Dive Brief:
- Forbes spoke recently with Harvard Business School Professor Jan W. Rivkin on ways the business sector can strengthen the U.S. education system.
- Rivkin, along with his colleagues Allen S. Grossman and Kevin W. Sharer, have written about three areas business leaders should focus on when it comes to education: influencing policy, helping to spread successful innovations, and helping to coordinate education programs in communities.
- Rivkin, Grossman, and Sharer are currently working with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Boston Consulting Group to create a roadmap for how businesses can effectively partner and improve public education.
Dive Insight:
An obstacle Rivkin says the business community must overcome is moving past the current “checkbook philanthropy” status quo and actually using brain power to improve districts.
“These are noble efforts that are effective in their own way but they don’t result in positive, lasting improvements to the system," Rivkin says of monetary donations by business leaders.
Given his work with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, it is probably safe to say that the creation of the Common Core — with a heavy hand from Gates — is more in line with what he wants to see the business community doing with public education. Strategies versus dollars.
Alluding to the fact that many educators are wary of Gate's involvement in the Common Core, Rivkin notes that overcoming distrust is another barrier. "The gist was that a business leader would come in and say, ‘I know how to run my business so I know how to run your school,’” he said when explaining how superintendents filled out a survey on business sector involvement in schools.
