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What doesn’t Ms. Lauren Powell Jobs want us to know, or

the hidden agenda of XQsuperschool project.

This is the third (and I am pretty sure not the last) installment of my comments on XQsuperschool project initiated by Ms. Lauren Powell Jobs (click here to see the first or the second one).

I have already pointed out at a huge gap between the declared goal of the project (reshaping high schools in the whole America) and the expected results (the best case scenario will lead to reshaping less than 1 % of the high schools in the whole America).

But I do understand why Ms. Jobs and her colleagues hope for more.

Let’s say you see one of the commercials and get excited.

Fifty million dollars!”, you think, “I could do a lot with that kind of money!”.

And you go to my.xqsuperschool.org site and create your profile.

The next thing which happens to you is you are being channeled through a set of questions (a la assignments) specifically design to make you think about education in general and your role in education in particular.

You will have to think about the mission of the education, about what students want to learn, and many other interesting and important things to think about (I do recommend to walk through all the questions). And in the end you will have to find people who would like to cooperate with you on the project, or people which project would you like and would wont to join to.

Imagine thousands or hundreds of thousands of people – teachers, and school principals, parents and politicians – teaming up and joining their energy to engage communities for making education better, for redesign schools and reshaping teaching practices.

This does look as a good idea, doesn’t it?

Unfortunately, this is not going to happen.

There are many reasons for that, but I only mention a couple.

First: there is a big difference between igniting an excitement and keeping this excitement for a long period of time. A recent example is MOOCs completion rates; for example, the average completion rate of a Harvard course offered on edX is roughly six percent”. All participants are excited at the beginning, “I want to change my life, I have to learn this stuff”, but as time goes by other things become more prioritized, “It can wait now, but I will definitely do it when …”.

Of course, if one hundred thousand people create their profile, 6 % means that six thousand people will present a project which might find a support – if not from XQ, but maybe from a local donor, or from a local district.

If an average team has six members, one thousand teams will be pushing for better education, which IS good, but (a) I would expect that many of those people have been already doing what they described in their projects and just want to scale it up (so they would not add a lot of new initiatives), and (b) even one thousand of brand new high schools would still make less than 5 % of the total number of the high schools in America.

There is however an even deeper reason for not expecting this project to work as it is being advertised.

The human history knows many seemingly good ideas which had not been achieved.

Take Communism, for example.

A lot of people thought of Communism as a good idea. But look what happened every time when the idea of Communism was used to generate populous excitement.

Don’t take me wrong, I am not advocating for Communism, I just use this as an example of a case when a big idea did not work. It did not work not because “bad people in the government” only used it to keep others in line and make them do what “bad people” wanted them to do. No. Many top USSR officials and politicians as well as many ordinary citizens (including myself) truly believed in the ideas of Communism. The project “Communism” fell apart because the designers ignored “the fact that in ordinary circumstances ordinary people are not led by visions or ideas, but led merely by “a carrot and a stick”, like having more money or not being fired.” (the quote is from my resent essay How is The Third Program of the USSR Communist Party related to education reform in the USA?”). FYI: this is one of the reasons why all dictators always depict the outside world as filled with enemies – to keep in people the feeling of a danger and being threatened, hence “there is no place for a simple and ordinary life, we all must be heroes!”

Fifty million dollars might seem as a big “carrot”, but it is so abstract, so far away, has so many hoops to jump through to get it, so it looks kind of unrealistic, like a dream, and not the one you really want to achieve, but the one you had in your sleep.

So, is XQsupesrschool project a blessing or a waste of money (the title of my previous comment)?

The answer is “neither”.

It will not result in reshaping high schools in the whole America, thinking that is just naïve.

But it will give people with ideas and ambitions an opportunity to make some difference on a local level.

I consider myself as one of such people; that is why earlier today (Oct. 14, 2015) I challenged Ms. Jobs with presenting to her my concept of a high school (you can find it via my.xqsuperschool.org or you can just click on this link).

Dr. Valentin Voroshilov

valbu@bu.edu

teachology.xyz

 

P.S. XQsuperschool project presents a very interesting social experiment (costly, but interesting). I hope that the team behind the project will be collecting data in a way MOCCs collect data, which will show what kind of people (socially and professionally) entered the contest, how many people created profiles, how many times they logged in, what connections and links they explored, how many remained active one month, two months after the first login, and later in the development, how those people continued their professional life after the end of the project.

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