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(A) Fund (B) Copy (C) Steal (D) Sell (E) All of the Above (A) Fund ( (B ) Copy ) This (C) Steal (D) Sell (E) All of the Above 30 JAN | FEB 2011 THE PENNSYLVANIA GAZETTE PHOTOGRAPH BY CHRIS CRISMAN C’03 Education What happens when you unleash an entrepreneurship evangelist on an education school? Meet Doug Lynch, the vice dean bent on making Penn GSE a hub for social entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and next-generation educational reform. BY TREY POPP THE PENNSYLVANIA GAZETTE JAN | FEB 2011 31 Sabrina Kay GrEd’09 was nobody’s $1.5 million a year for its private-equity ly in the future of fashion design. In 1991 idea of a typical student. owners. “They wanted to dump it,” says she struck a mutually beneficial deal For one thing, the fashion-industry Kay. “And of course, here comes Sabrina, with a software company that was hav- entrepreneur came to the United States and I paid cash for it.” ing trouble finding buyers for its new, as a 19-year-old Korean who didn’t speak She renamed it Fremont College, and quarter-million-dollar CAD suite. Give enough English—as she would say years got down to the task of remaking it— me the software for free, she said, and I’ll later—to order lunch at McDonald’s. For largely in the image of the very GSE- train your first generation of customers. another, by the time she applied to Wharton program she was now attend- It worked. Kay hired space and faculty, Penn’s Graduate School of Education, ing, via cross-country commute, in in- built a curriculum, recruited students, she had already retired. And really, what tensive week-long blocks. and won the all-important regional ac- does a thirty-something California girl “When you look at the Wharton creditation. Her graduates got job place- with “good, eight-figure money in my Executive program, you’re not just taking ments at a rate that even Wharton might checking account” need with a doctor- the brightest and the greatest—you’re tak- envy—consistently above 90 percent. And ate in education? ing anyone who can pay the money,” Kay the software company had a growing That’s a fine question, but put it aside says. “And you have to inject the knowl- market of fashion designers trained on for the moment, because in 2007 Sabrina edge in one week, and give them a very its proprietary platform. A decade of Kay was facing a more pressing one: specific outcome, which is either learn work paid off in 2002 when she sold the What does a doctoral candidate need to read financial statements, or learn- school for a reported $15 million to with an eight-figure checking account? ing leadership so that you become a Education Management Corporation, a She had been thinking about the perfor- better person.” Kay wanted to do the publicly traded company that would mance gap between America’s K-12 educa- same thing, albeit for mid- to low-in- shortly be acquired by Goldman Sachs. tion system, which is lambasted every come adults whose previous academic (EDMC, which runs 71 for-profit colleges, time US kids finish 20 places behind the experience had, to put it gently, lacked is once again a NASDAQ-listed firm, cur- Finns on an international test, and its rigor. “So I sat there and kind of did a rently valued at $2 billion.) universities, which remain the envy of the data input of what we were doing, hour If you think that talking about educa- world. “What happens between 18 and by hour, at Wharton, and drew up a model tion—much less education reform—in 19 for these students?” as she somewhat with six steps.” terms lifted from venture capitalists is facetiously puts it. “Do they get smarter This she showed to Doug Lynch, the vice vaguely sacrilegious, listening to Doug overnight—in one year? Or do we drop a lot dean of GSE and the person responsible Lynch might send you sprinting for the of our students on the street?” for starting the Work-Based Learning nearest exorcist. Ever since he was re- She was pretty sure it was the street. Leadership program. She showed it to cruited to GSE in 2004, as a trained econo- Too many young adults were falling other GSE professors. She made adjust- mist who’d never worked for an education through the crack between four-year uni- ments and additions, sometimes appro- school, Lynch has ordered his life as an versities and community colleges. Pick priating whole classroom exercises into administrator and classroom teacher any reason you wanted—breakneck tu- her curriculum plan. What she wanted to around one guiding belief: that America’s ition increases among the former, insuf- know was whether she could copy the best hope for improving