When Tom Vander Ark left the Gates Foundation at the end of last year, the edu-world curiously awaited his next move. During his dynamic tenure as the foundation's executive director of education programs, Vander Ark oversaw the distribution of $3.5 billion in scholarship and grant programs and helped build Gates's reputation for engaged and innovative (if not always successful) philanthropy.
It wasn't totally surprising, then, when a January press release announced that Vander Ark would become president of the cutting-edge X PRIZE Foundation (XPF), one of the few nonprofits that can claim to push the envelope as hard as Gates.
The brainchild of St. Louis entrepreneur Peter Diamandis, the foundation launched with a bang in 1996 by offering a $10 million prize (the X PRIZE) to the first team whose spacecraft could take three people into space and back, twice in two weeks. (He got the idea from the Orteig Prize, which in 1919 promised $25,000 to a pilot who could fly non-stop across the Atlantic--Charles Lindbergh, a previously unknown airmail pilot, won that prize in 1927.)
By 2004, when Mojave Aerospace Ventures took home the Ansari X PRIZE (renamed for a donor) for its SpaceShipOne, 26 teams from seven nations had spent 10 times the amount of the prize purse developing and building their entries. Compare that bang for your buck with NASA, which probably spends about $10 million a year on Tang, and the revolutionary power of the X PRIZE is obvious.
Now Diamandis (and Vander Ark) apparently wants to do for education what he did for space travel. XPF's website has announced that an education prize is in the works. Given all the billions that have been poured into education, could such a prize be to our education system what the Ansari X PRIZE was to NASA: a way to bypass a bloated bureaucracy and produce an admittedly small-scale, but astonishingly effective solution to a fundamental policy issue?
Yes, says Vander Ark in a recent interview. First, it would create leverage by generating research and other activities costing much more than the prize amount. Second, it would be performance-based, paying out only when there's a winner. Third, it would reduce costs since cash is scarce for most competitors (unlike government agencies). Finally, in Vander Ark's words, it would create "focal points for innovation" by bringing dispersed minds together on one well-defined problem.
Fair enough. But what would warrant such a prize? After all, education reform isn't rocket science--and in many ways, it's more difficult. Perhaps XPF could award the prize to the first high-poverty high school to graduate all of its students on time into credit-bearing college work. Or to the first team to design a financially viable, easily replicable, high-achieving private school for poor and minority students. (The Catholic church could use the money.) Or to a preschool that got all of its poor students "ready to learn" by kindergarten. Or to the first ed college (or ed prep organization) to have 300 teachers bring 100 percent of their high-need students up to proficiency in their first year of teaching.
But even these illustrative ideas don't quite capture the "audacity," as XPF's website puts it, that is at the core of the X PRIZE. To compete with space travel, the education X PRIZE needs to be even bigger and bolder.
So let us offer our own challenge: What achievement do you think would be worthy of X PRIZE acclaim? Creative and worthwhile ideas will be awarded with publication in next week's Gadfly. (And we'll share them with Tom Vander Ark, too.) Send them to [email protected].
