Beth Goldberg is a Middle School Mathematics Teacher at Linden Avenue Middle School in Red Hook, NY in the Mid-Hudson Valley. Beth has been teaching for eight years since obtaining her Masters of Arts in Teaching at Bard College. Prior to earning her MAT, Beth was a senior executive at JP Morgan Chase where she had global responsibility for a suite a payment services products. Beth holds an MS in business from the MIT Sloan School of Management and a BA in Mathematics from Wellesley College. Beth has seen how mathematics skills can create transformative opportunity and she is dedicated to providing her students the solid mathematics foundation they will need to succeed in life.
Edu-Reformers Should Understand This!
Today’s business and education elite are passionate about the need to
reform education. Business and even education leaders like New York State Education Commissioner King argue that a data driven management approach to oversee teacher performance should be used to reform the education system. This approach is both naive and problematic on many levels.
Students are not inanimate outputs like machines or software.
Schools are not factories. Students are living and breathing
individuals. Each student comes to the school with a unique personal
history and personality which plays an integral role in his/her
education process.
After a twenty year career in business, I decided to become a
mathematics teacher. I returned to school to obtain another master’s
degree in adolescent education. I was convinced that my management
expertise would be readily transferable to teaching. I had managed an
international staff, how hard would it be to manage a classroom of
thirty or less students? Needless to say, I quickly learned that
teaching students was far more complicated than managing adults. Why,
you may ask? There are three simple reasons that I would like to
share with the business intelligentsia.
1. Your employees are paid to listen to you, your students are not.
2. In business, employees are selected based upon a search and
interview process. Teachers do not select their students.
3. In business, an insubordinate employee is fired. An insubordinate
student is merely one more challenge for a classroom teacher.
To judge the effectiveness of teachers based upon an annual high
stakes test would be comparable to judging the effectiveness of a
business leader based upon one meeting or one memo. A business leader
may have an ineffective meeting because of a variety of reasons.
Similarly, students’ test scores on a particulate day are influenced
by a host factors including their home life and social interactions.
Today’s education policy appears to missing the mark. Vilifying all
teachers will not rectify the problems which plague a subset of this
country’s education system. The current ineffective policies have
been developed by individuals who lack experience teaching and are
removed from students.
Nonetheless I do recognize that there are certainly lessons from
business which are applicable to education. Here are a few for the
NYS Education Commissioner and his colleagues to consider:
1. Those who are closest to the customer should provide the necessary
feedback and market information so that sound strategies can be
formed. Using business terminology, teachers with years of experience
working with students are your best source of market intelligence.
2. Any large scale implementation requires a detailed project plan. It must be effectively managed as demonstrated by adhering to published deadlines and commitments. Releasing thousands of pages of curriculum materials for teachers days before teachers need to use the information is unacceptable.
3. Communicate clearly and effectively to all your customers,
colleagues and staff. Listen to their concerns.
When I left the business arena to become a teacher, I naively had no
idea of the complexities and challenges faced by teachers each day.
Teaching is one of the most rewarding and challenging endeavors I have
undertaken. Even though the career is much more demanding and
complicated than I anticipated, the satisfaction I receive from a job
well done more than compensates me for the effort I invest in teaching
my students. I hope that the numerous problems accompanying the
education reforms now underway in New York and across the country
will be acknowledged and appropriately addressed before the
education system is bankrupt.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Jamie Vollmer explains it very well here:
The Blueberry Story: The teacher gives the businessman a lesson
http://www.jamievollmer.com/blueberries.html
“1. Your employees are paid to listen to you, your students are not.
2. In business, employees are selected based upon a search and
interview process. Teachers do not select their students.
3. In business, an insubordinate employee is fired. An insubordinate
student is merely one more challenge for a classroom teacher.”
Even just taking this tiny section proves a powerful point! Thanks for sharing, Diane.
Excellent commentary. The writer stated her case and gave clear, concise, reasoned explanations based on her actual experience in the busies and classroom worlds.
Soo tired! Only when the Unions take to the streets demanding his resignation by their Democratic supporters will it end. How many ways to we need to describe this horror with no results.. Day of Action!, my foot. Year of Inaction and Indifference from the Union.
School districts are not businesses because they are non-profit. End of story.
Read Noam Chomsky’s latest article on Reader Supported News…here’s a small portion of his education opinions: “but there are changes and developments in the higher education system and also K-12 which I think are extremely threatening and harmful.”
“Those who are closest to the customer should provide the necessary
feedback and market information so that sound strategies can be
formed. Using business terminology, teachers with years of experience
working with students are your best source of market intelligence.”
The fatal flaw in the reformer “business plan for education”.
Beth,
Thank you for your insightful commentary! Schools are not businesses and we need to protect the “PUBLIC” sector and our public schools!
