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Thursday, October 6, 2005

By Ralf Seiffe

One of the bright spots is Bruno Behrend, back on WIND 560 AM with one of the few, long-form programs that examines important, topical issues. Now expanded to two hours, the show is cunningly scheduled to compete with humanist Dean Edell and to be available before church on Sunday mornings.

This past week’s show concerned public education.

Behrend invited Neil Parthune a student in the University of Illinois’s education school to spend the entire two hours discussing the state of the schooling we provide our children. If one assumes that the student reflects his academy, it occurs that the educational system that has served us for 150 years may be nearing the end of its useful life.

What’s bothering many is the fact that public school academic performance has been declining for the past two generations.

According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Americans now in their 50s were the world’s best students. Others, now in their 30s declined but were still first world performers. Now, however, student who have just graduated from our public school system score dead last among 18 industrialized countries.

Behrend put this evidence squarely in front of his guest, asking why our kids’ performance has declined for two generations. The answer to this question, which his guest would not or could not answer, is what taxpayers want from education professionals.

This is not the only time a discussion of education has become mired in complexities, jargon and pleas for more money.

This got me thinking that the trouble educrats have answering this question is an expected symptom of a product moving towards the end of its life cycle.

Product Life Cycle theory holds that new products are introduced and are adopted by opinion leaders. Then, these products spread to more conservative consumers and as they grow, they become dominant in their category. Later, other new ideas arise and begin to challenge the established order and displace once-dominant products.

Ideas have life cycles, too. Unlike tangible products, however, ideas are much more nebulous.

It’s easy to see the difference between two competing cars or computers but it’s harder to understand the relative worth of two ideas. In the consumer realm, the market eventually votes. Sears and Marshall Fields were once great concepts but they are now fading; mergers and name changes clearly show that consumers, one-by-one, have moved on to Wal-Mart and Target. In the future, some other distribution method may displace the current leaders.

More esoteric ideas, public schools, for example, wither when they can no longer explain contradictory evidence. When this tension reveals itself, supporters of the status quo often become dogmatic and conservative while adherents of the new concept become exasperated that their rivals cannot see what, to them, is obvious.

For 150 years, the public school system has been the dominant idea for educating the masses and one that enjoyed almost universal support. Americans were justly proud of the system that created our middle class. Moreover, free and universal education attracted the world’s achievers and these immigrants supercharged our economy.

Now, however, evidence is accumulating that contradicts our perception of the public school system’s worth.

One key indicator that the system isn’t meeting expectations is our student’s academic performance even though we are spending much more money--in real terms--than we ever have.

Another indicator of a dying idea is the effort that its acolytes must expend to make their theory meet reality. No better sign that educrats are having this trouble is the declining productivity of the public school system.

The rising ratio of administrators to teachers indicates that for whatever reason, the public school system is having trouble meeting its mission. It is spending more to administer, rather than operate, the system and the effect is that no education professional can finish a thought without the words “…with more resources”.

Misdirection is another technique adherents of evaporating ideas often use. This keeps challengers off-balance.

In the case of education, extraneous concepts such as “diversity”, political correctness and odd-ball curriculums have replaced achievement as the metric of success.

In the free market, a product that’s long term performance had declined as much as public education’s would waste away to obscurity.

Of course, there is no free market for education and despite educators’ complaint that they are not paid enough nor do they get enough respect, they fight to preserve their monopoly with ferocity.

This monopoly allows those invested in Big Education to believe they are not obligated to answer that very simple question about performance. After all, they have been very successful in beating almost all challenges to their hegemony.

Nevertheless, they would do well to consider this: parents in affluent districts are beginning to purchase alternative, educational services. Kumon, locally, and offshore on-line services are penetrating these opinion-leading consumers. Product life cycle theory tells us that demand for these services will spread to later-adopting parents because they want their children to have the same advantages.

When the mainstream begins to purchase these services, real alternatives to the current, public school paradigm will also begin to develop. When it does, costs will drive parents to demand that education funding go to the student rather than the school. It will be interesting to see how the product life cycles of these competing concepts plays out.

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Ralf Seiffe advises business start-ups and product launches from Chicago, Illinois, and is a political analyst and columnists for the Illinois Leader.