Barriers to Building for Kids: Part 3, Values

“The greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation.”
― Jeremy Bentham, The Principals of Morals and Legislation

“The end may justify the means as long as there is something that justifies the end.”
― Leon Trotsky, Their Morals and Ours

“I do not care about the greatest good for the greatest number . . . Most people are poop-heads I do not care about them at all.”
― James Alan Gardner, Ascending

Within education, there is constant, seemingly inescapable tension between buyers and vendors. This tension is a natural outcome of the difficulty of experimentation in learning (Part 1: Science), and the chicken-and-egg challenges of innovating on behalf of children while also protecting them (Part 2: Safety). The extremely high bar that new learning solutions are rightfully held to inevitably leads to friction of the following type:

1. Companies capitulate or cater to status quo notions of safety to stay in business… and end up building ineffective, or incrementally effective, products. (And, in some cases unethical companies disregard the importance of the educational system that they are engaging and try to sell whatever they can to whoever they can.)
2. Either way, educational buyers — whose inability to bear the risks of innovation is a driver of company’s behavior — end up purchasing solutions that don’t really move the needle for their students.
3. Trust is lost. Buyers become disillusioned, and move towards even more conservative (and less collaborative) purchase processes. Companies (both old and new), face an even harsher market environment than they did previously. And repeat step 1, leading to further retrenchment¹.

The tension between educational buyers and vendors is exacerbated by the dissonance between their mutually admirable value schemes:

1. Parents and educators value each individual child as extraordinarily precious.
2. Companies think about children in the aggregate, seeking to do the greatest good for the greatest number².

Both of these value schemes are completely valid and, in the world of education, frequently incompatible.

The simplest and most fundamental example of this misalignment is that innovative products are always least reliable for the first people who use them. For educational products that serve adults, early adopters can volunteer for imperfect solutions because the promise of improvement (and the potential to contribute to societal progress) is worth it for them.

Kids’ guardians simply can‘t be early adopters in the same way. Most parent’s value system is that “we refuse to let OUR kids participate with an experimental solution that risks their outcomes EVEN IF doing so is likely to produce widespread benefits for kids and society in general over the long term”. Correspondingly, innovators who are willing to ‘risk’ the interests of a small group of kids (the hypothetical early adopters, who are only 6 once, after all) in order to build a revolutionary product for all kids demonstrate competing values with their initial customers; the very same customers who must turn around and tell future buyers that the product is safe and worthwhile for an innovation to have any chance to scale. (See Part 2: Safety)

So, entrepreneurs in education are faced with a killer paradox. The more bold, unconventional, and higher ‘delta’ a learning innovation is, the harder it is to build trust with the customers who would benefit from the solution if it could be brought to fruition.

Another demoralizing example of how different value schemes impact innovation in learning can be found in pricing. Imagine that a school or district would like to use a product but can’t pay much (it’s not all that imaginary!). Let’s also assume, for the sake of the example, that the startup that produces the product has done a terrific job and it would absolutely be good for the kids in this district to get access to it.

In this situation, it’s probably bad for the company to undermine its pricing scheme to increase access for children in a specific district, even if the company is fully focused on benefitting kids (not maximizing profits). By charging less, and undermining the value of its product, the startup would prioritize immediate revenue and the interests of a small group of students over its long term capacity to innovate and sustainably make a difference to a large number of kids worldwide. It is absolutely right and fair for the hypothetical district to want a deal — that’s all they can afford! But, the resulting pressure that the district puts on the startup has the potential to lead to tradeoffs that are net-negative for kids at large³.

There are innumerable permutations of this local vs. global value disconnect⁴. For instance, imagine that: District A can only use a product if it is integrated with LMS Q, but integrating with LMS Q entails steep costs for Company Z. If Company Z executes the integration, it will be serving that particular district’s children successfully. But, if we consider the opportunity cost of the integration work, Company Z may have hurt its chances to make a difference to kids overall by deferring other critical priorities. If Company Z chooses not to support LMS Q, District A will be rightfully disappointed, and potentially even mistrustful, of a corporation that is not willing to make a dedicated effort on behalf of their children.

So, even when everyone in education is acting reasonably (which, unfortunately, isn’t the case as often as we’d like), there’s still inherent tension. It’s hard innovating in learning. It’s SO hard.

Good thing that we have lots of subsidies and support for research and development in education to overcome these impediments; and many highly-capable and empathetic adults willing to take on the challenge, right?

Right?

…

Not so right :/.

On to Part 4: Underinvestment.

(Or, go back to read about the difficulty of experimentation in education in Part 1: Science, and/or the power of the familiarity of the status quo in Part 2: Safety).

Footnotes:

1. My suspicion is that this cycle is descriptive in education beyond vendor/buyer dynamics. For instance, at a macro level, parents play a similar role when selecting schools to the one that schools play when selecting vendors.
2. This is a generous heaping of benefit-of-the-doubt — my point is that even the rare companies who are this morally motivated can still be somewhat misaligned with their individual customers.
3. AND, it’s actually even worse than that because if the company does refuse to discount the product, that choice will almost inevitably contribute to the impression that the company is focused on profit, not benefiting children. Once again, trust is lost — and truly, trust is so often unintentionally eroded in education in precisely these ways in the real world.
4. Credit and thanks to Ben Thompson of Stratechery for helping me consolidate my thoughts on the importance of local vs global values. Facebook Stats, Facebook’s Data Sharing, Facebook Politics (Stratechery Daily Update 12–20–2018)