Bringing the Sharing Economy to Sex Ed Teacher Training

By Rebekah Saul Butler, MBA, MPH | April 13, 2015
Co-Executive Director/The Grove Foundation

My business school marketing professor once said, “The airlines need to think more like a taxi.” Get people where they need to go when they want to go, and make it easy to get there.

 

As a frequent business traveler, I’ve often thought of those words while stranded in an airport or waiting for everyone in front of me to get their bags down and exit the aircraft. Air travel feels impersonal—like it’s designed to be convenient for the airlines, not the flier. And the industry hasn’t made much progress in 15 years.

 

I can’t say I’m any more enamored with the taxi industry. I’ve waited endlessly for a cab many times in cities all over this country. San Francisco is a notoriously terrible taxi city, which is why it was the birthplace of ridesharing companies Uber and Lyft—companies founded deliberately to transform an inefficient transportation industry. 

I’ve recently started using a ridesharing app and can understand perfectly why the sector is growing exponentially. And what’s this got to do with sexuality education?

I’d like to see sexuality education teacher training become more like a modern ridesharing business: technology based, customer centric and widely accessible.

Young People Need This Information

As part of my work at the Grove Foundation, I lead our work on the collaborative initiative Working to Institutionalize Sex Ed (WISE™). WISE supports school-based sexuality education. Behind the program is a firm commitment that all young people need information about sexual health in order to successfully navigate their lives.

Schools provide an ideal place to teach sex ed for all kinds of reasons. Health and learning are linked. Young people and their families want sex ed taught in schools. Schools employ skilled teachers and staff who care about young people. School-based programs can achieve scale.

Indeed, I believe that implementing sexuality education in the roughly 14,000 school districts of the U.S. employing more than 3 million teachers is primarily a challenge in scale.

Many people assume that lack of time, lack of interest or the fear of controversy keep schools from implementing sex ed. It’s true that these factors (and others) hold some schools back. However, the experience of WISE is that there is significant, unmet demand by school districts to improve their sexual health programs. With guidance and resources, schools can and will dramatically improve their sexuality education programs.

Top of the List: Teacher Training and Funding

WISE focuses on school districts that have some readiness to implement sexuality education, so they are not a representative sample. Still, when districts fill out their needs assessment at the beginning of their engagement with a WISE partner, they cite the need for teacher training and funding (e.g. to purchase curricula) more frequently than any other implementation barriers—above lack of time, lack of staffing or parent/community opposition. This always jars me when I read the WISE evaluation reports, because teacher training and funding are infrastructure barriers that we should be able to solve for schools.

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Barriers to Implementing Sexuality Education

Identified in needs assessments completed by WISE school districts 2011–2014

Teacher training	69%
Funding (e.g., to purchase curricula)	67%
Lack of time	62%
Lack of staffing	52%
Parent/community opposition	27%

Source: Learning for Action. Bringing Comprehensive Sex Education to Schools: Outcomes from Phase 2 of the WISE Initiative. Academic Years 2011–2014. January 2015.

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I am particularly troubled by the unmet need for teacher training because, in my experience, such training is unnecessarily supply constrained. It’s constrained by too few trainers located in too few places, and training models that adapt too little and cost rather a lot. Some schools receive federal funds that allow them to implement evidence-based sex ed in line with curriculum developers’ models, but for the majority of schools, those models remain out of reach.

Time and again I’ve seen schools committed to implementing sex ed but thwarted by their inability to access affordable teacher training on a workable timeline. Schools could implement without a formal curricular training, but, in my experience, schools feel that the training is essential. It is a best practice to provide professional development (for example, see the work of Douglas Kirby and colleagues outlining 17 Characteristics of Effective Sex and STD/HIV Education Programs), so it is a good thing that schools seek it.

However, the end result is that we are leaving young people in the lurch—an outcome I find much more unacceptable than waiting hours for a taxi or killing time in an airport hoping I can get on a different flight.

Sharing the Ride

That’s why I dream about the “Ridesharing Company Model of Sex Ed Training.” Here are the key market-transforming principles behind ridesharing companies that I think are relevant to sex ed training:

1. Use technology to improve service for a similar or lower price. Lyft, SideCar and Uber all have business models that use software to integrate various mobile phone, location, supply calculation and payment technologies. That can get complicated, but it is simple for the end user.

You download an app and input your payment information. Then, when you need a ride, you tap on the app and get instant information about fare and wait time. If you request the ride, payment occurs automatically at the end. The process is straightforward and completely transparent—you know what you are getting and when and can consider your alternatives.

2. Keep a customer focus. Since ride-share companies were responding to customer-level frustration with the existing transportation industry, they were built from the ground-up with customers in mind. In addition to being easy and transparent, they promote a culture of service and encourage providing feedback on drivers (via an app) so that there is accountability to service.

That explains why at the start of my first rideshare experience, the driver turned to me and said, “Bottled water? And help yourself to either the Android or Apple phone charger.” These companies offer choices, such as different kinds of cars and levels of service, to meet the different needs (and price points) of different customers.

