Why do we Educate?

TLDR - We are all investors in education, either directly or as citizens and taxpayers.  I developed a framework for understanding the industry.  A conclusion is that what we call 'education' is actually many different activities, with different customers, with different aims. The disagreements in effectiveness and reform should redirect first to the intended goal of the work, and how that person/school/project understands their work within the broad umbrella of 'education.'  Finally, there are many terrific leaders and programs to listen to and support when you align with their goals.

Why Focus Here

Every human on the planet is affected by education, defined here as systematic instruction to provide knowledge.  We educate to enable individuals and societies to prosper.

We can all complain about the current education system.  In fact, frustration with local education offerings is as global as education itself.   In America, it is a paradox that a majority of parents (73%) are completely or somewhat satisfied with the education their child is receiving, and also a majority (54%) are dissatisfied with the quality of education in the country overall (polling here).  

What might explain this discrepancy?  The complexity of education.  Education is both deeply personal to a child, family and community, but also a national interest. Americans with children experience the industry every day around the dinner table, and also while following contentious local and national political debates.  

Education is a profession for millions of adults, and also a vehicle for hope and change for millions of families.  The 'customers' of the service are largely minors, without direct political voice, yet it is one of our largest government spending programs.  The various positions of adults (teachers, administrators, policymakers, parents, researchers, tax-payers) lead to naturally differing perspectives on the industry.

We can ignore the political debates. We can hope for novel technology or new innovation to change the current system.  But no one, anywhere, can avoid the impact of education on lives and our collective prosperity.  As citizens, the educational systems of our local municipality, our country, and even other countries, will affect our economic and social well-being.

Important Caveat

Education is a well-studied field.  Because of its importance, the industry attracts many creative, talented and ambitious practitioners, researchers and entrepreneurs.  A list of some initial resources is at the bottom of this article. These have been my initial guide in developing my understanding, but there are many, many others.  Suggestions and additions welcome.

Why We Educate

Over $4T is spent annually in education (over $800B in the US), making it one of the largest industries in the world.  The spending occurs in every country in the world, and across different age groups. Primary, or elementary, education supports elementary learning for children, typically from age of 3-5 to 11-13.  Think reading, writing and arithmetic. The outcome of successful primary education is literacy and numeracy.  Secondary education is generally from age 11-13 to age 18, roughly what is considered high school in the United States.  Post-secondary, or tertiary, education encompasses university and post-university level.

Today over 98% of children in the world attend primary school, up significantly over the past century.

Globally, there are over 1B individuals today with incomplete primary or no education. That number will fall in half over the next forty years, as recent increases in access to education are revealed through natural demographic change. At the same time, the number of people with a post-secondary education will grow by more than 1B people.

What will be the outcome of this additional 1B people with post secondary education on the world? We don’t know.  Paul Romer's Nobel Prize winning work on New Growth Theory suggests we should be exceedingly optimistic on the impact of an additional 1B educated knowledge workers in the global economy.

In the description above, I included a goal for primary education (literacy and numeracy), but not for secondary or tertiary education. There is no consensus for why we educate students at these levels, which is a remarkable statement given the amount of global attention, resources and commitment to keeping children in school through high school and university.

Perhaps this isn’t a big problem.  Aside from the challenges, particularly in the US, around affordability for university, there isn’t significant disagreement about the value of tertiary education. The world is getting wealthier, our industries more complex and interdependent.  The consensus view is that the additional education is a positive for the individual and for society.

Yet, without aligning on why it is a positive, investors, innovators and traditional participants cannot coordinate on prospective models for change.

Consider potential narratives for why we educate, with the implications:

Individual economic well being - Getting to and through college provides significant economic benefit: learners with an college degree in engineering, computer science, nursing and economics earn over $500,000 more over a career than those without college degrees. Therefore, the argument goes, if we want to provide the American dream for more children, they should all complete tertiary education.  

