Sign Up For Our Newsletter

Buffett and Green Dot: an open question to Andrew Coulson

Andrew Coulson is a little pessimistic on the Gates/Buffett philanthropic leviathan, pointing out that others have been here before:

Mr. Buffett and the Gateses are not the first to invest over a billion dollars in an ambitious school reform plan. Ambassador and TV Guide  mogul Walter Annenberg trod this path during the 1990s, donating $500 million of his own money and another $800 million in matching funds to the "Annenberg Challenge."

Mr. Annenberg’s goal was to create exemplary schools and districts that would act as models for the nation. He sought not incremental change, but systemwide transformation. He didn’t get it. Though some Annenberg Challenge projects showed promise, at least for a time, their impact on the system as a whole was negligible.

Why? The Wreck of the Annenberg can be attributed to a single fundamental flaw in the ambassador’s approach: he assumed that excellence, once demonstrated, would automatically be imitated.

It is easy to see why people who have amassed riches in the private sector might assume that successful models are always mimicked on a broad scale. That is what happens in competitive markets – including competitive education markets. 

In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith praised the vigorous education industry of classical Athens, noting that: "The demand for … instruction produced, what it always produces, the talent for giving it; and the emulation which an unrestrained competition never fails to excite appears to have brought that talent to a very high degree of perfection."

But the "emulation" that Mr. Annenberg was counting on never happened because there was no competition to "excite" it. Absent market forces, America’s public school monopoly has no mechanism by which excellence can be routinely identified, perpetuated and disseminated. As a result, there are myriad examples of public school excellence achieved and then lost.

So businesspeople fail because they put their expertise to work in a model that isn’t built for it–a model that, Andrew goes on to say, is fundamentally broken due to union ossification and lack of competition.  In that context, look at this statement from Green Dot guru Steve Barr:

"We’re really trying to figure out how to take research and development (at charters), couple it with political will and create systematic improvement. We’re not going to create a district with 1,000 charter schools.

"The goal is for all LAUSD schools to have the basic tenets we know work and eliminate the need for charters."

Without having to fight his way through the bureaucratic and political obstacles of Los Angeles Unified, Barr hopes to demonstrate what works in public schools and spark citywide school reform. 

Barr sounds not at all unlike Annenberg: Green Dot will be the model for excellence, LAUSD schools will steal from Green Dot’s playbook, and L.A. schoolchildren will be the better for it.  But here’s my question for Andrew: since we’re talking about charters and therefore some element of competition is present, shouldn’t there be at least a little more optimism with respect to Green Dot?  Feel free to leave a comment in the thread, or fire off an e-mail if you prefer.