If Congress renews the controversial No Child Left Behind Act this fall, as it is expected to do, some impoverished, low-performing students will inevitably lose the hypercompetitive race to get into college. As a result, unemployment or low-paying jobs might await them as perceptively unattractive options.
Perception, tragically, often becomes reality.
Entrepreneurial self-employment, however, would hold great promise for business-minded students, if they learn entrepreneurship in high school and can test out their innovative business plans on consumers in their own neighborhoods and beyond — especially Internet start-up ideas. The social and community networking success of MySpace opens a wide door for anyone to market a new idea or product to a myriad of potential customers instantly.
In a bold, dramatic move to address the entrepreneurship learning deficit in NCLB, Congress should amend the law to fund the certification of high school educators to teach entrepreneurship electives, especially to students most likely to be left behind. Alternatively, Congress should pass separate legislation to this effect or the federal Department of Education should launch this as its own initiative without a Congressional mandate. Unfortunately, there is no current push by lawmakers to include entrepreneurial education in NCLB.
The National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE), which has trained over 4,700 teachers since 1987, would be the ideal pedagogical vehicle to launch such an initiative. During its existence, more than 180,000 students gained the ability to follow a pathway to prosperity — not be left behind — by taking NFTE’s rigorous, relevant and relationship-driven micro-MBA type program.
NFTE students have: been taught by their teachers to conceptualize, design and defend their own business plans guided by volunteer business plan coaches, learned to open up bank accounts and conduct business operations while tracking income and costs per unit of product or service sold. Drafting a personally chosen business plan is an experiential and asset-based approach to enable students to understand the importance of grammar and calculating personal profits provides context and rewards for learning math. Significantly, the NFTE’s teaching programs have been adopted in 600 mostly low-income high and middle schools in 21 states and 13 countries. This demand-side growth comes from success at NFTE’s two founding sites 1988: South Bronx, N.Y., and Newark, N.J.
