SAN FRANCISCO (AP) – Like any ambitious entrepreneur, Amy Lee has created a global marketing plan, approved the product manufacturing specifications and memorized a business pitch to venture capitalists.
“I’m nervous, but I think I can get people to invest,” said the president and founder of Friends Forever Bracelet Inc., a jewelry retailer that plans a major Internet advertising campaign in China.
After a brief conversation with investors, she walked away with $32 in fake currency – no treasure for a Silicon Valley executive, but a proud fortune for an 11-year-old girl.
Amy is a fifth grader at San Francisco’s Jean Parker Elementary School, where she’s enrolled in a monthlong crash course in the fundamentals of business administration. The students learn new words like “revenue” and “prototype,” meet venture capitalists and executives, and even tour the glass offices of San Francisco’s financial district.
At the end of the month, they all sell their bracelets to fourth graders. Whichever team makes the most make-believe “BizBucks” wins the contest, and everyone celebrates with a big party sponsored jointly by San Francisco-based software company Salesforce.com and BizWorld Foundation, a nonprofit founded by a local venture capitalist.
The program is one of many that aim to teach business skills to kids. Some, like Colorado-based Junior Achievement have been around for generations and are offered at schools around the world. But the programs, long commonplace in America’s high schools, are increasingly being offered to students in middle and even elementary schools, advocates say, and are reaching a more diverse population than ever before.
Jean Parker, for example, is on the edge of San Francisco’s Chinatown and many students are the children of first-generation Asian immigrants.
Advocates say the initiative gets students thinking about entrepreneurship, finance, marketing and other real-world jobs, expanding their options beyond firefighters, veterinarians and other typical fifth-grade career picks. Proponents – including millionaire backers from the tech industry – want every school in America to teach business basics.
“Business curriculum engages students in learning much more than the basic ‘two-plus-two-is-four’ system, and it gives them a way to connect to their education,” said Gerald Richards, executive director for the Bay Area Office of the National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship. The group sponsors its own business school-style programs for students age 11 through 18 in San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Boston, Washington, Los Angeles, Miami, Baltimore and Pittsburgh.
“It needs to become a standard part of education nationwide as a way to give students a way to take ownership of their futures.”
But critics say these “kiddie MBA” programs – often sponsored by corporations – are thinly veiled advertisements that undercut the nonprofit motive of public education. They worry that dividing students into teams, then appointing one person president and giving lesser roles to other kids, needlessly exposes children to the cutthroat world of corporate America.
“If you’re just trying to make every student want to be an entrepreneur, that’s not necessary and could be harmful,” said Ikhlaq Sidhu, who runs the Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology at the University of California, Berkeley.
He applauds any program that teaches kids communication and sales skills. But in a nation desperate for more rank-and-file scientists and engineers, emphasizing business ownership might send the wrong message to students who have no desire to start a company, Sidhu said.
At Jean Parker, students meet once a week for a couple hours with businesspeople such as Bobby Napiltonia, a Salesforce.com senior vice president. Earlier this month, he pretended to be a VC for Amy Lee and other fifth graders – something he himself did when launching his own Internet startup before joining Salesforce.
“One of the kids was actually sweating, he was so nervous when he was pitching me. I thought, ‘Hey, I know that feeling!”‘ Napiltonia said. “The best part of this is that they are learning that in the real world, they can do whatever they want, as long as they can get investors to get on board. It’s empowering.”
The idea behind the program at Jean Parker came in 1993, when the 8-year-old daughter of Silicon Valley venture capitalist Tim Draper asked her dad to describe his job. At a loss to explain entrepreneurship to a third grader, he used his daughter’s love of friendship bracelets to create a mock company for her and her classmates.
Draper – founder and managing director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, which has backed startups such as Skype, Overture and Hotmail – established BizWorld Foundation in 1997. Google, Merrill Lynch, Salomon Smith Barney and the New York Stock Exchange Foundation have donated at least $100,000 to the foundation, which runs academic business curricula in all 50 states.
Jean Parker teacher Celia Magtoto says the program gets her 30 fifth graders thinking about careers far different from those of their parents, many of whom work blue-collar jobs.
Magtoto was initially concerned that a program promoting business culture could marginalize aspiring musicians, painters and others kids interested in non-corporate careers. But she quickly realized that the kids – who have music, art and other classes – rarely glimpse the business world.
The program turns some of her shiest wallflowers into straight-talking ramrods.
“I see kids who normally wouldn’t talk to their peers suddenly pitching their company to adults they don’t even know – that’s great for self esteem,” Magtoto said. “And it’s great for them to see that there are adults out there who really care and really listen to them.”
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