Balance: Competition vs. Knowledge Sharing

For a few years I have been promoting more freedom in schooling:  More freedom to open new schools; more freedom to create different types of schools; more freedom to parents in choosing the school for their children - possibly different schools for different children in the same family, for they are very different indeed.

Together with this freedom, a free market economy will naturally appear, with competition among the schools.  Schools will compete for pupils.  Theoretically, a good school will get more pupils, and a bad school will run out of pupils - it will be allowed to fail and close down.  There are several concerns that come up immediately:  What happens with the pupils of the failed school?  What happens when there are more pupils than a school can cope with?  Do we allow selection for entry into the good schools?  To what length will schools go in pandering to the lowest common denominator in prospective pupils or parent?

All these and more are valid questions, but this post will try to focus on one:  We want schools to share knowledge, which is against their immediate competitive interests.  How do we balance the Competition with Knowledge Sharing?

First, let's make sure we have a good handle on the reasons for sharing knowledge:

• For the regulation to work well, the regulator needs free access to information about what the schools teaches, what it doesn't teach, the results of teaching (=what types of graduates are created by the school), etc.  In some schemes, such as charter schools, the regulator needs access and even some authority on the school's plans.
• Transparency helps control the marketing and advertisement of the school, to ensure truth in advertisement.
• To facilitate parents' and pupils' choice of school, the information needs to be out there.
• Common knowledge would facilitate the creation of new schools - why repeat old mistakes?

But these are short term concerns.  One longer-term concern is that of continually improving humanity's understanding of what schooling we need, what doesn't work, etc.  This knowledge is lacking these days, and even if it were much better today, we would need to continuously update it to adapt to the requirements of a rapidly changing society.  Ongoing research is necessary, and since the variety of needs and the variety of different cultures and people requires research and experimentation to be very wide ranging, the research can't be limited to a few academics.  Research needs to be systemic.  It needs to be part of the culture...  And that goes against the secrecy that comes - to some extent - with competition.

Regarding market research, it may be possible to avoid a head-on collision between the need for transparency and the need for secrecy by allowing two types of research and knowledge gathering about the market, which is one of the most sensitive trade secrets for competing entities:

1. Each school may prepare a market research for itself, and not have to share it
2. The state will prepare periodic baseline market research and publish it

• To avoid the need for schools to develop a great market-research ability
• To raise the bar for all schools - existing and prospective, by exposing weaknesses, strengths and opportunities

Regarding pedagogic research, it may be more difficult to avoid this collision.  But on the other hand, secrecy of methods is very difficult to maintain in a school, even without any laws demanding transparency: The pupils are exposed to the teaching methods and teaching materials, and there are too many students to maintain secrecy. Schools will need to compete not in their ability to develop and concealing methods and materials, but in their ability to execute:  To take existing knowledge and put it successfully into practice.  Schools also have an advantage in generating new knowledge, even in an environment without secrecy, because they will be the first to be able to use the knowledge, before it is distributed.

There will always be the temptation to keep some new knowledge secret, or to release incomplete and unusable forms of the new knowledge.  Some of the ways to discourage this behavior include:  Laws, similar to antitrust laws that impose penalties on secretive behavior.  On the carrot-end, the state can offer financial bonuses to teachers who generate and distribute new knowledge.  On the school level, the state can provide recognition (=free publicity) to schools that generate and effectively distribute such knowledge.

This idea of a combination of competition and knowledge-sharing is not as wild as it may seem:  Hospitals and HMOs compete against each other, but share medical knowledge and work in a somewhat transparent environment.  Engineers working together share knowledge, at the same time they compete for raises and recognition.  More than anything, it is a matter of culture.