A version of this argument goes back to start of public schooling in America, when Horace Mann developed the framework for universally accessible publicly funded schools to ‘equalize the conditions of men.’   Adopters of this view pay close attention to the cost and accessibility of education, as well as the long-term economic benefits of differing educational pathways for learners.   The school choice movement emerged from this view, and the ‘achievement gap’ remains an important focus area.  

For those that focus on this purpose, the key data they look at to evaluate individual projects and mark progress include test scores, college graduation rates, particularly for students of color and lower economic status, and student debt burden.

Human enrichment - A more recent adaption of the economic mobility goal is that education should provide learners choice in their lives.  Economic security may well nest within this goal, but it isn't the primary purpose of an education. Some may choose to pursue careers with high earning potential, but other learners may choose alternative pathways.

This view can be reached by two very different camps. On one side, traditional advocates of the ‘well-rounded’ education, who view the study of Shakespeare, art,  and language as part of a rich human experience. Exposure to ideas serves as a foundation for future creative expression and personal fulfillment. As many as possible, therefore, should be provided access to secondary and tertiary education with the freedom to learn. This is a classic view of the liberal arts education.

More recently, the goal of human enrichment has also been adopted by many of the most ardent reformers in the education space.  They approach the question from a very different angle:  questioning the racial and socio-economic equity of the traditional system, including college access and standardized testing, and the uniformity of a standard sixteen-year classroom experience.  They respond to an unjust and expensive education system with a renewed focus on maximizing individual choice, rather than universally pushing for all students to complete university.  

Regardless of why advocates come to the position, those that support the goal of human enrichment use different language than the economic well-being supporters.  Work in this area emphases non-traditional academic pursuits such as social and emotional learning, creativity and group problem solving in primary and secondary school, and alternatives to tertiary education such as trade schools, apprenticeships and new pathways from student to employment.  

There is an openness to consider new metrics for success for education.  You will see language include personalization, ‘student centered design’, the local ‘context’ in which school is situated and a ‘whole child’ approach.  

For those that focus on this purpose, the key data they look at to evaluate individual projects and mark progress include high school (or equivalent) graduation rates, and empirical research from innovative models, though these data are not always in line with the stated goals of the movement, and advocates concede there is more work to be done on how to accurately measure a ‘choice filled’ goal over the long term.

A tension exists not only on how to measure success, but also in whether and how learners can make their choices.  Should an 14 year old be able to step off a traditional college track to enroll in a trade school, when such a decision is associated with lower lifetime earnings?  What about a 10 year old? Who decides, and how should society overall wrestle with the unequal earnings outcomes?  

Social cohesion. Some believe the primary purpose of education is to support social stability. Students attend school to become good citizens. The United States is a democracy, and therefore needs a well-informed electorate to serve as a check on elected officials.  

The goal of social cohesion also has two very different camps within it.  A traditionalist view that schools help bring about good citizens through the studying of classic American works - think Huck Finn, the Federalist papers and I'm Just a Bill.   And, a more progressive view which includes providing anti-racist curricula and a more complete picture of American history, past and present.  Both have the goal of building towards a moral society, but with quite different views on what that means.  

It is from within these two groups who share the same outlook on the purpose of education that we get the most heated education debates.  Adopters of this goal place more relative emphasis on primary and secondary education, and on what exactly is taught in the classroom.  The political disputes around banned books, student curriculum and parental choice emerge from this discussion.  Local school boards are the locus of energy and discussion.

For those that focus on this purpose, the key data they look at to evaluate individual projects and mark progress are school board elections, elementary school curricula, school choice and enrollment.

National economic competitiveness.  A significantly vocal community argues that students should complete post-secondary education to improve national competitiveness. The world is interconnected, and if the students in competitive country X [Russians in the 70s, Japanese in the 80s, Chinese today] are studying more then they will invent the industries of tomorrow and we will lose our economic competitiveness.  Eric Hanusek's work, particularly The Knowledge Capital of Nations supports this work.    

