No Competition, No R&D

I have one observation about education that I can never get out of my mind. When John Quincy Adams, one of our smartest Presidents, was a lad (fifteen years old I think) he applied to Harvard. He spoke Latin, Russian, French, and Dutch in addition to English. He had read the classics of the day and studied geometry.

I know this because of David McCullough's biography of his dad. John Adams was in Europe when he received his son's letter detailing his disappointment at not being admitted to Harvard.

I couldn’t help but wonder how many kids leave Harvard today knowing as much as JQA did when he was rejected. In the intervening 200+ years, transportation has progressed from the horse buggy to the 2006 Lexus, today's youth have easy access to inexpensive books, computers and the Internet. Medicine has gone from leeches and bleedings to MRIs and gene therapy.

All these aspects of life have made mind-boggling improvements. Show President Adams a GPS-equipped motorcar, an airplane, any aspect of modern life and he'd probably faint. Take him in a classroom and the only surprise would be the lack of respect.

Readers of this blog will accept that the lack of competition is what allows an industry to not progress, we can argue about which elements of Dewey and his modern acolytes have caused it to regress. But Chris Whittle, CEO of Edison Schools, narrows it further in a Guest Editorial in the WSJ today, "SOS Save Our Schools."(paid site, sorry!)

What if Ford announced tomorrow that it was eliminating all research and development in order to add $7.4 billion to its annual bottom line? Readers of these pages would instantly recognize the absurdity of such an action because only through R&D can a company maintain its competitiveness and value. That an organization with more than twice the annual revenues of Ford has virtually no R&D budget will surely be surprising. But R&D was not stopped. Rather R&D was never seriously begun.

The entity with virtually no R&D? American public education. The revenue for K-12 schooling in the U.S. is around $400 billion per year. Our spending on K-12 education in just two school days equals the entire revenue of an entry-level Fortune 500 company. Yet despite spending so much to operate our schools, our investment in advancing their design and updating their systems is negligible.

Why do you "waste" money on R&D? To keep ahead of competitors. No competition, no R&D; No R&D, no improvement.

Whittle goes on to suggest that this might be a good place for the Federal government to put its budget.

This seems like a perfect example of where the federal government could and should step in to fill a breach. Certainly it has the required scale. Certainly such involvement seems appropriate, if the prerequisite for federal action is the inability of local or state entities to act. Federal engagement in innovation in other categories critical to our national well-being provides ample precedent. Consider the $27 billion of R&D money pumped into the National Institutes of Health every year to help bring our citizens one of the finest health-care systems on the globe. How about the $9 billion that went into just one Department of Defense project: the design and development of the Joint Strike Fighter?

I know most of this blog's readers (both?...) would lean toward zero fed involvement in schools -- as would I. Whittle makes a compelling case about scale. Our schools are thankfully decentralized. And I would confess that politicians will spend money on education to get votes. They should perhaps pick something with efficacy.

How do you keep the unions out, Mr. Whittle? Won't they just drive the train through their influence and kill any real reform? Mr. Whittle bats .500 against the unions (the only person in the country over .000), maybe he has a plan.

Education Posted by John Kranz at November 4, 2005 11:14 AM