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Part I is here. -ed. 

 

“Wow!!!  This almost makes me cry . . . This is just a kid who just 3 weeks ago was literally shut down . . .. His out look on the world seemed limited and somewhat dark (discouraged) and most definitely no motivation toward school. Which from a parent perspective was so scary and concerning… I have seen such a transformation in (our son) in such a short period of time… In his new found expressiveness he shared with me, how much he love HIS School, and how much it has changed his life (of course adding, when he first heard the kids a Khabele say that Khabele School changed their life, he just new they were just saying this to “SUCK UP”) but know he believes it to be true.

Thank you for all you do, and giving (our son) an opportunity to find himself, and what he has to offer to the world I am eternally grateful . . . I can see the Khabele School will change all of our lives . . . Blessing to You and Yours for your amazing efforts!!!”

The Khabele School is a small private school near downtown Austin housed in two beautiful, old Victorian houses adjacent to one another.  The first time entrepreneur Gary Hoover invited me to visit The Khabele School we were placed in a room full of parents who were literally crying with gratitude for what the school had done for their children.  One mother said that although the Khabele School wasn’t religious, it had created a more Christian atmosphere for her daughter than had the private Christian school her daughter had previously attended.

Khotso Khabele and his wife Moya had not intended to start a school.  They had both been teachers in a small private school for children with learning disabilities that collapsed part-way during the school year:  the school’s owners simply disappeared, leaving the parents and faculty alike in a lurch.  Khotso and Moya met with the parents and agreed to create a school.  Although Moya at least had a couple of years’ experience as a teacher, Khotso was a recent economics graduate with no direction in life who just happened to take this teaching job.  He had no training in education and very little experience – and suddenly he found himself the head of a private school.

If you rely on the education experts, this sounds like a recipe for disaster – a school headed by an untrained person with no experience?  Most reform efforts in the world of education have emphasized the urgency of more teacher training.  Indeed, No Child Left Behind requires that both public and charter schools hire only “highly qualified” teachers, meaning teachers who have valid state teaching licenses in the specific area in which they will be teaching.  And yet I know of few schools as good as the Khabele School anywhere in the nation.  How can an untrained economics major with no expertise in education create a great school?

In the world of entrepreneurship, we are abundantly familiar with inexperienced amateurs creating great companies and transforming entire industries:  College drop-outs Paul Allen and Bill Gates created Microsoft, college drop-outs Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs created Apple, college drop-out Michael Dell created the largest PC retailer in the world, Linus Torvalds was still a college student when he created Linux.  These are only a few of the famous ones; the spectacular technology revolution of the past thirty years could not have taken place without the work of many thousands of untrained, inexperienced amateurs like Allen, Gates, Wozniak, Jobs, Dell, and Torvalds. 

If the most respected engineers from IBM, DEC, Xerox, and Cray had been asked to create professional standards for employment in the tech field in 1975, they probably would have required that only degreed professionals with years of experience be allowed to take leadership positions in organizations.  This one stroke of mandated professional responsibility, this “No Computer Left Behind” law, would have left all of us behind.  Big corporations would still be purchasing expensive data-crunching monsters, and the rest of us would be grateful for improvements to our IBM erasable Selectric typewriters.

The writer Sarah Bird recently apologized to Texas Monthly for sending her child to private school; she expressed her belief that public education is the foundation of a democracy and the only way to ensure literacy.  But while Thomas Jefferson wanted to require that each town have an elementary school, at no point did he suggest that the large, politicized, bureaucratic organizations we have today are the “foundations of a democracy.”  A Jeffersonian emphasis on “education in a democracy” could include home schooling, educational vouchers, tuition tax credits, and charter schools.  Ms. Bird doesn’t seem to realize that school vouchers could increase the probability that her nursing home worker will be able to read the labels on her meds.