It seems to me that there might be some discussion of the customer on the business side.
In business, your customers are not paid to listen to you.
In business, you do not get to choose your customers
In business, an insubordinate custmer becomes a constant concern as he or she tweets and blogs about the businesses shortcomings.
The analogy between a businesses customer and a student would seem to be better than an analogy between a businesses employee and a student.
Students aren’t customers. The idea that students are merely consumers in an education market place is a wrong headed and juvenile idea. Unfortunately that kind of libertarian thinking is typical of men who have failed to advance past the adolescent, Ayn Randian faze of development.
Students would seem not to be employees either. I am not sure what the point of this post might be.
Do you think that the education system is constructed primarily for the benefit of the students, the parents, the teachers, or society as a whole? The title of this blog leaves that a bit unclear .
Tax paying parents are consumers, though, no? I mean, it’s their children and their tax dollars. It’s not quite a free market, but parents are certainly within their right to voice their opinions. Even if some of them are stuck in adolescence. And male.
TE: Goldberg’s point is that business managers and teachers are apples and oranges. Perhaps customer sales/service rep is a better comparison? But is managing thirty fractious customers really like teaching thirty 2nd graders? Isn’t the former, at root, a simpler proposition: make the customers happy? In the latter, it’s far from just keeping kids happy. it’s “shape the minds academically, morally and socially.” It’s easy to measure the customer rep’s effectiveness in dollars and cents (although this may be overly reductionistic and on some level be unfair). It’s not easy to measure the teacher’s effectiveness. The instruments we have are too crude.
Increasingly it seems to me that our real foe may be Scientism –the idea that science can solve all problems, even ones traditionally governed by the humanities. The reformers want to turn the school into a scientifically-managed production facility. To do that they need standardization and measurement. Sadly the humanities are feeble these days. Who are our prominent humanist (and by that I don’t mean athiests –they’ve started appropriating the label) intellectuals? Leon Wieselthier and some other New Republic writers come to mind. As does Evgeny Morozov. We need to give succor to these fighters. We need to stand up and say the school is a zone where human souls are created (“alma mater” means “soul mother”). Here humans will not be treated like robots. Here teachers will model what it means to be a whole human being –a citizen, a moral being, a soul –not just a worker-to-be. Here a teacher’s art, craft and experience-fueled intuition will govern, not scientific management.
The original post did not compare managers to teachers, but employees to students. It seemed to me that the more apt comparison would be to compare students to customers, not employees. Tim suggested that the families might be seen as the customer, and that seems reasonable to me as well. But I would also say that the families, as part of the community, are also the owners of the system.
Parents who are only concerned about their own child think that they have the right to make choices about a public service that has the education of the community’s children as its mission. I do not get to choose, as an individual, how the taxes that I pay to the state and the federal government are spent. People have a choice not to send their children to a public school if they have the resources to afford private. They can choose homeschooling if they want. Public tax dollars that are to be spent on education need to be spent in a way that promotes a common good. It is not an individual benefit. Since when did consumerism replace citizenship? We have been living with the idea that personal responsibility is the only responsibility that matters. Apparently the idea of civic responsibility ended with the Reagan administration and the catastrophic increase of the influence of adolescent libertarianism (google Greenspan). What did we get as a result? The 2008 economic melt down. And we should still listen to these ideas?
I found she was trying to parallel managers to teachers. She made the point that she herself had managed “an international staff.” She then asks, “How hard could it be to manage thirty or less students?” To me, that is the point she is making. I had a peer describe it like this, a contractor gets to select the pieces of wood he builds the house out of. If he finds one to be subpar then he can put the piece back. As teachers, we can ONLY teach those which we are given. And we do so dutifully. I don’t know how this point was missed….
I think the point of the post was to challenge the usual stuff we hear about how much better things would be, if schools were run like businesses. It did not have to be perfect….the post gave a lot of alternative ways of looking at the state of and purpose of education. We will continue to sort it out. This helps.
This is a very long addition to this thread. But it is a classic.
“The Blueberry Story: The teacher gives the businessman a lesson.” Source: http://www.jamievollmer.com/blueberries
[start quote] “If I ran my business the way you people operate your schools, I wouldn’t be in business very long!”
I stood before an auditorium filled with outraged teachers who were becoming angrier by the minute. My speech had entirely consumed their precious 90 minutes of inservice. Their initial icy glares had turned to restless agitation. You could cut the hostility with a knife.
I represented a group of business people dedicated to improving public schools. I was an executive at an ice cream company that had become famous in the middle1980s when People magazine chose our blueberry as the “Best Ice Cream in America.”
