New Report: In Search of Productivity Gains in K–12 Schooling

Posted by on August 05, 2010

The scourge of Baumol’s disease

While education differs in important ways from other service sectors, improvement in productivity in other sectors may hold important lessons for understanding how the education system can become more efficient and effective, according to a white paper from the Center on Reinventing Public Education. While policymakers talk about innovating to “do more with less,” in the last two decades, dramatically more productive schooling models have not emerged. The combination of rising costs and stagnant productivity are major problems in an environment where many children are not learning the skills they need and education is unlikely to receive sustained increases in public funding. The authors recommend five steps to counteract this stagnation: 1) systematically consider strategies employed by other labor-intensive industries for their relevance to education; 2) hone in on learning systems outside schools to surface alternative production processes that may yield greater productivity; 3) understand the key cost drivers in the current schooling model, and examine the impact of each on proposed alternatives; 4) prototype new test models; and 5) create a policy agenda for identifying and reproducing the most promising ways to increase productivity.

Read more: http://www.crpe.org/cs/crpe/view/csr_pubs/343