North Carolina is to be congratulated on becoming a finalist in the U.S. Department of Education's Race to the Top. This potential boost in funding is sorely needed, but in addition to new dollars, our biggest challenge is how to get the most value out of our existing dollars. Because, it's not how much you spend but how you spend it that matters.
How can we stimulate the kind of education reform that will lead to smarter schools? At an Education Summit today, North Carolina's leaders in the public, private and not-for-profit sectors have a unique opportunity to focus on how innovation can chart a new course for education.
Many education reformers rightly point to solutions involving teacher preparation and development, extending the school day or year, reducing class sizes or strengthening the curriculum, standards and accountability measures. All are vital. But if all we do is spend more on these things in the same way we do now, we will not see real progress. We need to end the Band-Aid approach to school improvement by embracing innovation.
Innovation in education can have a real impact in three areas: school operations, classrooms, and partnerships with the private and not-for-profit sectors.
There is an enormous opportunity for innovation in school operations. Some 15,000 K-12 school districts across the country collectively spend nearly $55 billion on operations. While we all believe in local control, does each school district really need to order supplies, process payroll, route buses, manage data centers, deliver food programs and handle other operational issues in an endlessly duplicative and costly fashion?
We need to move instructional decisions as close to the classroom as possible, but move "back office" operations where they belong for efficiency's sake. If technology were used to create shared services centers by state, as much as $5 billion could be saved. That savings could be used to reduce class size, lengthen the school year or hire 100,000 additional teachers.
Innovation must also be applied in the classroom. N.C. State University is providing K-12 students throughout the state with access to advanced educational resources through its Virtual Computing Lab, a cloud computing technology developed in partnership with IBM. Through these Internet-based resources, students get access to the most advanced educational materials, software applications and computing resources. A first-grader from a rural town can learn about geography using the same interactive 3-D animation as her counterparts in a high-profile school district, and the cloud technology reduces the cost.
Innovation can extend to the classrooms of our youngest students. Last week, a panel of Harvard economists released findings on the importance of kindergarten teachers, proving that early education can impart skills that last a lifetime. Working with local nonprofits, IBM is placing special technology centers in the hands of North Carolina's youngest students by donating and distributing another 100 KidSmart learning centers. They use innovative technology to integrate interactive teaching and learning activities into pre-K curricula.
Finally, we need innovation in how districts partner with the private and not-for-profit sectors. Our schools cannot bear the burden of educating our children alone. By partnering with nonprofit agencies and businesses, schools can enrich after-school programs by offering science and technology enhancement, or arts and cultural opportunities. In New York City, the After School Corporation was able to increase the school day and year by 35 percent, at only a 10 percent added cost, via such partnerships. Over the long term, programs like this pay for themselves.
The private sector can also provide an innovative way to meet the demand for new teachers. As the Baby Boom population nears retirement, companies can help streamline the teacher certification process, making second careers in education more attractive. IBM's Transition to Teaching is one model. It provides company-paid tuition, leaves of absence and other support, such as mentoring, to interested employees. If other companies joined the effort, the result could be tens of thousands of highly qualified new teachers in a variety of academic fields.
We can find other innovative ways create smarter schools, but only if we work together to end business as usual. Ensuring that our young people have the skills they need to succeed in the global economy is as vital to America's long-term economic health as a stimulus package is in the short term. Let's make sure that the money is spent wisely to create a brighter future for all our children.
Stanley S. Litow is president of the IBM International Foundation and IBM's vice president for corporate citizenship and corporate affairs. Before joining IBM, he served as the deputy chancellor of schools for New York City.
