Charlie Rose

Arthur_Gubish  06/08/2010 03:08 PM Report

I would like to challenge the affluent knowledgeable expert guests of Charlie Rose who believe there is a problem with education to be part of a solution that would achieve the elusive goal of superior academic student performance at all levels of primary and secondary schools.

Since the question “why can’t Johnny Read?” was asked in 1959 we have understood there was a crisis in education. To solve the problem with education we have changed curriculum, set high academic standards, devised different methods of assessment, and have tried to remediate education deficiencies in the last years of high school. In 1983, the National Commission on Excellence in Education presented the report “A Nation at Risk” referring to the failure of our education system to produce graduates who possessed the knowledge, skills, and abilities essential to become productive members of society. President Reagan’s response to the report was that the American people would do what was right for their children and future generations. In 1997, President Clinton held a White House Conference on Early Childhood Development and Learning to highlight scientific findings on brain development of the very young children, and the importance of quality child care. Between 1993 and 1997 President Clinton’s administration increased NIH children’s research funding from $1.3 to $1.6 billion. In 1997, Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin stated addressing the issue of childcare is of critical importance to our nation economy. In 1999, University of Arizona President Dr. Peter Likens stated “We are a nation at the shallow end of the pool” referring to the fact that the qualified pool of students entering our universities was at a critically low point and that our nation could lose its technological advantages and weaken our democracy if we did not improve the number and quality of American students entering our universities. Dr. Likens also stated that primary and secondary school were responsible for the failure to adequately prepare students for institutions of higher learning. In 1999, at the National Education Summit President Clinton said “The time for analysis and evaluation has passed”, and IBM President and CEO Lou Gerstner said world class standards should be the catalyst for reform in American public schools and provided a $40 million grant called “Reinventing Education”. The grant was for technology to improve education. In 2008, the Harvard Business School Global Business Summit stated a national crisis exists in public education and that systemic problems require systemic solutions that address root causes, and that social entrepreneurs have an ability to create transformational change. Just as institutions of higher learning cannot be held responsible for inadequate student preparedness neither should secondary or primary schools that work to remediate deficiencies propagated from the earliest years of education, especially since there has been an awareness of the effects of mediocre quality child care on brain development.

As a society we have depended on politicians, professionals, and experts for solutions; we have had summits, commissions, conferences, research studies, and have invested billions of dollars to find solution to the problems of poor academic performance, yet 51 years after the question “Why can’t Johnny Read” was asked there has not been an effective effort to resolve the issue of improving education. When I worked for IBM I was taught you can’t test or inspect quality into a product; well the same holds true for education. The difficulty with many of the prescriptions for improvement is that they are primarily focused on assessment not learning and do not start at the beginning, and when I say beginning I mean from birth not at a point in the k-12 continuum of public education. While the solution is clear to have a strong foundation for education you must have a quality nurturing environment specifically designed for children that addresses their individual needs with caring professionals that understand early childhood development and can provide a strong foundation of basic life skills, cognitive, psychosocial, physical and emotional development. While this task is very difficult because of the balance between family affordability, staff labor costs, facility costs, and other operational expenses to provide quality resources; the balance can be accomplished. To provide a strong foundation for education and sustainable business you must understand the best practices and theories of early childhood education and social entrepreneurship.

I as a social entrepreneur have a solution to address a significant root cause of failures in academic achievement that are propagated throughout K – 12 public schools and impact institutions of higher learning. The solution I am proposing will create a new paradigm of quality early childhood development services, exceeding NAEYC standards, provide a strong foundation for educational preparedness that will translate into long-term higher academic achievement in primary and secondary schools, improve preparedness for institutions of higher learning, and improve opportunities for entrepreneurship.

To facilitate transformational paradigm change of the mediocre childcare crisis will require a collaboration of community leaders, and time. To fulfill this endeavor I have developed a business plan that incorporates best business practices with the best early childhood development theories and practices of Montessori, Piaget, Erikson, Maslow, Vygotsky, Bandura, and Gardner; while addressing learning styles and multiple intelligences of (verbal /linguistic, logical / mathematical, visual / special, musical, body / kinesthetic, naturalistic, interpersonal, and intrapersonal) in individual development plans (IDP’s) that will be determined collaboratively by parents and teachers. Our organization will provide for the needs of children, families, staff, organization, and community. The solution I propose will provide all children, including children with challenges, an opportunity to attend centers specifically designed to reflect higher NAEYC standards. Imagine if all children could reach their fullest positive potentials in education and life; imagine the efficacious use of financial and human resources when schools are able to focus on teaching at a higher level, and not remediation; imagine students prepared for institutions of higher learning; imagine the possible innovative contributions to science, technology, medicine and society. It is in the best interest of our nation to create a new childcare paradigm; employment opportunities in early childhood care, and construction; a stronger foundation for education; and a model for our community, state, and nation that will strengthen our future economic health while maintaining our global competitiveness.