For those that focus on this purpose, the key data they look at to evaluate individual projects and mark progress include international test scores (PISA), college graduation, the number of STEM graduates in particular, and the performance / size of research universities.

Of all these possible purposes for education, the one description that stands out especially comes from Lisa Delpit's Other People's Children. It is a beautiful sentiment, open to wide interpretation:

A few years ago, I asked Oscar Kwageley, a friend, teacher, Yupik Eskimo scientist, and wise man, what the purpose of education is. His response startled me and opened my eyes even more: he said, "The purpose of education is to learn to die satiated with life."  

Two Additional Debates

Beyond considering the purpose of education, there are important questions on how and why we understand what our education system is actually providing to learners. Many investors simply want to ‘look at the data’ and invest behind what is 'working.' They analogize to looking at a company income statement – if student knowledge is growing (measured by either testing scores or graduation rates) then it is ‘working.’

The data argument is complicated for two reasons.  First, there is rich debate about the validity of testing.  We know standardized testing introduces biases, and disparate access to test prep and other support resources distort the results.

Second, even discounting the biases, it is an open question if testing can accurately reflect the learning intended in education. Consider the goals above, what correlation exists between ‘human enrichment’ and SAT scores?  Or social cohesion?   It is true that there is a strong relationship between college graduation and subsequent income, but the relationship between test scores and college completion is weak (James Heckman research, as discussed in How Children Succeed).  Increasingly, education reform advocates are studying household and community health, and personality traits like grit and optimism as more predictive indicators for future success.  Should we be systematically measuring and optimizing for those rather than traditional academic measures?

A second important ongoing debate relates to models of learning. We don’t agree on how students learn. The ongoing debates about classroom size, use of technology, student tracking, and ‘character’ instruction all relate to uncertainty about how we learn.  There is ongoing experimentation to answer this question, but unfortunately progress is inhibited by the related questions around the purpose of education and the accuracy of testing. If we can’t agree on the goal and on how to measure progress, reaching consensus on the pedagogical choices of different schools will be impossible.

Finally, it is important to remember that over 14M Americans already work in the education industry. And, over 50M Americans are parents of school age learners. Education is a top spending area for state and local governments.  Parents and governments are naturally risk averse, and organized teacher unions can resist change.    

In other words, education is a diffuse, yet massive, industry, with entrenched political interests, unspecified goals and inaccurate measurement. Experimentation is naturally limited by these dynamics, as is dissemination of innovation.    Investment decisions must account for these dynamics.

Investment Theses

Because education is so broad, investment activities in the industry need to be broken down into an understanding framework.  What change is the team seeking to make?  How does that change map to existing work in the field?

I see five primary categorizations for potential education investments:

• Geographic scope
• Level of education
• Change model
• Theory of Education
• Change goal

Investment theses emerge across the grid.  New and existing organizations map to various pathways.  For example, Donors Choose, a wonderful cause, focuses efforts on a local level, in primary schools, implementing a whole child approach to the median student.   While some categorizations are clear, such as primary schools, others are subjective. Donors Choose doesn’t explicitly direct their work toward the median student, but it also doesn’t limit itself to at risk schools, nor does it focus on pushing the upper boundaries for classroom facilities.  

In this case, and in all the examples below, I am making a judgement call.  Few organizations would like to be pinned down in this way.  I suspect most would disagree with the labels I have here.  Many are indeed multi-dimensional in their approach, making my categorizations limited at best.

Yet, I still find the exercise helpful. I am seeking to categorize each organization within a broader framework education.  I may not get these correct, but the exercise focuses the attention on understanding how the organization fits within the broader education ecosystem. Yes, nuance is limited. Yes, I am missing important aspects of each organization's work.  But the benefit of the approach is consistency which can be used to understand and appreciate a wide range of organizations.

