« Competition
Friday Fish Porn: Grantmaker Edition I »

New Ideas

If you have an idea to improve public education then this should be you next year (pdf).

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 4th, 2008 at 11:17 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

3 Responses to “New Ideas”

  1. Reason Says:
    December 5th, 2008 at 10:47 am

    Government cannot be entrepreneurial. The Mindless Trust is engaging in self-deception or Orwellian propaganda.

  2. Eduwonk Reader Says:
    December 6th, 2008 at 7:37 am

    I don’t understand this comment–The Mind Trust is a nonprofit, not government. And certainly several education nonprofits (TFA, for example) have proven to be very entrepreneurial (and successful).

  3. Reason Says:
    December 6th, 2008 at 9:40 am

    Government: The Ultimate Anti-Entrpreneur

    Eduwonk Reader,

    Good question. From the document:

    “Organization Will Invest $730,000 in Three Outstanding Social Entrepreneurs to Help Incubate Their Ideas to Transform Public Education in the Nation’s Most Under-Served Communities”

    They want to ‘transform public education’. Public means government.

    Government, by definition, forces money out of people, puts it where it wants and then extracts more money from the powerless to pay for the damage or success the original outlay caused- it does not matter which as long as the money and power keep rolling in. There is no such thing as profit and loss, investment and entrepreneurship because government does not risk its own capital and pay the price for failure. There is no measure of failure anyway because government is not beholden to the consumer.

    Government rent-seeks; it does not invest. Government succeeds when it fails. Most “emergencies”, like education or war or drugs or terrorism or you-name-it, are not only used as excuses to take more money and liberties from people, but are often, indeed, artificial creations of the government and/or government wannabees in the first place.

    Public schools are shielded from the market and entrepreneurship. By this protection they naturally produce lesser quality for more cost and suffer from grave internal contradictions. This inevitable consequence gets qualified as an emergency. The current “emergency” produced NCLB and calls for more government power. The consequences, negative from the well-being of children and America in-general, are being used by Obama et al. to induce even further government control. It is a destructive spiral.

    So the non-profit, maybe with its heart in the right place, maybe out of ignorance, is merely donating money and mind to what rightly should be called the ultimate anti-entrepreneur.

Leave a Reply


eight * = 24