Redding School District

In the late 1960s, Fred Smith was a student at Yale.  He was trying, without much success, to make a particularly good impression on his economics professor.  Then Fred got this idea for a brief economic thesis.  Something a whole lot more interesting than you might expect from a college paper.  The topic of Fred’s original idea was a super efficient and privately managed postal service.  A hypothetical company that would buy for itself a fleet of jets and the planes would fly only in the middle of the night.  Letters and packages would be taken to a central location for sorting and then planes would fly the parcels to their destinations the same evening.  That’s what the paper was that Fred wrote in his economics class.   Don’t get ahead of me here but I know that your mind is already soring with ideas.  

Today Frederick W. Smith is currently the Executive Chairman of that hypothetical company that he founded years ago.  It's not hypothetical any longer.  Today it employs nearly 300,000 people and earned nearly a billion dollars in the last fiscal year.  The fleet of jets that Fred envisioned in his economics class paper?  Well, there are 650 planes in its fleet now and 80,000 other motorized vehicles in the service of, you guessed it, Federal Express (FedEx).  The corporation began as a college whim and then became a worldwide sensation.  Even though at the beginning FedEx was seen as a competitor to the US Postal Service, it was the government that did inspire many of the practices of his company.

After graduating from Yale, Fred enlisted in the Marine Corps.  He would serve two tours of duty in Vietnam.   While in that service, he became fascinated with military procurement and delivery procedures.  These observations only encouraged him.  When he got back home, he told himself that he would go forward with that overnight commercial delivery service that he had dreamed up in college.  The main competitor, the United States Postal Service, is barely hanging on to its 32% market share against the 38% market share held by Fred Smith’s FedEx.  It all started with a college paper in an ordinary economics class. 

It isn’t usual for a large corporation to have its origins pinpointed so precisely.   There is a lesson in all of this.    How easily Fred Smith might have been discouraged.  I forgot to mention that on the school paper that he wrote, the one where he outlined one of the biggest successes in American History, Fred received a “C”.  

So important for us to know the purpose and power of our grades as well as know how to help our students to make connections with their ideas and the world around them.  We really have no idea what experience we offer to our students that will spark the next huge growth for that student and inspire them to think beyond. 

Thanks for continuing your exploration around the process of looking at our student's outcomes and how to improve those outcomes for each and every child that we serve.  As we make our way to the easter break after next week, keep up the fantastic work of discovery and exploration for improvement.

Have a great weekend,

Rob