Testing the framework, here are some other well-known models/investments categorized:

- Rocketship (national network of charter schools) - national, primary, skills acquisition, innovate, inequality

- Class Dojo - (software to connect families with learners’ classroom) national, primary and secondary, whole child, pilot/innovation, median

- Winnie - (pre-school for everyone):  national, primary, whole child, scale, median.

- Quizlet (AI learning assistance with online flashcards) -  global, secondary + tertiary, skills, implement, median

- Harlem Children’s Zone (end intergenerational poverty in Harlem) – local, primary, whole child, innovate, inequality

- Embark  (micro middle school embedded in a local business) -  local, secondary, whole child, innovate, median

- Teach for America (two year teaching placements) – national, primary, skills, implement, inequality

- Sora Schools  (live, accredited virtual schooling) – national, secondary, whole child, disrupt, median student

- Children’s Literacy Initiative (in person training and reading programs)-  local, primary, skills, implement, inequality

- Code.org  - (online coding tutorials) national, primary, skills, innovate, median

- Rivet School (online college degree program) -  national, tertiary, signaling, disrupt, median

- Synthesis School (online complex games and simulations)-  global, secondary, skills, disrupt, outliers

These investment theses represent a top-down view of the industry.  There is no ‘right’ investment thesis – each pathway through the five categories represents a different change goal and strategy. There will be important and successful organizations with a range of different approaches.  What matters is evaluating the investment opportunity in regard to the stated goals of the organization. The framework’s purpose is to help distill those goals into a structure so as to compare alternative approaches.

My argument is that this investment mapping should happen before evaluating the specifics of any opportunity, to ground the investment in a broader understanding of the industry. Of course, any investment should also undergo additional underwriting of the founder/team, traction, operating model, valuation, etc

Investors too will disagree on the specific categorization of individual organizations.  These are subjective choices.  What I may label here as an effort focused on ‘outliers’ because of the high cost of a service, another may see as median by projecting forward into the future when a service proliferates at a lower cost for all (e.g. the Tesla theory of change – enter at high end of market, but broaden to all with scale over time).

Finally, there are substantive open questions that all education investors, policy makers and practitioners are still wrestling with. I’ve included a discussion on three below in the Appendix.  

My Approach

My wife and I have several current investments in education, and intend to have more.   Here are a selection of these, mapped against the framework above:

- KIPP Schools– a national network of charter schools

- African Leadership Academy- pre-university two year residence program for exceptional students across the African continent

- Oakland Reach - (parent led, local advocacy and learning).  Oakland Reach builds community and organization with local parents.  The work involves both local programing and advocacy, both made stronger by the amplification of individual contribution through a community approach .

- Outschool  – interactive, online classes for curious learners.  (Included though I am invested as an LP in a fund, and as a teacher on the platform).

I hadn’t put these investments through the framework before this work. It was not intentional to have one investment focused on inequality, one on outliers and one on median students, though it perhaps makes sense.

I believe KIPP is outstanding in the work that they do.  They are one of the best organizations to support for the goal or reducing education inequity in the US.  I would be reluctant to divert funds to another organization that shared the same strategy, but one could certainly identify other organizations with that same goal but a different approach, perhaps with a more ‘whole child’ or local approach, such as Harlem Children’s Zone. Both may be worthy of investment.

I’m using this framework as a lens for looking out at the industry.  Here are some organizations I don’t have any relationship with today, but am curious to learn more about:

- Kaipod (in person virtual learning in pods).   Kaipod tackles the complexity of the teacher role by dividing the position into a live facilitator of the student experience, and online instruction.  Students gather in a physical space, for socialization, focus and community, but the academic instruction is provided by individualized online learning.

- Primer (online learning in a ‘club’ format) -  Primer builds online classes and micro-schools around student interests.  The approach is to ‘take children seriously’ in determining their learning goals and focus areas.

- Embark  (micro middle school) -  Embark runs a micro middle school embedded in two local small businesses, a coffee shop and a bicycle store.  It is an integrated learning environment where students learn from both classroom and real world experience.  