Without getting into the endlessly politicized debate concerning the data on private vs. public school performance, I want to emphasize one point that has been almost entirely neglected in this debate: The only way to transform any system is to allow amateur, untrained visionaries to create new institutions within that system.  Every single study purporting to evaluate the effects of school choice ignores the importance of allowing brilliant amateurs to create schools.  Charter schools, which were originally designed to bring innovation into the public education system, have increasingly been chained to the same stifling “standards” that force public schools into a bland uniformity.  We need to allow even greater school choice than is possible through charter schools (and I know – I’ve run a charter school).

The Khabele School is not for every child or every parent.  No school is, nor can be.  The human mind is the most complex and unique entity in the universe.  We should allow thousands of Khotso Khabeles to create thousands of unique schools, and let parents decide which one are best for their children.  With educational vouchers, the poorest parents would have access to an increasing array of educational options. 

Opponents of school choice constantly claim that this would result in a “creaming off the top,” in which “good students” would go to private schools and the public schools would be left with those who are most difficult to educate.  And yet the charter school movement has proven that this fear is false:  Charter schools disproportionately educate poor, at-risk, and minority students.  And of course they would – with school choice, those students who are least well served by the existing system will be the first to leave.  It may, in fact, be the case that the only students who stay at public schools are those that are doing well there.

If we move towards greater school choice, it is crucial that we allow new entrepreneurs to create schools, and it is crucial that we allow people without education degrees to lead such schools.  All of the experts in education will testify to the legislature that we must ensure professional competence through certification – by them.  And yet we know that amateurs created the tech revolution.  The tech revolution, the largest legal creation of wealth in history, was created from math, sand, and entrepreneurship.  The Soviet Union had the greatest mathematicians on earth, and plenty of sand, but without a legal structure that allowed entrepreneurs to create new enterprises, their tech industry went nowhere.  By the mid-1980s a University of Chicago computer scientist estimated that any decent university in the U.S. had more computing power than the entire Soviet Union.  World-class innovation, in any field, depends on letting millions of people free to discover what they are best at – and letting them do it.

It is obvious to everyone at the Khabele School that Khotso was born to work with young people.  He has no expertise in curriculum, administration, evaluation, or any other expertise that would be learned at a university.  But his heart and spirit are brilliant, and young people respond.  Mothers cry when they see their dark, disillusioned teen brighten up and becoming a lively, loving spirit once again.

Adolescence in America is a disaster; Sarah Bird is only slightly exaggerating for humoristic effect when she says, “The best parents can hope for [from public middle school] is that their child emerges alive and unaddicted.”  Because of this unacknowledged fact, the first wave of school choice will not be based on test scores – it will be based on the desire to find happier, healthier circumstances for our children.  Once parents realize that the option exists that their teenager could enjoy school, and come home and be happy, pleasant, conscientious, and constructive, there will be a massive demand for more humane schools.  Learning will follow.

While outsiders like Khotso will create many of these humane schools, the best public school teachers will create many others.  Many of the excellent teachers within the system could create far better schools than are the ones in which they currently teach.  Those of us with a passion for entrepreneurial change need to help the frightened public school educators to see that they have nothing to lose but their chains.  And we need to help apologetic parents like Sarah Bird to see that they have nothing to apologize for when they are liberating the human spirit for good – and for democracy – when they support not only private schools, but legislation that will allow government funding to follow the poorest child to a school chosen by the parents.

Texas is the most entrepreneurial state in the union.  My favorite definition of an entrepreneur is someone who stays up nights thinking, “What sucks?” and then goes about fixing it.  In a world plagued by adolescent misery and dysfunction, we need to allow thousands of caring entrepreneurs the opportunity to create learning institutions that are filled with happiness and well-being.  It would befit Texas to legalize markets in happiness and well-being, one that allowed unlicensed educational entrepreneurs to compete with government-run schools, so that thousands of Texans can create new, better, happier, and healthier ways for our young people to learn the skills they need to compete in the 21st century global economy.

Michael Strong has founded and run several humane schools, including a New Mexico charter school that was ranked the 36th best public school in the nation.  He is currently the CEO of FLOW, an Austin-based non-profit devoted to “liberating the entrepreneurial spirit for good.”