Education Week - February 27, 2013 - 16

EDUCATION WEEK

FEBRUARY 27, 2013

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INDUSTRY & INNOVATION > Tracking business trends and emerging models in K-12
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Ed. Entrepreneur Classes Targeting K-12 Innovators
for it’s own sake, without a lot of
thought put into what we want it
to look like in schools.”

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1

‘Very Intense Experience’

Michael Stravato for Education Week

have become increasingly focused
on bringing new academic and
financial models to school districts, which face pressure to raise
test scores and control costs.
At the same time, higher education, business, and school leaders have become increasingly
convinced that universities can
do more to encourage the development of new technologies and
ideas that can benefit schools, if
entrepreneurs are given encouragement and sufficient knowledge
of the primary and secondary
school landscape.
That thinking is evident at
institutions such as the University of Pennsylvania’s graduate
school of education, which has
had a long-standing interest in
promoting entrepreneurship in
education and is seeking to expand those efforts.
The goal is to bring about “an
absolute merger of researchers, the education community,
investors, and entrepreneurs
in a way that benefits schools,”
said Barbara Kurshan, a former private-sector entrepreneur
who is now the executive director of academic innovation at the
graduate school in Philadelphia.
“If we don’t figure out a way to
help these groups speak to each
other,” she said, “we’re not going
to see any of the benefits reach
the classroom.”
The education school’s work on
education entrepreneurship is
playing out on a number of fronts.
Since 2010, the school has
staged a competition designed to
spawn potential breakthrough
ideas and products in the education market. It will award
$120,000 in prizes this year. The
competition is meant partly to
expose winners to educators and
researchers, as well as venture
capitalists and others, school officials say.
Ms. Kurshan, who joined the

Eric M. Schmidt, who studied education entrepreneurship at Rice University in Houston when he
was a teacher, is now the school leader—essentially the principal—of a middle school in Houston.
KIPP Courage College Prep is part of the Knowledge Is Power Program’s charter school network.

school last year, also has been
working on a project to encourage a more direct link between
education research and entrepreneurship—so that academic
scholars with sound research can
have the support to take their
ideas “to product or practice,” she
said, and so that entrepreneurs
can understand how research can
and should inform their work.

Innovation vs. Reality
The background Ms. Kurshan
brings to the task includes work in
higher education, and time spent
as the executive director of an
open-source education provider, a
developer of children’s software for
Microsoft, and co-chief executive
officer of an education investment
fund.
The University of Pennsylva-

nia’s graduate school also offers a
course for master’s and Ph.D. students in education and social entrepreneurship, taught by Martin
Ihrig, an adjunct assistant professor at the Wharton business
school who is also serving as a senior fellow in the graduate school
of education.
Most of the 20 or so students in
the class have worked in schools
and intend to return to them after
earning their degrees, Mr. Ihrig
said.
His course draws on texts such as
those focused on the theory of entrepreneurship, “knowledge assets,”
and a third titled Marketbusters: 40
Strategic Moves That Drive Exceptional Business Growth.
Mr. Ihrig said the course addresses entrepreneurship in broad
terms, focusing on the “charge to
improve” and weighing the push
for innovation while also considering the needs of students, parents,
school board members, and others.
He sees benefits both for educators and for business leaders and
other innovators in understanding
one another’s needs.
“Where does innovation come
from?” Mr. Ihrig said. “It’s from
cross-disciplinary integration.”
A different effort is under way
at Carnegie Mellon University
in Pittsburgh: The university
will launch a master’s-degree
program next fall in learning sciences and engineering. It will be
designed to refine the skills and
knowledge of students who plan
to work in the education industry,
including publishing, technology,
curriculum development, and
testing.
Students are likely to have
backgrounds in computer science,
design, and psychology, as well
as education, said Carolyn Rosé,

an associate professor in the university’s institutes of language
technologies and human-computer interaction. They will take
classes in curriculum, instruction,
e-learning, assessment, and software, with electives in data mining, intelligent tutoring, cognitive
modeling, and other areas.
The program’s designers want
its students to gain the ability
to apply science to the creation
of products in technology, curriculum, and other areas that will
help schools, and to work in other
settings where learning takes
place, from homes to museums,
Ms. Rosé said.
It’s a program “specifically designed to train people to go off into
industry,” Ms. Rosé said.
“You don’t want science to not
go anywhere,” she added. The
program “was conceived as a way
of making sure our research had
more of an impact in the world.”
When efforts to bring innovation
to K-12 schools fail, it’s often because those with new ideas tend
to treat schools as “market-style
entities,” and they have little
understanding of the institutional and educational challenges
in play, said Christopher Lubienski, an associate professor of education policy at the University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
The focus tends to be on “management techniques” rather than
on ideas that can drive academic
improvement, said Mr. Lubienski, who has studied efforts to
bring innovation to schools in the
United States and internationally.
Graduate schools would be wise
to give students a realistic view
of the challenges facing K-12 systems, he said.
Too often, Mr. Lubienski said,
“ ‘innovation’ becomes idolized

At Rice University in Houston,
studies of education entrepreneurship have secured a place in a different department: the business
school.
In 2008, school officials launched
the Rice University Education Entrepreneurship Program, inspired
in part by a desire to help local
schools and to produce leaders
for the city’s burgeoning charter
school sector, said Andrea Hodge,
the executive director of the education entrepreneurship program.
Students in the program face
assignments familiar to business
school programs everywhere, Ms.
Hodge said, though typically with
an education-specific focus. “Our
cases,” she said, “tend to boil down
to ‘How does this work in a school?’ ”
A majority of those who enter
the two-year Rice program are
teachers or principals. They attend the school at night—usually while still working day jobs
in schools—and graduate with
a business master’s degree with
a certificate in education entrepreneurship.
“It’s a very intense experience,”
Ms. Hodge said.

Student Incentives
But students have an incentive
to stick it out. If the graduates continue to work in schools after finishing the program, the university
reimburses 80 percent of the business school’s total tuition and costs,
which are more than $90,000 over
two years. The school has produced
24 graduates with the entrepreneurship certificate so far.
One such graduate is Eric M.
Schmidt, who entered the program in 2009 as a teacher and is
now the school leader—essentially
the principal—of a new middle
school in Houston, kipp Courage
College Prep, part of the Knowledge Is Power Program’s charter
school network.
He said the program shaped his
thinking in areas such as supporting teachers at his school, recruiting families and explaining the
school’s goals to them, and making
sound purchasing decisions.
“I decided that if I was going to do
a master’s [program], I wanted it to
be an experience that would differentiate me from other future school
leaders,” said Mr. Schmidt, who is
28. While the business program
didn’t offer a clear “template” for
running a school, he said, it helped
him decide “where do I start, and
how do I want this place to look.”
Coverage of entrepreneurship and
innovation in education and school
design is supported in part by a grant
from the Carnegie Corporation
of New York.

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Education Week - February 27, 2013

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