It is almost a year since Mark Zuckerberg created a buzz when he announced that he is pledging $100 million to improve the troubled public schools on the Oprah Show. In fact I had almost forgotten about it till such time it appeared as a news segment on the Nightly News today on NBC.
It was announced that roughly about $9 million has been spent as of today. It is then natural to find out what has improved as a result of spending that much money. I must admit that I have not done enough research to see how it has been spent. With little information I have, I know that a $1 million was spent on a survey and the rest of $7 million was spent to improve the schools.
That hit home! That’s more than enough to provide text books to almost every school in the district where my kids go to school. There are 27 schools with a student enrollment of 20K+. Assuming text-book costs around $100, I would need just $2 million – just for the books.
However, my daughter spends around $1K per year on her text books just doing undergrad. With 30K+ students at her college the students at that college alone will be spending $30 million on books. Most often than not, all these books are just a newer editions of the same prescribed book, and, the differences more often than not just incremental. Moreover, each university has got its own prescribed text-book even though the degree they graduate from is still in the same college across those universities. I thought that this is a wasteful supply of materials to learn when the same incremental changes could have been supplied as addendum to the older version – thus saving trees, going green and, most importantly, make the education affordable. By doing so, the $30 million spent on newer versions of books, can then just be reduced to $3 million by providing addendum to the older versions.
Has this hit home? Not yet? Look out for my next blog on health care. I am going to hit home on the main component, the administrative costs , that are wasteful because of the two things – processes failing to keep pace with the consumerized products, and, the regulations that are in place to stifle the process improvements necessary to quicken the pace of adaptation. I think the infrastructure improvements, rather, I should say the disruptive improvements are necessary to make that kind of changes in the existing processes.
For that perspective, the question is – should we use the remaining $100 million on churning out wasteful materials or establish an infrastructure that is innovative and works for the 21st century model of learning?