One wonders if we could not learn something from the nation of Brazil.
Brazil is a huge nation, almost a continent in itself, with a population of 190 million of which 50 million are school children.
while it is not as good in education as the United States, much less Finland or Singapore or South Korea, it has found a way to drag itself out of a poor public school educational system: Corporate owned schools.
One of Brazils largest banks, Bradesco, recognizing the need for better educational outcomes than an almost 60% dropout rate in the coming technological revolution, has started a series of private schools with free tuition, lunches, books and uniforms, housed in state-of-the-art facilities.
The 51,000 students are taught by teachers who earn 50% more than public school teachers. Bradesco Bank was started by an entrepreneur with only a fourth grade education but he understood better than anyone the limitations on those without a formal education.
Bradesco is just one of perhaps a thousand Brazilian companies who have taken the public school system by the horns, and either taken over the management of public schools or started their own schools.
That is certainly a model that could work here in the United States, and Apple Computer is perfectly positioned to do it as the leader. Apple has dominated schools from the very beginning and made a ton of money from that foresight. Steve Jobs has donated a lot of money to education, but without the further step of starting his own schools…something he can and should do rather than importing intelligence from India.
Corporations have always loaned talent to public schools and universities. Now is the time to take the next step — corporate ownership. A cursory search of Google finds no corporate-owned “public schools” in the sense that the public in general is invited to attend.
It is time, before our public schools completely collapse.
California public schools already have collapsed, and that is sufficient reason for corporation that depend upon an educated labor force to jump in. There are something like 17 Fortune 500 corporations in California that should take the lead, but there are may more Fortune 1000 corporations that could easily step in.
I know that Hewlett-Packard has had a partnership agreement with the Poway Unified School District, and when I taught at National University we had an excellent IBM loaned executive teaching computer science.
We now have universities that are operating excellent Charter Schools, and a good transition might be for corporations to fund university-led Charter Schools.
Universities have an incentive to feed higher education, not a bad incentive to be certain, and corporations have an incentive to have an educated workforce, another substantive incentive. Public schools as currently constituted have neither incentive to perform, nor do they face any punishment for failure.
It is time to reform public schools, and do so quickly. The Brazilian model, in some form, could be a better answer than what we are currently doing because there is no doubt to anyone who looks at the numbers that what we are doing is called, failing.
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