Proposal: The Learning Faster XPrize

A three-way partnership between the College Board, the XPrize Foundation, and the Gates Foundation could provide an effective infrastructure for disruptive innovation in educational efficiency.

The basic idea is this: a multi-million-dollar prize would be announced in the field of educational efficiency, using the College Board’s Advanced Placement exams as benchmarks. The College Board would define the Prize; the XPrize Foundation would determine the winner; and the Gates Foundation would provide the prize money.

The first team to achieve a specified metric of improvement to student success on a current AP exam would be awarded the prize.

What should the prize-winning metric be? It seems to me that three variables are involved in educational efficiency:
1. The educational outcome (i.e., exam scores).
2. The percentage of the total student population that attains a given outcome.
3. The cost of attaining a given outcome (including study materials, teacher time, and students’ study & practice time).

Consider the College Board’s Calculus Advanced Placement examination as an example. One could increase educational efficiency by
A. Increasing the average exam score for the current percentage of students at the current cost.
B. Increasing the percentage of students that attained the current average score at the current cost.
C. Reducing the cost of attaining the current average score for the current percentage of students.

One way to define the prize-winning metric would be to simply pick variable A, B, or C above, and to define the amount of improvement needed over the status quo that is necessary to win the prize. For example, one might define the prize-winning metric to be “reducing the cost of attaining a passing grade by 50%.”

This approach could exclude potentially prize-winning solutions that focused on improving the other variables. That’s not good.

However, this downside is ameliorated by the inter-dependency of the variables. Reducing the cost of passing a given exam, for example, will tend to enable a higher percentage of students to pass it. Likewise, those students whose study-investment remained constant, despite the lower cost of passing, would be likely to achieve higher scores, thus raising the average score.

Hence, I suggest that the prize-winning metric should focus on cost-reduction.

If the metric uses the “current average score,” however, then one way to win would be to identify the easiest-to-learn subset of material tested in the examination, teach that material only, and ignore the rest – in short, to “dumb down” the material. That’s not the Prize’s goal at all!

Therefore, rather than using the “current average score,” a much more-demanding metric such as “the current 80th percentile score” should be used.
The metric I propose, then, would be “reducing, by 50%, the cost of attaining a score equal to the 80th percentile score on the previous year’s exam.”

In the previously-mentioned case of AP Calculus, awarding the prize would indicate that students could now learn calculus twice as quickly as before, and that despite this lower investment of time, would learn more than they did before. That’s a very significant outcome, worthy of a multi-million dollar prize.

The Gates Foundation is not, by any means, the only source of funding for such a prize. The US Government has recently expressed interest in offering such prizes, and of course there are many other education-focused philanthropies -- but the Gates Foundation has the size and the focus to help make such a prize successful.

Hard Work

While the percentage of music educators that are enthusiastic about the ThumMusic System is high, those who are unconvinced sometimes seem to be opposed to anything that might make music education easier. They want music education to be hard. This view is captured in the Children's Music Workshop's Twelve Benefits of Music Education, in which Benefit #7 is described as follows: "Through music study, students learn the value of sustained effort to achieve excellence and the concrete rewards of hard work."

However, this benefit can be obtained from lots of alternative activities, including team sports, weight-lifting, macramé, and even video-game playing, just to name a few examples. Therefore, emphasizing this common benefit is a distraction from, and devalues, music education’s unique benefits.

Here’s another way to frame the issue. Let’s say that this minority of hard-work-loving music educators had to choose between making music education 10% easier or 10% harder, with all else being equal, and the status quo not being an option. Because these educators consider “an appreciation for the benefits of hard work” to be an important outcome of music education, then of course they would prefer the “10% harder” option. Surely one can’t increase a student’s appreciation for “the benefits of hard work” by making something easier!

Yet this is clearly self-defeating (which is probably why it is a minority viewpoint). Taken to its logical extreme, this viewpoint would make music education so hard that no one would be able to succeed. That's clearly not a desireable outcome, because then no one would attain the unique benefits of music education (whatever those might be).

On the other hand, let's consider the other logical extreme. Imagine that music educators could wave a magic wand and instantly change a non-musician's brain, muscles, cardiovascular system, etc. to precisely match the changes would have resulted from years of musical study and practice through traditional methods of music education (but without the Repetitive Stress Injuries). Let’s further imagine that waving this magic wand was guaranteed to deliver the unique benefits of music education with no unpleasant or unexpected side-effects. Talent and inspiration would not be guaranteed, but then, they never are.

If the unique benefits of music-making are good for individuals and for society, then waving this hypothetical magic wand would be, too, wouldn’t it?

To argue otherwise would be, in effect, to advocate educational flagellation in the belief that the self-mortification of unnecessarily hard work will deliver spiritual benefits.

According to the Twelve Benefits of Music Education, Benefit #3 is that "Students of the arts learn to think creatively and to solve problems by imagining various solutions, rejecting outdated rules and assumptions. Questions about the arts do not have only one right answer" [emphasis added].

A high percentage of music educators have acquired this benefit, and are eager to deliver the unique benefits of music education to as many students as possible, by any means necessary -- magic wands, the ThumMusic System, or whatever. The flagellants, on the other hand, would apparently rather see students fail with traditional methods than succeed with a new one, lest -- God forbid! -- they attain the unique benefits of music education without as much hard work.

Thank goodness that music education's flagellants are in the minority!