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Run It Like A Business

By Beacon Staff

One of the first things that you hear from business people after a story in the news about a failing school or troubled teacher is that schools need to run like a business.

Listen to the news about today’s natural disaster response and you’ll hear the same about community organizations.

“Run them like a business and it’ll solve all your problems”, they say…in so many words.

Backlash
Of course, the next thing out of the mouths of some of the folks involved in education and community benefit (you might call them non-profit – a poorly chosen name) organizations is something like this:

“Oh, you mean like Enron, Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers?”

Why yes, of course. Business people have studied your situation and have decided that it’s best to run things like some sort of corrupt dictator, complete with automatic weapons, fast cigarette boats, and kickbacks.

Or maybe not.

Reality
What does someone *really* mean when they say they want to run a school or non-profit  “like a business”?

In the case of schools, let’s gloss over the likelihood that they don’t really get how complex a school district budget is, noting that it’s a recursive budget of budgets consisting minimally of bond funds, Fed and state monies, local taxes and that oh-by-the-way annual operating budget.

That mix of budgets are then scrambled a bit more by the goofy manner we’ve chosen to fund education: Head count, which produces oddball economies of scale of the type that few in business have to deal with.

What they really mean about schools
I think much of this comes from a sense of low/no accountability, something that makes business owners nuts (oh just wait, we’ll come back to that).

Much of this comes from the news media. You see stories of bad teachers in NYC paid not to teach because they can’t be fired and soon they’re all in one chicken bucket of non-accountability.

The obvious questions come next, like “Why are you spending $ on that?” and “Why can’t you fire that bad teacher?” (contracts, laws and the 17 conflicting definitions of “bad teacher” aside)

Questions of a future past
Ask yourself:

  • What’s getting measured?
  • Are those the right things to measure?
  • What are you doing with that information?
  • What does any of that have to do with what you’re REALLY trying to accomplish long-term?

Meanwhile, we measure teachers based on their students’ historical performance: grades / test scores.

How do we measure future performance?

What about trend info showing how various learner types do in each teacher’s class and how each type of student’s learning, problem solving and creativity advances as they experience each teacher type?

For example: Who is the most effective math teacher for 6th grade kids who learn visual/spatially and are reading two years below grade level? Why is that teacher so effective for that group? Why does that teacher fail to reach non-spatial/non-visual learners as well as other teachers? Why is he so effective with Asperger’s kids? Do these success trends change when they are teaching science or history? Why?

Do these patterns of success (or not) change based on factors we can’t control? What about controllable ones, if any, by learner type? What’s been tried? What worked?

Punch line
I’m suspect most schools can’t answer those questions. They’re forced (by Feds/states) to answer the wrong questions in order to find a way to balance their budget.

Is there a line of questions like that – about your business – that would transform your thinking from past performance (letter grades) to future performance? (matching learner types with teachers who are the most effective at teaching that type of learner)

Considering that last question, are you really running your *business* like a business?

Want to learn more about Mark or ask him to write about a business, operations or marketing problem? See Mark’s site or contact him via email at mriffey at flatheadbeacon.com.