Larry Cuban on the Search for Innovation

By dianeravitch

November 15, 2018 //

Larry Cuban posted photographs of innovative ideas.

Innovation is a buzz word these days.

It is useful to be reminded that many innovations are duds.

We should not experiment on helpless children who trust us.

At least, do no harm.

Categories Education Reform, Innovation

11 Comments Post your own or leave a trackback: Trackback URL

dienne77 says:

November 15, 2018 at 12:09 pm

When I click on the link I get “not found”.

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- dianeravitch says:
  
  November 15, 2018 at 12:20 pm
  
  Try it again.
  
  https://larrycuban.wordpress.com/2018/10/28/photos-of-innovations-2/
  
  Reply
  - dienne77 says:
    
    November 15, 2018 at 12:32 pm
    
    Thanks! Some of those were hilarious. Just don’t tell Mitt Romney about the dog sack for the car!
    
    I’m especially keen on that last cartoon.
SomeDam Poet says:

November 15, 2018 at 12:48 pm

I once spent a significant amount of time doing patent searches for inventions that I and a collaborator had come up with to see if anyone else had come up with something similar.

I found myself getting sidetracked quite a bit because of all the fascinating inventions people have come up with, most of which had no chance in hell of ever being successful as products.

Many of them were wildly imaginative but completely impractical.

But the UPTO patent depository (which is now online) is actually a great place to see some of the best and worst ideas ever.

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- Laura H. Chapman says:
  
  November 15, 2018 at 4:46 pm
  
  I agree. Having the patents online is wonderful. I love the drawings. The new ones for computing are often minimalist. I subscribe to a couple of tech blogs.
  
  One recently featured a Facebook patent for a sociogram. Patent #: US20180032883 (15 pages)
  
  Another offered this report on a Facebook patent for emotion analysis. https://www.cbinsights.com/research/facebook-emotion-patents-analysis
  
  Here is an article from one of several tech blogs of interest https://www.biometricupdate.com/201808/australian-schools-testing-facial-recognition-for-attendance
  
  Reply
dienne77 says:

November 15, 2018 at 12:52 pm

Sorry, off-topic (and in no way do I want to suggest that Amazon is in any way connected to “innovation”), but some things we should all understand about the Amazon HQ deals: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/why-amazon-chose-new-york-virginia-756355/

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retired teacher says:

November 15, 2018 at 12:59 pm

I recall one of DeVos’ early public denouncement on public education. She claimed that public schools hadn’t changed from the 19th century, and she called them failed “factories of failure.” The truth is a different story. Public schools have evolved with the times, and sometimes this is a positive and sometime a negative as demonstrated by this post. At least public schools are operated by professionals that know when something is failing, and they can make changes. As for DeVos’ criticism, the mass standardization of so-called reform is more of a factory model than one that values human engagement in the learning process. To me a room full of children staring at screens all day is not much different from a room full of women sewing sleeves in jackets all day. Both of these are void of human contact and more worthy of the term “factory.”

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- LeftCoastTeacher says:
  
  November 15, 2018 at 7:51 pm
  
  The sweatshop comparison is spot on.
  
  Reply
Lloyd Lofthouse says:

November 15, 2018 at 1:36 pm

Regarding ALL invovations:

“30,000 new consumer products are launched annually, 95% of them fail. The failure rate for new products launched in the grocery sector is 70 to 80 percent, according to Inez Blackburn of the University of Toronto. Ask anyone what percentage of new products fail. The usual answer is somewhere between 70-90 percent.”

https://www.publicity.com/marketsmart-newsletters/percentage-new-products-fail/

Click the link and discover how horrifying that failure rate really is.

What is the failure rate for so-called innovative publicly funded, private-sector charter schools? I think the answer will reveal it is no different than the facts reports by that University of Toronto study quoted above. The public cannot afford to fund a failure rate that high.

The public education system when it is run from the bottom up and new teaching/education concepts and ideas are tried out by teachers in pilot programs, the cost of the failure rate is almost zero compared to innovative ideas forced on teachers from the top down. The reason the failure rate is almost nonexistent because those teachers adjust for flaws in the system that teams of teachers and possibly parents and students are involved in developing are correct during the process.

When I was still teaching, I took part in several of those pilot programs and no one was forced to join. It was all voluntary so the only teachers that took part liked the concept and were motivated to make it work and were willing to adjust.

Top down seldom if ever works because there is no room for the teachers at the bottom of the education pyramid to adapt and adjust and that is because when a top down idea comes along it is almost always managed by someone like Trump who thinks they are a stable genius and everyone else is a failure or they wouldn’t be at the bottom.

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- retired teacher says:
  
  November 15, 2018 at 1:59 pm
  
  Well stated. Instead of starting with student needs, they are starting with products to market and sell. With someone like Gates it starts with buying the people at the top to impose products on those at the bottom.
  
  Reply
- bethree5 says:
  
  November 16, 2018 at 10:10 am
  
  This reminds me of Quality Circles/ kaizen, the bottom-up method for continual improvement used in Japanese factories for decades (now in China too).
  
  In this link, the blogger visited Japanese factories in 2014, observing the method is still alive & well: https://www.leanblog.org/2014/11/quality-circles-are-alive-wed-probably-call-it-a3-problem-solving/
  
  Here, a blogger notes the method’s failure in US, w/commentary of Akira Ishigawa, a past president of Tex Instr-Japan, excerpted from Deming’s book Out of the Crisis : http://workingoutloud.com/blog//the-life-death-of-quality-circles-and-a-more-modern-way-to-implement-them Ishikawa’s observations show kaizen did not “fail” in US factories, it was never used at all. Mgt used the name, but “implemented” it backwards, i.e., top-down.
  
  The failure of personalized learning et al ed-reform silver bullets– and every other ed silver bullet peddled by textbook publishers et al since 1950’s– can be laid at the same doorstep. Check out Finland for a model of bottom-up ed: http://www.nea.org/archive/40991.htm
  
  Reply