Should We Run Schools Like A Business? – Education Is Horked, Part 6

Imagine if you came across the following on Craigslist or LinkedIn while looking for that next great job.

Your responsibilities as Division Manager at Acme Co will include managing, supervising, and mentoring a division of 300 people. At Acme Co, we highly value your ability to handle new situations each day, as well as your ability to get the most out of each of your direct reports. Your compensation and job security are tied directly to the performance of the people that work for you. In addition:

• You will be required to hire anyone that walks in and applies for a job, regardless of their qualifications
• You cannot fire anyone if they don’t show up for work.
• You must promote at least 50% of the employees every year, regardless of whether or not they can perform the tasks required.
• At the end of each year, we will test all of the employees to see what new skills they have learned. The results of these test scores will determine whether or not you continue to work here.

So, the logical conclusion for us meat-eating capitalists is “We should run schools like a business!” I certainly used to think that this was the panacea we had been waiting for. Teachers would do their jobs, we would measure them against some objective standard, and the ones that performed well would be rewarded. We would weed out the incompetent lot, the bottom 20% just like Jack Welch tells us to in business. The cream would rise to the top, students would migrate to the better schools, and competition would determine the winners and losers. Losers go home ( or in this case, shut their doors ).

The problem is, I am not sure it’s that simple. In business, there are objective standards to measure success. Successful businesses make money, gain market share, attract new customers, keep old customers and so forth. What are the comparable measures in education? Yes, there are standardized tests. But those tests are not the same from state to state until the SAT and ACT in high school. Additionally, the use of standardized tests to measure success has prompted teachers and school systems to teach to the test, not necessarily provide the best all-around education. With the enactment of No Child Left Behind, if test scores are not moving in the right direction, the results turn punitive quickly. As well, No Child Left Behind only measures math and reading. There is reduced incentive to teach art, science, music, humanities, geography and other subjects that make up a well-rounded education.

Even with all of these obstacles, surely competition and the introduction of free-market principles would incent families to find the best schools, teachers to provide the best education, and schools to provide the widest, most complete education? Maybe, maybe not. There is a growing body of evidence that both school choice and vouchers have done little to raise the bar collectively where they have been implemented. Yes, the students that are in these schools sometimes perform better, but again the standard is not the same. Charter schools can control their population, traditional public schools cannot. In the book The Death and Life of the Great American School System:How Tests and Choice Are Undermining Education, Diane Ravitch presents a compelling case for why school choice has been bad for public education. Ms. Ravitch has serious street cred, and I highly recommend the book. Her analysis of school systems throughout the country is both thorough and interesting.

Are there areas of the education system that could use a little business sense? Absolutely. Consider the outdated concept of tenure. There is no other profession where the concept of tenure exists. It is my opinion that giving teachers a lifetime membership to the profession needs to go. Just because a teacher has proven they can do their job for two or five or seven years does not mean they should not have to go on proving it. I also believe that some amount of competition would be healthy in the school system. If there is a way to level the playing field, then may the best schools win. For those that are willing to do the work to get their kids into the best schools, why should they not be rewarded?

There is a whole other discussion to be had around how to make sure that those kids lost in the system somehow are given the same opportunities as others. If a kid has parents that don’t care if they go to school, and furthermore don’t care about the results, they are going to be at a huge disadvantage. I am not sure how you fix this, quite frankly.

If running a school like a business is not the answer ( and I don’t think it is ), what do we do? I think some of the answer lies in returning power and control to the local community. The federal government has no business being in education. Let the states and communities figure out what is best, and let them compete in the marketplace of ideas. Some communities will get it right, people will move there, and they will flourish. Others will get it wrong and quickly become irrelevant. Beyond that, I think a return to teaching based on the desire to impart wisdom and knowledge instead of trying to make everyone fit in the same box also makes a lot of sense. I don’t believe the same curriculum and measuring sticks can be used in both Raleigh, NC and inner city Baltimore or Detroit.