Education Innovation: Tougher than It Looks. This article hits the nail on the head of one of the largest problems in our society, which is everyone is trying to get more money. Normally that wouldn't be a problem. I grew up as a republican and entrepreneurship is one of the major tenants of that political party. However, the issue here is that no one is willing to invest the money in programs that could potentially really help the schools in this country. It is the very same issue that we are facing in our government today. So many of the brightest and greatest thinkers have absolutely no business or desire going into politics because of exactly that: there is no business going into it. The president of the United States of America makes something like 110,000 dollars a year. Mind you this is a pretty penny for pretty much all of us normal folks. The only "problem" is that the truly innovative people like Bill Gates and others like him who are able to build and develop and fund programs make millions and millions of dollars doing what they do now rather than go into government. This article points out the same issue: for profit organizations don't want to wait for a most likely mediocre return on the investment that they would get by going into the research field of education. They most likely realize that even if they waited 10-15 years to get a return on their investment, they would probably only break even, because if they were lucky enough that enough school districts had purchased their programs or whatever they are selling, more research would come out that would render theirs in second place. What then? Start over from scratch? It isn't like the computer business where you can just get out there and do more research and development to get the newest, faster processor and beat out the competition that way. There is so much prior knowledge to build off of there that you have a legitimate starting point. I'm willing to bet that there isn't nearly the same kind of thing with the development of teaching strategies because of the issues this article described. There is no real way to win. Even if they demonstrate in a small subject area that something works, it won't work for everyone. Even then if it has been found to be successful in that setting, there is the very distinct possibility that when it is sent out into the real world, some teachers won't use it because it isn't technically practical. Why would someone buy it? Exactly, they wouldn't. So why would others work on developing it. Obviously the answer here is that educators don't teach for the money otherwise they wouldn't be a teacher. The issue is that the rest of the world runs on this notion.
No I'm not arguing for the redistribution of wealth. Just trying to put my voice out there that there is a very obvious reason why we have the issues described in the article.
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