I was convinced of two things. First, public schools needed to change; they were archaic selecting and sorting mechanisms designed for the industrial age and out of step with the needs of our emerging “knowledge society.” Second, educators were a major part of the problem: they resisted change, hunkered down in their feathered nests, protected by tenure, and shielded by a bureaucratic monopoly. They needed to look to business. We knew how to produce quality. Zero defects! TQM! Continuous improvement!
In retrospect, the speech was perfectly balanced — equal parts ignorance and arrogance.
As soon as I finished, a woman’s hand shot up. She appeared polite, pleasant. She was, in fact, a razor-edged, veteran, high school English teacher who had been waiting to unload.
She began quietly, “We are told, sir, that you manage a company that makes good ice cream.”
I smugly replied, “Best ice cream in America, Ma’am.”
“How nice,” she said. “Is it rich and smooth?”
“Sixteen percent butterfat,” I crowed.
“Premium ingredients?” she inquired.
“Super-premium! Nothing but triple A.” I was on a roll. I never saw the next line coming.
“Mr. Vollmer,” she said, leaning forward with a wicked eyebrow raised to the sky, “when you are standing on your receiving dock and you see an inferior shipment of blueberries arrive, what do you do?”
In the silence of that room, I could hear the trap snap…. I was dead meat, but I wasn’t going to lie.
“I send them back.”
She jumped to her feet. “That’s right!” she barked, “and we can never send back our blueberries. We take them big, small, rich, poor, gifted, exceptional, abused, frightened, confident, homeless, rude, and brilliant. We take them with ADHD, junior rheumatoid arthritis, and English as their second language. We take them all! Every one! And that, Mr. Vollmer, is why it’s not a business. It’s school!”
In an explosion, all 290 teachers, principals, bus drivers, aides, custodians, and secretaries jumped to their feet and yelled, “Yeah! Blueberries! Blueberries!”
And so began my long transformation.
Since then, I have visited hundreds of schools. I have learned that a school is not a business. Schools are unable to control the quality of their raw material, they are dependent upon the vagaries of politics for a reliable revenue stream, and they are constantly mauled by a howling horde of disparate, competing customer groups that would send the best CEO screaming into the night.
None of this negates the need for change. We must change what, when, and how we teach to give all children maximum opportunity to thrive in a post-industrial society. But educators cannot do this alone; these changes can occur only with the understanding, trust, permission, and active support of the surrounding community. For the most important thing I have learned is that schools reflect the attitudes, beliefs and health of the communities they serve, and therefore, to improve public education means more than changing our schools, it means changing America.
Copyright 2011 Jamie Robert Vollmer [end quote]
😎
Reblogged this on Middletown Voice and commented:
I come from a business background as well, and operating schools is nothing like a business or running a home budget. The people who make that comparison are just ignorant, and yes, that includes the congress members I hear utter those words, are ignorant.
The current direction of ed reform is motivated by profit. Period.
In Indiana, our governor proudly grew a $2 billion surplus off the backs of schools and social services. Our community cannot afford bus services in 2014, while the new governor seeks to cut $1billion in business taxes to make Indiana more attractive to companies. Make any sense?
We’ve got the wrong people leading our country…
Appealing to “tools” like King to change the direction of ed-reform is a waste of time.
As long as teachers don’t present a serious challenge or threat to shutting down the schools, the insanity of education for profit, whatever the outcome for children and teachers, will get worse every year.
“Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people that were oppressing them.”
-Assata Shakur
Bravo, Beth. I followed the same path as you- business person first, now teacher for 11 years.
Schools ARE DEFINITELY NOT businesses, and cannot be run as such. Kudos to the teacher that used the “blueberry” analogy .We in the public schools of NYC and elsewhere cannot pick and choose the “blueberries” that we want in our classrooms.
Teachers are NOT sales managers, nor are students widgets to be processed. The formulas that school deformers use are inherently flawed, to say the least. Do these people that call for these reforms have any idea of what actually happens in a classroom? I doubt it…..
To Communist Teacher- You are correct. So long as teachers, students, and parents “go along to get along”, appealing to people such as King will continue to be a waste of time.
In my haste, I DIDN’T read who submitted the blueberry story. Mea culpa. Thank YOU, KrazyTA, for submitting the story. Priceless.
The blueberry story gave me goosebumps.
I’ve thought about this article for a few weeks now. I too left the business world to enter the world of teaching. I currently teach in a large city school district. I think that the business analogy works, but doesn’t have all the right players in the right places. If the administration and the commissioner are the bosses, teachers are the employees and the students are our clients, then it fits.
We can’t always choose our clients, our job is to meet their needs and make them more successful. Where I struggle is the boss or overseer. If your boss doesn’t trust you, constantly checks your work, stands over your shoulder and doesn’t give you good directions, how are the employees to feel? A good employer values the employees, asks for feedback, continues to educate them so they may better serve their clients and above all trusts that they put the right person in place.