3. Change the supply dynamics. Taxis have long been regulated by “medallions”—a complicated system which intentionally constrains taxi supply. Uber, SideCar and Lyft have disrupted that model by allowing anyone with a suitable car and personal track record to get into the transportation business. The focus has moved from regulation and proprietary systems of delivery to a focus on outcomes—let’s get people safely and efficiently to where they want to go.

These companies are part of a broader movement sometimes called the “sharing economy” or the “mesh economy,” where business models or partnerships use excess capacity and talent to increase supply and convenience, often while simultaneously lowering prices.

Ridesharing companies aren’t perfect. They have their complexities—politics and pricing among them—which I won’t get into. Instead, I’m suggesting that our sex ed training model can improve itself by thinking about ways to apply these market-transforming principles.

My colleagues in this field have taught me that sexuality education training includes these primary components:

• Curriculum-specific details, such as the research and/or theory base behind a specific curriculum or how to deliver lessons of a given curriculum to make them most effective.
• Functional knowledge, including understanding the essential content that young people will need to know to avoid risks and make healthy choices. Examples here are what happens during puberty, what an STI is or how to compare current contraceptive methods.
• Core skills, such as how to answer difficult questions, build comfort discussing sexuality and body parts, and teach lessons in ways that are inclusive of diverse students.

Now, I understand as well as anyone that a taxi ride is not the same thing as sexuality educator training, and that the skills and experience needed to give someone a lift across town are different from the skills and experience required to deliver an effective training. A local ridesharing business doesn’t face the same challenges as a national training initiative.

But I do think we can learn from this analogy. There are business-model similarities between the traditional medallion taxi system and the prevailing curriculum-specific teacher training model. In my view, both have elements of being proprietary, regulated and supply constrained. I want the field to take a good look at how ridesharing has changed things. If we could apply some of this market-transforming model to sexuality education trainings, we might see more people ready to train, more teachers ready to teach, and more young people getting the education they need and deserve.

Here’s what the ridesharing principles might look like in our field:

1. Use technology to improve service for a similar or lower price. Let’s leverage technology to handle what technology can, starting with tasks such as scheduling, booking and supply/demand management. In addition, and more important, technology can replace the first and second elements of traditional training (curriculum specifics and functional knowledge) as well as needs assessment and basic follow-up. All of that can be executed online. This is a distributive learning approach (ETR offers a model here) which can save time, dollars and boost learning over time.

2. Keep a customer focus. Current curricular training models too often remind me of that airplane industry my marketing professor commented on: there is a fixed training model, a fixed or limited schedule, and a fixed price. You can either pay your fare, show up on time and “get on the plane”… or not.

In our model today, curriculum-specific trainers deliver the training in a pre-determined format (e.g. two back-to-back days, in person), and it is not unusual for the trainers to travel long distances to provide the training. This is a difficult model for schools that must free up professional development days, hire substitutes, comply with union rules and adapt to changing calendars.

A customer focus would mean starting the process by asking schools about their preferences: When would you like to do training? How much time do you have? What can you afford? The trainer would then work to deliver a quality learning process (training) while honoring the school’s needs and working with its constraints. Furthermore, training that uses technology to do pre-assessment and post-training follow-up could be more learner centric, meeting teachers where they are and focusing on their specific needs.

3. Change the supply dynamics. If curriculum specifics and functional knowledge can be offered online, in-person training can focus on an evidence-informed core skills training that is more “generic” in nature. This is in line with the distributive learning approach. Capacity to deliver the in-person portion of learning process could be built in as many states and regions as possible, relying on existing sexuality educators who could thus support a variety of curricula and topics.

This is analogous to letting qualified people who meet certain standards use their own cars to provide rides: supply increases, and wait times and costs go down.

Deliberately focusing on using local talent to provide training and build relationships could have additional benefits. Over time, the model could evolve from a focus on curriculum-specific training to true professional development, which is, as one of our WISE partners explains it, “long-term, ongoing, sequenced and cumulative.”

This last point about supply is particularly important. The experience of WISE is that more supply of help and resources leads to an increased demand for sexuality education implementation. I believe this dynamic is explained by the economic principle of “latent demand”—demand that exists but is not recognized because no known product or service meets it.

This is something schools experience every day. Most schools fundamentally understand that young people need a better education about sexuality and healthy relationships. If I am correct that this latent demand exists, increasing the supply of curricula and training could have a dramatic impact on increasing sexuality education and, thus, improving health and learning outcomes.

I have seen WISE partners and many others across the United States develop regional core skills trainings, move from training to professional development, demonstrate a strong customer and learner focus, and increase the supply of educational resources and services to meet schools’ needs. And I have seen some curriculum developers, including one of the Grove Foundation’s partners, ETR, move products, assessment and support online, unpack the science of online and adult learning (some of which is reflected in this opinion piece), and work hard to deliver trainings in a more flexible and responsive way.

These steps are having a real impact and I’m excited by the direction we’re moving. But curriculum-specific training continues to be a bottleneck in the system. Through our collective efforts we can fix the bottleneck. I believe we must fix this if we are truly committed to our young people.

Rebekah Saul Butler, MBA, MPH, is Co-Executive Director at The Grove Foundation. She can be reached at Rebekah@grovefoundation.org.