its educational ficient capacity among the latter, uncer- most effective parts of her executive- outcomes lies in opening the marketplace tainty about the real economic value of a doctorate program and paste them into as wide as possible to entrepreneurs. And diploma from either one—it didn’t mat- the for-profit educational tracks at graduate schools of education, it follows, ter. Kay thought she knew how to deliver Fremont College—if, as she later put it at should be doing everything in their power the kind of education that would help an education-industry conference, she to equip and enable them. these overlooked people thrive. Namely, could “knock off Wharton.” Lynch has challenged and changed the the same kind she was getting at what Lynch answered with a memorable status quo at Penn GSE over the past few she called her Penn “brain spa,” the new piece of advice: “Steal shamelessly.” years, though not necessarily in a way Executive Program in Work-Based Learning that’s attracted a lot of outside attention. Leadership, offered by GSE in partner- ynch would not have been the He negotiated a partnership with Teach ship with Wharton. least bit surprised by Kay’s pur- For America wherein GSE would adminis- The thing was, just writing a disser- Lchase of a for-profit college as a ter a custom-built certification program tation wasn’t going to do it for her. “I’m “laboratory” for her dissertation work. for TFA recruits—an idea he considered a more of a practitioner than an aca- That was how she’d banked eight fig- “home run” but only managed to pull off demic,” she says now. “I needed a labo- ures to begin with, as the founder of after being “drawn and quartered by the ratory to kind of test out some of my California Design College. After study- faculty,” some of whom, he recalls, “basi- theories. So I bought one.” ing computer science and industrial cally said, ‘They’re the devil. What are you To be precise, she bought a college in design at California State University at doing? They undermine everything that southern California about 45 minutes Long Beach, Kay, whose parents owned a we’re about.’” (Because most TFA corps from where she lived. Nominally a for- clothing business, intuited that comput- members only teach for two years before profit institution, it was losing about er-aided design (CAD) would figure huge- pursuing different careers—and there’s a 32 JAN | FEB 2011 THE PENNSYLVANIA GAZETTE lot of evidence that it takes three or four years of classroom experience to make What [Kay] wanted to know was whether teachers really effective—some scholars criticize TFA for sending inexperienced, if she could copy the most eff ective parts well-intentioned, college graduates into of her executive-doctorate program and the country’s neediest classrooms. “There are folks who argue eloquently that teach- paste them into the for-profi t educational ing is an intellectual endeavor, and that it takes a long time to get good at it, and tracks at Fremont College—if, as she later we’re one of the few decent ed schools in the country, so we should be sort of pre- put it at an education-industry conference, paring the Jedi masters,” Lynch elabo- rates. “And here you are signing a deal she could “knock off Wharton.” with these 21-year-old kids who are going to last two years.” But the faculty came Lynch answered with a memorable around, he says, when they started inter- piece of advice: “Steal shamelessly.” acting with TFA recruits and realized, as Lynch puts it, “’Oh, these are really smart, thing centrally: ‘We’re going to change Foundation and the KIPP charter school committed kids—and they really do need the whole system, and we’re going to program to La Guardia Community College our help, because they’ve [only] gotten five legislate it.’ Well, that’s been tried sort and Rosetta Stone. weeks’ training.’”) of for the last 50 years, and that’s got- “Part of it is sort of being a yenta,” Lynch He started the program in which ten us pretty much nowhere.” explains. “One of the big problems [in Sabrina Kay enrolled—a first of its kind So he advocates jettisoning that top- the education marketplace] is what they among Penn’s peers in that it was de- down approach and replacing it with call ‘deal flow.’ Once you’re University of signed for senior-level executives in what amounts to an army of entrepre- Phoenix, it’s pretty easy to get capital— charge of corporate-based education neurs who can test out ideas great and you’ve got 500,000 students; you’re and training. (“At first faculty were small—rather the way Supreme Court sort of worth a gazillion dollars.
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