When Corporate Logic Replaces Educational Innovation

Super education corporations show off wonderful facilities – but what lies underneath?

Photo by Dom Fou on Unsplash

Written By: Michael Caplan

The big players in South African education are rapidly expanding. With their access to capital they are able to build schools with impressive modern facilities – including things like computer centres, pools, hockey astros, state of the art classrooms, and modern elegant architecture.

A recent example is Advtech’s super campus, but Curro and Inspired (Reddham and Reddford) have the same quality facilities.

This is all very well, but as experienced leaders in education the world over know, beautiful facilities do not make education excellence.

We know quality education needs staff and leadership who are brave enough to innovate, to try the unconventional, to draw lessons from the latest scholarship in fields like neuroscience and education.

There are several factors, inherent in these groups, that make innovation highly unlikely at best.

Leaders – what do they know?

A fundamental problem is that the senior, most powerful decision makers, in all these education groups have little or no education experience. They are there because of their proven corporate track record and strategic leadership skills.

This lack of knowledge and experience in the field that is the core of these businesses creates problems when these leaders must evaluate proposals of innovation put forward by school heads. Proposals set out by those who know what they are talking about, who know what will work in the classroom, with their staff and their students.

Many will say that this leadership has expert educators underneath them to advise, but how likely are they to take this advice? Key decisions come down to business strategy which often does not align with initiatives that constitute an increased quality of education. The structure mitigates against innovation.

Case study

The need for economies of scale, the steep hierarchy and plain complacency shut down innovation.

Let’s take the case of a head of a particular school (which is part of one of these big groups). He/she has done intensive research into the modern field of neuroscience of education and has become familiar with innovative practices being used internationally. He or she knows this will work – experience and research say so. This head is excited and puts together a comprehensive proposal making it clear how it will significantly advance the quality of pedagogy – leading to a far better product for the people that matter most – the students.

The proposal goes up to the powers that be. In response – the head receives a pat on the back for initiative and effort, but the answer is no. Why? It is too risky. The executive explains that the company is highly successful at producing brilliant academic results and even better financial figures. “Why fix what is not broken? Why risk our proven recipe with experimentation?”

Without autonomy given to those who know about education, who do the teaching and know what will work, educational innovation dies a quick death. In the end most of these excellent leaders just give up, after all, they need to keep their job.

The excellent financial performance figures, which are applauded by the business communities, neatly cover up this lack of innovation. Many school heads are fully aware but the message they dutifully trot out to their staff is that – we are doing great.

Little wonder that the only real innovation comes from small, agile single schools that are not part of a large corporation.

Myths of AI introduction

Much has been said about AI being the future of education. Likewise, all the big education groups have marketed themselves as being at the forefront of using AI to improve and modernise education. This has led to huge capital investment in AI and more broadly in edutech.

The trouble is that many of these key budgeting decisions are made without the knowledge required to ensure that AI implementation is beneficial. In fact, AI can, in some cases, make no improvement (a huge waste), or more often actually harm the student. If key budget decisions are based on what looks good and impresses, rather than thorough, careful research by educators, it is likely to do more harm than good, while nevertheless pushing share prices up, adding brand value and bringing in investors.

You cannot simply add AI and mix.

The issue of what works vs what just has a wow factor is crucial for key spending decisions at the top of the big education players in SA. It is therefore worth a closer look at the tools that have been created by educationalists to determine use and abuse of technology in general and AI specifically.

RAT – how much difference is tech making in the classroom?

There has been a vast amount of work done in this field over many years.

This research has created a framework to assess genuine effectiveness of tech in education called RAT (Hughes, 1998): R -Replication; A – Amplification T – Transformation.

With Replication – you do nothing but replicate the task with no educational improvement. Amplification means by using technology you add efficiency but no educational benefit. However, with Transformation the integration of technology (including AI) makes a major pedagogical difference. You improve learning in a way that could not be done without its use.

The reality is that the vast majority of tech and AI spend does not lead to anything near transformation. Why? Because the wow factor trumps the use of quality research. This kind of careful, well-considered intervention takes far too much time and effort especially for big players.

If introduced poorly AI can easily have the effect of outsourcing student thinking. Several studies have shown this damaging effect on students’ ability to think critically, creatively and independently.

If the big players in SA education are really interested in producing world class education, the above framework needs to be applied to spending decisions. This can only be done by giving educators a key role at the top. There must be a healthy appetite for risk that goes with any pioneering innovation.

The mighty have fallen

Corporate history is littered with the stories of huge dominant players who looked invincible, only to succumb to innovation that was simply ignored with complacency and the “don’t fix what’s not broken” approach; Nokia and Kodak come to mind.

As with a giant ship which takes ages to turn, a huge corporation may be outmaneuvered by smaller but much more agile competition.

This has never been truer than with the increasingly competitive private education market.

Alternative – big but different

Of course it does not have to be this way, from my layman perspective, I do not see why these players need to go with the full standardisation model. An approach which gives educator leaders significant autonomy could exponentially increase innovation. Suddenly that same creative, thinking head spoken about in the hypothetical example earlier is fired up and motivated to come up with excellent innovation with the knowledge that he/she will be listened to.

The Spar Model comes to mind – store managers are very much still the Spar Brand but have considerable autonomy to innovate and make their store specialised to suit a particular market location.

In closing, I am reminded of Percy Byshe Shelly’s famous poem Ozymandias,

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said – “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert … Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Michael Caplan, an Associate of the Free Market Foundation, is a History and English teacher with 27 years’ experience in mostly private schools in Johannesburg. He holds an MA in History and has a strong interest in libertarianism and the free market.