I have used the word ‘investment’ throughout, while including both for profit and non-profit organizations. This is intentional.  Change will not come from the for-profit sector alone. We need intentional, thoughtful investors in both for profit and non-profit organizations to continue the work to improve education for all.

Appendix

1. Open Debates/Questions in the Field

- How to operate in a space that is dominated by government spending?  In the US, the public sector spends $800B annually (over 90% of that is from state and local sources) on education.  80% of that spending goes to salaries and benefits.    Given the scale of that capital, how should investors respond? There is a rich debate about whether to advocate / invest in ‘reform’ vs ‘disrupt’ existing systems.  I don’t believe that question is resolved, and possibly will never be resolved in a universal manner, but the scale and stickiness of public spending in the sector is something all education investors should consider.

- The application of technology.  Disrupting Class (more below), written in 2008, has the central argument for personalization of learning through technology.  The end of the ‘factory model’ of learning where a teacher stands in front of the class and tries to impart knowledge equally to 20+ learners who all may have different interests, aptitudes, and learning styles.  Surely, with today’s technology we can provide a more individualized experience, tailoring learning to each learners needs.  A decade and half later, not much has changed in most classrooms. And, many argue the pursuit of technology in the first place is misguided.  Students learn best in classroom settings with other learners, they argue.  In this view, technology is at best neutral, and could be a misguided prop that prevents deep learning.  What to believe about when and how technology, particularly personalized learning technology, will go mainstream remains an open debate.

- Multiple ‘purposes’ for education.  Above, I highlighted the open question on the purpose of education.  I won’t revisit the details again, but what wasn’t explicitly stated there is the possibility that there are multiple concurrent purposes, either at the individual or societal level.  What we call 'education' may be economic empowerment for some, while for others it is about a life well lived.  One way to probe this thinking is to consider household economic status.  Children in the top 1% of American households by income (~500k learners) are generally not at risk of severe economic dislocation (see intergenerational mobility research), while education is one of the primary levers for intergenerational mobility for learners with lower economic status.  'Education' serves a very different purpose for each group.  The implication is that any single measure of success, such as test scores, graduation rates or income rates, may be misguided.

2. Other Resources

Recommended Books

- The Smartest Kids in the World  Amanda Ripley's book is a terrific read. She took a novel approach to the question of the challenges are in American education by following American students when they go abroad.  By looking at the experience of American kids in Korean, Finnish and Polish high schools (all of which score higher than the US on the international PISA test).  The book wrestles with the purpose of education, the tradeoffs of test driven learning models, and the importance of a ‘culture’ of learning.

- How Children Succeed, by Paul Tough. Terrific book developing the argument for what I have called the ‘whole child’ approach to student learning.  The subtitle is ‘Grit, Curiosity and the Hidden Power of Character.’  Citing academic work and personal stories, Tough makes a compelling case for considering factors beyond reading, writing and arithmetic instruction when hoping to improve education outcomes.

-Other People's Children, but Lisa Delpit.  Highly recommended. Focused on cultural context in classroom, and the negative implications of progressive education initiatives for students of color.  

-Prepared: What Kids Need for a Fulfilled Life, by Diane Tavenner.   Inspiring read full of perspective for what it is like to design a school from scratch.  The stories and perspective throughout influenced my thinking on the purpose of school, and how to parent effectively.  Highly recommended.  

- Disrupting Class, by Clayton Christensen, Michael Horn and Curtis Johnson.  Christensen is my favorite strategy teacher.  I was excited to learn that he wrote an entire book on education.  The focus is on technology, specifically how student centered application of online learning and personalization will change education.  What is noteworthy here, and why this book is included in this list, is that it was written in 2008.  Why hasn’t the disruption predicted almost 15 years ago happened yet?  Reading this book with the lens of the present day is a helpful instruction on the challenges of innovation writ large in this massive, complex sector.

Online Resources

• The 74 Million  
• Jon Danner Blog  
• The Montessorium
• Edsurge

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