Are essay-based group competitions good for educational innovation?
Recently, education policy maven and friend Rick Hess penned “The Wham-O Pudding Essay Contest Theory of Educational Innovation,” a brilliantly funny framing of his thoughts on the oh-so-many contests to select the next Big Education Idea. Oh, to write with such waggery.
I have opined elsewhere on the conduct of these contests; in particular about the need to stick to the mission and goals as they’re written. If you put in a request for jalapeño mango chutney, yet reward only the contestants who submit vanilla ice cream variants, your contest is being a bit ungenerous. If you don’t like it spicy, fair enough. Just don’t ask teams to waste their time on Mars Journey design when you’ll really only read maps that head toward Ames.
Yes, it’s true Kennedy sought Mars as the original space goal and, when it was ruled is unrealistic, reluctantly settled for putting a man on the moon. Practicality is fine; just be fair. If you’re giving away a $100,000 prize, you may not want the totally unsafe bet to receive it. But if you’re claiming to be all about disruption and out-of-the-box thinking, well at least give a few of those entrants some recognition along the way.
But what about the basic function of these contests? Are they good for the innovators and entrepreneurs that they address? Are they good for the education community as a whole? Are they good for kids?
So Rick knows something about these that he didn’t tell you. He sits on the board of an organization called 4.0 Schools that does nothing but conduct Wham-O Pudding Essay contests. It has conducted many rounds of these in various forms over a number of iterations in varying sizes and objectives and character of awards. (I’ve entered several times, done the phone interview, phoned Matt Candler, got nothing in return.)
Indeed, for a while, they ran the impressive The Apprentice edu-derivative, Startup Weekend Edu. But I often wish I’d never heard of these foundations and had consistently spent my time in other ways. “Cash is king,” we were told that start up weekend. Sell something now.
“If Jobs and Wozniak, or Bill Gates and Paul Allen, had penned an essay in the 1970s about their vision, it would’ve been divorced from the experience of doing it,” says Rick. That’s true.
Also worth noting: Not all of us come to this with parents who hung with IBM’s CEO, went to private prep schools and Harvard with the children of other elite, or happen to be thrown in with a genius technology wizard or live in the neighborhood of the company occupying the state-of-the-art position in the industry we want to change. Not all of us can get an appointment with H. Ross Perot. Or even Drive Capital. Not all of us stumble onto Esquire Magazine in a fire sale.
“Because they were garage-builders … I kind of suspect their entries would’ve paled next to those of thumb-suckers and soothsayers who’d spent their days learning what phrases were in vogue and mastering impressive-sounding terminology,” adds Hess. That’s true, too. I can show you the pile of failed applications sitting on the desk beside me.
Recently a company in Columbus, Ohio, hit the sweet spot in the sector they aimed to serve. They finally arrived at a product that just instantly spoke to the customers they talked to—that has the potential for radically disrupting the healthcare administration industry. They tried twenty-seven products before getting there. What’s important is that the first twenty-seven did not pay the bills along the way. You can build an organization in a way that does. Hewlett-Packard did. If you want to build an education org like it, then the “sell anything to anyone who will buy” it model works. But usually that’s exactly the approach that never gets around to leap-ahead change.
So, no, the really good BHAGs may simply never fit into the forms of a Wham-O Pudding essay contest. Far more pointedly, my BHAG may never fit into the form of the upcoming contest questionnaires at Fordham, 4.0 schools, and other organizations.
But does that mean they should not conduct them? And if they do, should the innovators (should I) invest our precious time our time elsewhere?
Risk’s summative concern seems for the larger conversation: “I fear that this big-idea contest boomlet risks redirecting attention, energy, and regard toward poseurs and aspiring TED talkers, and away from the innovators and inventors with the skill and the will to make remarkable things happen.”
But that was happening anyway. Remember when the edu-pundits were all agog over the seventeen-year-old who would save American education? (And who was basically a Diane Ravitch knock-off, with less than 1 percent of her accumulated knowledge?) Here in Ohio, administrators practically worship at the feet of Ted Dintersmith and George Couros. Chris Emdin, anyone?
The glut of poseurs and TED-talkers is hardly the unique spawn of the contest strategy of change.
On the innovators’ side, there is, of course, the possibility of side benefits. That this time, tailoring the form, in this targeting of the words, to this organization, I will finally discover The Magic Marketing Message that resonates with a larger audience. Or that this time the ideal stakeholder will discover us, and join forces. Could happen.
A confession: I buy lottery tickets. Not often. Not many. But some—maybe six to ten a year.
When your only shoes are pocked with holes, when your bed hurts your back at night, when you don’t have the gasoline you know you need to go and visit the people that you know you absolutely have to talk to, when you live largely on long-term hope, then sometimes short-term hope is priceless indeed. Sometimes the thought that the half-billion (or half-thousand) that may lie on the piece of paper in your wallet is the comfort and support needed to move you forward.
And sometimes, the thought that a group of education experts assembled somewhere will grasp your idea and move it onto another level is the one thing that keeps you going.
