B-School for Beginners

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The entrepreneurial nature of entrepreneurship education makes the subject difficult to standardize and incorporate into a national core curriculum. "The reality with any K-12 program is that you're not going to disseminate it nationally until you pilot it somewhere, reveal its benefits with concrete evidence, and make sure it's not dependent just on the teacher's personality," cautions Marilyn Kourilsky, one of this year's Kauffman judges and the creator of the KinderEconomy and Mini-Society programs. Kourilsky, recently appointed vice-president of the foundation's K-12 and community-college division, will oversee the dissemination of Cohen's teachings. She says her primary concerns will be replication and copyright infringement, because Cohen's lessons are derived from a variety of sources.

The Entrepreneur of the Year judges gave Cohen high marks for the creativity of her materials, which, they felt, "are meant to develop a very basic hands-on understanding from everyday life as to how the banking system and other business transactions work."

Student accounts bear this out. In addition to experiencing the life of an inventor last year, Jessica McClafferty received on-the-job training as a bank teller in the school's on-site branch of Wilmington Trust. Jacqui DeLorbe, 10, one of Jessica's classmates, took a shine to supply-and-demand charts while developing her pasta implement, the Wonder Wheel. Her mother, Terry DeLorbe, likes to tell the story of Jacqui's comment at the mall when she wanted two items but had only enough money for one: "My opportunity cost, Mom."

Reports from Cohen's older graduates are equally encouraging. Kelley Heck, a 16-year-old junior at Brandywine High School, in Wilmington, is planning a career in marketing when she finishes school, based on the exposure to the field she received in Miss Cohen's class seven years ago. "The competitions we entered got me used to speaking before people and selling products," she recalls. Heck is a member of Distributive Education Clubs of America, an international group for marketing students.

While Cohen's teaching methods instill an excitement about business in her students, they also convey lessons about failure that any embattled entrepreneur would understand. Unfettered by society's scrutiny, her students are tenacious: if one idea for a business doesn't fly, they eagerly come up with another.

For Cohen, there's much more to her craft than simply training the tycoons of tomorrow. She emphasizes that entrepreneurship goes beyond preparation for business. "Each of us is an entrepreneur, and the good or service we sell is ourselves. You may not have a business, but you still have to sell yourself. That's what entrepreneurship education does. It gives the kids confidence in themselves for whatever they do."

DIARY OF A JUNIOR ENTREPRENEUR

Each year, Miss Cohen devotes a month to Pastamania, an assignment in which students devise a tool to facilitate spaghetti eating. The following entries are excerpted from the inventor's log of Jessica McClafferty.

11/6, 30 minutes: Talked with Mom and Dad about some of my ideas.

11/10, 20 minutes: Got the idea to use clothespins and forks. Tried putting the clothespins and forks together and could not get it to work.

11/12, 20 minutes: Watched my family eating spaghetti and got the idea to use an eggbeater. Started working on taking one apart.

11/14, 90 minutes: Went to library to get ideas from books. Worked more on the eggbeater idea. Didn't like the way it was working.

11/15, 20 minutes: Got an idea from watching Mom washing potatoes with a vegetable brush. Used rubber bands instead of noodles to see if they would stay on the brush. It worked.

11/16, 30 minutes: Thought about ways to use the vegetable brush as part of my invention. Found an old hairbrush. I removed the bristles from the handle. I tested the hairbrush with the rubber bands and it worked.

11/17, 30 minutes: Helped Mom make spaghetti for dinner. Tried using the hairbrush to pick up the noodles.

11/18, 30 minutes: Found an old paint roller. Worked on ways to put the brush on the paint roller. I couldn't think of a way.

11/20, 20 minutes: Used dental floss to tie the brushes to the roller. Needed something to keep the brush and roller from hitting the handle. Dad and I looked around and found the tip of a caulk gun worked.

11/22, 45 minutes: The dental floss was not strong enough. Tried using fishing line. Tested again. Found that it was hard to control the movement of the brush.

11/24, 30 minutes: Changed to a smaller paint roller and glued the brushes to the roller instead of using the fishing line. Looked around the house for something to attach to the brush to help control the rolling. Found the eggbeater and thought the lever would work.

11/25, 20 minutes: Dad helped me remove the eggbeater lever. Needed something small and round to mount the lever to. Found a hubcap on an old lawn mower that was just the right size. Glued the hubcap and lever together and glued to the roller.

11/25, 15 minutes: Tested it and it worked.

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