Custom essays on Critical Thinking

Is public education largely a value-chain business? What does that even mean?

There are three business models that are involved in the current commercial system: value chains, facilitated user networks and solution shops. The value-chain businesses include retailing, manufacturing, and food service companies. Such kind of companies put inputs of materials into one end of their premises, changes them while increasing value and provide higher-value products to their customers at the other end of their premises. The ability to deliver value in such businesses is embedded in strong and standardized process (Christensen 130). The example of value-chain business is the production and distribution of textbooks. It is also known that the public education’s commercial system is largely a value-chain business now also. Students are herded into a classroom at the beginning of the school year, then value is added to them and they are promoted to the next grade at the end of the year.

2.) The technological platform will allow software to individualize student learning with assessing their learning styles and tailoring lessons to meet their needs…is this far fetched? Why or why not?
The technological platform is a platform that enables nonprogrammers to build remarkably sophisticated software for specific purposes; it allows any student to develop his individual, own system to manage a small business’s resources.

Such platforms help nonprofessionals to create software that helps different types of learner’s master topics that they would otherwise have struggled to learn. This innovation is very attractive and can be very useful for students. It sounds like a tutor. It would be great for every student to be able to afford personal tutors who have the skill to tailor the way they teach each subject to their students in a manner that matches the way the students learn. Such kind of software platforms will give students an opportunity to teach other students while developing tools and putting them into the network of users. It is known that it is easier to learn while teaching and not just listening to a teacher.

3.) What lessons can we learn from other industries about disruptive regulated markets?
Considering the disruptive regulated markets, we need to remember that once the new commercial system had proven itself to be viable and better and the bulk of the customers had migrated to the unregulated system, its regulators responded to the fait accompli. For example, Southwest Airlines didn’t disrupt the airline industry by seeking approval in the early 1970s from the federal Civil Aeronautics Board for discount prices on long, interstate routs. It began flying short routs and the rates and route structures of interstate trucking collapsed under their weight in the late 70s after corporation began operating their own truck fleets, which fell outside the jurisdiction of the Interstate Commerce Commission. The regulation of bank interest rates was toppled when Merrill Lynch introduced its interest-bearing cash management account.

4.) What role, if any, would the teacher union play in this potential change in the school system?
In public education, the there is a belief that teachers unions can wield more than textbook and instructional software, so a lot of school reformers have lost the hope to change something. It is suspected that if innovators begin changing user networks that are used by professionals and amateurs (parents, students and teachers) in order to circumvent the present value chain and will offer their products to each other, the balance of power in educational system will collapse.