Creative Destruction

Anybody want one of these?  Of course not, they were made obsolete by newer, better products.

Creative destruction is a term I learned in a Business Economics course taught by Professor Mark Perry at the University of Michigan-Flint.  Put simply, creative destruction is the act of a newly created product destroying its predecessors.  We can look at the history of innovation and see how the creation of a product eliminated the need or usefulness of existing products.  Well, we are in the midst of such a "revolution" in education at the moment.  Charter schools are acting as the agents of destruction as families run from failing schools in an effort to provide their children with the best possible education.  An education that will provide them with the skills necessary to be competitive in a global marketplace.  Unfortunately, many of our traditional public schools are failing to offer such an education, but thankfully our nation's students now have a choice; they are no longer relegated to 13 years of a sub-standard education.

The great thing about this shift is that charter schools themselves are held to an incredibly high standard.  Whereas traditional public schools have been allowed to fail their students for decades, charter schools receive their charter for a finite time period and may not be renewed if they fail to demonstrate academic progress or sound financial oversight.  Thus, charter schools may act as the agents of creative destruction, but may also be the very victims of creative destruction if they fail to live up to the promises they make to the families and students they serve.  Creative destruction reallocates resources to those organizations best positioned to make use of these resources.  How many great teachers are trapped inside a failing school?  How many students are serving time at a school that consistently fails to meet their academic needs?  How much money is being shoveled into school systems that fail to graduate even half of the students entering their hallways and classrooms?  The destruction, or closing, of these failing schools will reallocate these vital resources to schools demonstrating the capability of meeting the educational challenges of today and tomorrow.

This is a good thing for our country.  We need competition in education and for far too long many of our nation's most marginalized students have been confined to prisons of low standards and low expectations in some of our nation's drop-out factories.  The creative destruction taking place in education will once again allow our nation's graduates to compete with graduates from all over the globe for admittance to the top post-secondary institutions in the world.  Once there they will be prepared for the rigorous academic programs they encounter.  We need to work quickly to close historically failing school districts while doing our best to replicate those schools meeting the challenges presented in today's dynamic education environment.  Finally, we need to reward those educational entrepreneurs pursuing innovation in this field in an effort to better serve our nation's children.