Significant benefits for local businesses stem from increased employee morale, productivity, and reduced absenteeism. These benefits result from the knowledge employees have that their children needs are being met and care arrangements are stable. Additional benefits will also include local stimulus for facility construction materials acquisition and equipment rentals along with tax revenues associated with these transactions; primary and secondary employee wages and tax revenues during facility construction; and post construction professional employment with improved benefits for caregivers. The impacts of revenue infusion will have a multiplier effect on economic stimulus improving our local economic recovery. The long-term contribution to economic prosperity will come from an education system focused on advancing education not remediation; extraction of human potential; and creation of a globally competitive, innovative, and productive 21st century workforce.

I am a father of five and grandfather of four who cares passionately about the future of our community’s children. My passion to help children stems from the kindness of community members who guided me as a child and provided a safe environment to help me develop into a productive member of society. Now as an adult I have worked to repay their kindness by obtaining an MBA; and knowledge in early childhood education; while developing a viable sustainable business plan that incorporates best business practices, knowledge, theories, and best practices in early childhood education; and will provide children the best opportunity for success in education.

I cannot accomplish this endeavor alone and need the help of community leaders. If you would be interested helping to improve opportunities for the children of our community please be part of a coalition of community leaders that share a passion to strengthen the educational foundation from birth through kindergarten so that children enter school prepared for success, not deficient and needing remediation. Your help in this endeavor will be appreciated by generations to come. Please contact me if you want more information, or if you would like to contribute one masonry brick to build a facility. Arthur.Gubish@gmail.com

anne4444  05/29/2010 04:25 PM Report

It was a great conversation

Thank you

REMant  05/26/2010 12:29 PM Report

Being in Foreign Affairs, this will likely have a clear bias, but I could not tell from this discussion precisely what it is, and I am not sure Dr Schramm knows either. The problem with talking about entrepreneurship is that it is never quite clear what ppl mean even when they decry bureaucracy. There are good arguments for large R & D, and DARPA and NASA are as good examples as Bell Labs. Not a whole lot of stuff is developed in garages anymore. Gates, for instance, did not build personal computers, he merely wrote software for them. That that turned out to be important, in no way negates the fact that it is something one can do at home. But size does not make for a mercantilism or a free trade necessarily.

The debate has been whether Whig mercantilist "improvement" or Democratic individualism is behind America's 19th c development. Earlier, they called it virtue vs commerce, and you will find Smith, following Machiavelli, discussing it in Wealth of Nations, but it is certainly anything but clear which party was virtuous and which commercial. Machiavelli blamed the Church for lacking virtue as well as the spirit of empire. The republicans who fought our revolution were clearly free traders, at least with respect to British restraints on their trade, while their Whig (in this country termed incorrectly Tory) opponents were both monarchists and mercantilists. Our "model" is not indigenous, and certainly not just Democratic because essentially what we did is to copy the mercantilist banking system, and the only thing the Jacksonians did was to decentralize it. The largely Whig North, at the time having little to sustain it but commerce argued that we needed banks and mercantilism to develop manufacturing and the largely Democratic South, wishing to remain agricultural, clung to free trade, hard currency and the idea of entrepots, and were surely the party of virtue in the martial sense. Some, even rather famous, historians have tried to make the case that the South or at least the middle states, were the true entrepreneurs, but it is a difficult sell. The Reaganites, essentially Democratic party refugees, resurrected the Jacksonian position, never making a move tho to restore hard currency, which had become in the interim the position of the Republicans, along with tariffs. Despite Progressive inroads in the early 20th c, it was never really to change.

Max Weber, tho, following Ben Franklin, spoke of self-denial, opportunity costs, and called it rationalism, located development essentially in religious commercialism, while his erstwhile friend Werner Sombart, took the position that technology drove development, joined the Fascists during the '30s, and argued for planned economies. While it is entirely possible to "grow" an economy by doing each other's laundry as it is often pejoratively put, I think it must be allowed that factories or washing machines make it a whole lot easier. Mercantilism is not always rational in Sombart's sense, nor is free trade always in Weber's, indeed there is much to suggest that the opposite is more often true.

Keynesians are often held up as mercantilists, and while this is true, they are also heirs to various anti-quantity monetary theory positions taken in the 19th c, which brought a large dose of reality (or perhaps morality) into free trade thinking.

The great economic historian Eli Heckscher appears to have shown an evolution from free trade to mercantilism with the development of nation states, and it is clear that there is a shift from labor to capital, and as with Italy, Holland and Britain before, much of what we have for an economy is related to finance and our control of much of the world's money. What I think is going on now is a necessary re-balancing in favor of labor, and if you want to call it that, entrepreneurship. That's why I called recent financial maneuvering essentially blackmail. Yet most economic growth has come from entrepots founded by overseas Chinese, Indians, Arabs, Dutch, Portuguese, etc, as well as through foreign investment, as by the British in building our railroads, and has hardly been indigenous, tho it does not seem that natural resources provide much long term benefit in large measure because they are never adequately rewarded by those nations controlling their use.

From the mid-70's to the mid-90's the debate over virtue and commerce was the central feature of Anglo-American, Enlightenment-era historical writing, and is now almost completely forgotten, replaced, as a result of the culture wars, by an obsession with the intimate details of the lives of slaves, Indians and women, with their emphasis on political correctness and rejection of the so-called Western "Canon." I would be loath to call that entrepreneurship.

And now, I have to go outside and do a little labor myself, because I don't trust our local entrepreneurs to get it right.