastered, college attainment). This shift creates enormous
opportunities for entrepreneurs to provide the requisite
people,
tools, and practices.
