Lisa Woods, who has taught for 25 years, explains clearly in this post why schools will never run like businesses. It originally appeared. In the Greensboro (N.C.) News-Record.
She asks readers to imagine a job where one’s compensation depends one’s “job performance and value” depend on the following conditions:
“* You are meeting with 35 clients in a room designed to hold 20.
“* The air conditioning and/or heat may or may not be working, and your roof leaks in three places, one of which is the table where your customers are gathered.
“* Of the 35, five do not speak English, and no interpreters are provided.
“* Fifteen are there because they are forced by their “bosses” to be there but hate your product.
“* Eight do not have the funds to purchase your product.
“* Seven have no prior experience with your product and have no idea what it is or how to use it.
“* Two are removed for fighting over a chair.
“* Only two-thirds of your clients appear well-rested and well-fed.
“You are expected to:
“* Make your presentation in 40 minutes.
“* Have up-to-date, professionally created information concerning your product.
“* Keep complete paperwork and assessments of product understanding for each client and remediate where there is lack of understanding.
“* Use at least three different methods of conveying your information: visual, auditory and hands-on.
“The “criterion” for measuring your “worth and value” is that no less than 100 percent of your clients must buy and have the knowledge to assemble and use your product, both creatively and critically, and in conjunction with other products your company produces, of which you have working but limited knowledge
“Only half of the clients arrive with the necessary materials to be successful in their understanding of your product, and your presentation is disrupted at least five times during the 40 minutes.
“You have an outdated product manual and one old computer, but no presentation equipment. Your company’s budget has been cut every year for the past 10 years, the latest by a third. Does this mean you only create two-thirds of a presentation? These cuts include your mandatory training and presentation materials (current ones available to you are outdated by five years).
“You have no assistant, and you must do all the paperwork, research your knowledge deficiencies and produce professional-looking, updated materials during the 40 minutes allotted to you during the professional day. You cannot use your 30-minute lunch break. Half is spent monitoring other clients who are not your own.
“Your company cannot afford to train you in areas of its product line where you may be deficient, yet you are expected to have this knowledge and incorporate it into your product presentation in a meaningful way.
“You haven’t had a raise in eight years and your benefits have been purged, nor do you receive a commission for any product you sell. Do you purchase all the materials needed so your presentation is effective? Will you pay for the mandatory training necessary to do your job in a competent and professional manner?”
What business could succeed under those conditions?
I suggest that there is a great deal in common with well managed schools and well managed businesses.
People are paramount to both.
Management is management, whatever the organization.
What the have in common is trivial to what they don’t. The goals of a business are mostly to make money. How do we measure whether the goals are being met? Businesses have metrics. If you aren’t making payroll, that is a bad sign. Educations do not have such metrics which has fueled the largely unsuccessful effort to create them with VAMs.
Business management is part voodoo, part cult of personality. The plethora of business management books on the bookshelves of any bookstore tell us that people have no idea how to manage as each book is a testament to “my way to manage.”
“People are paramount to both?” The number of organizations you can’t say that about you could count on one hand.
The most effective business managers realize that “customers for life”
are far more profitable than quick bucks made from customers who are disgusted and who will never come back and who are certain to bad mouth that business.
Well managed businesses are incredibly consistent with well managed schools.
Ineptly managed businesses are incredibly consistent with ineptly managed schools.
Management is management, whatever the field.
You might want to examine the importance placed on people by both General Electric and Wells Fargo & Company, both leaders in their field and both among the most respected organizations in the business world.
There is no higher priority in either than in optimizing the development of the human capital resources of the company.
Dormand, I was thinking the same thing. There are too many businesses that would be terrible models. But there are some where employees are trusted, empowered, given resources, and passionate about what they do. I’ve seen this in tech firms, restaurants and car dealerships. But I’ve also seen the worst case scenarios.
So what businesses do these folks want schools to be run like?
Businesses are designed to be competitive; they compete for their own existence. Competition is what we do with outsiders. And we want our children treated as if they were outsiders? We want winners and losers? Or do we want all of our children to be treated like insiders, like quasi-family, in the hope they all succeed. Friendly competition is what high school sports teams used to do. Now schools are locked in life or death battles for their existence with our kids as pawns in the struggle. Is this what we really want?
Why have the Finns been so successful basing their school system on American research, leaving out the technology obsession and the competition? is it because they are collaborating while we are competing?
Thank you Steven: well said!
I personally have seen little that technology has added to education with two exceptions:
a ) the Kahn Academy
b ) use of iPod for children with autism
It is not that technology cannot be made effective for education, it is just that we have not learned to properly implement its immense power.
The truly effective individuals in IT have incredible human dynamics
capability and are able to make their systems quite user friendly.
This is so rare in the field of education that it is virtually a Poisson distribution as of August, 2014.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisson_distribution
When exceptionally talented individuals such as Tim Berners-Lee decide to devote time to applying IT to the field of education, we will see vast improvement.
Sal Kahn is the only person who has made a significant impact on education utilizing the Web.
Pearson Corporation has made a significant sales and earnings impact taking money from impressionable public policy decision makers in the field of education while delivering little of value as far
as developing human capital resources.
Peason Corporation has much in common with Microsoft Corporation
which has had virtually zero in-house developed software, but has made a fortune corning markets with software developed by others.
A critical mass of the very top IT professionals refuse to let their own children have access to any computer prior to the age of eight.
Screencasts have worked well for my students.
The confusion here seems to be about words. Being run like a business are not necessarily the same.
There are some well-run business and some poorly run schools. There are businesses where employees really do have a say and many schools where they don’t.
Generalizing about businesses and schools is a fools errand.
Even competition has a lot of nuances. Competing measured by only shareholder returns doesn’t yield lasting success; producing good products and services can. Focusing only on a bottom line gets schools and businesses in trouble.
“Businesses are designed to be competitive”.
Not all businesses. There are companies and organizations like Vanguard, USAA, St. Jude Children’s, SAS, etc.. that are laser focused on their employees and their customers. Many schools could learn a great deal from these organizations especially around how to treat employees and how to manage operations outside of the classroom (food service, transportation, employee benefits, accounting, etc…) To think otherwise in naïve.
Amen.
Attempt to compete with SAS and you will be lucky to come away from battle with your head and limbs intact.
These employees are empowered, trained and motivated and no one that I have seen can come close to attempting to compete with Jim Nightengale’s SAS.
If you can retain a company of this caliber to handle your IT work, why even consider anyone else?
In virtually every organizational type, there are best practice management protocols
which provide optimal outcomes.
As better means of doing things evolve, the best practices evolve.
It is quite possible that schools that continue to operate with a significant similarity to
1900s assembly line, top down, Theory X thinking are not doing much to develop their students’ latent capability nor to provide much satisfaction to their faculty members.
Jay Mathews, Education writer for The Washington Post, calls Rafe Esquith of
the Hobart Shakespeareans America’s Best Classroom Teacher.
For a quarter of a century fifth graders from the very worst home environments have been transformed into highly productive contributors to society using the protocols that Rafe Esquith openly shares in his books.
If more schools emulated the protocols that the Hobart Shakespeareans have proven to be effective in fostering upward mobility for those in the most dire of poverty situations, we would enjoy a higher level of productivity as there would be be more well trained individuals to meet the demand for well trained professionals.
http://online.wsj.com/articles/academic-researchers-find-lucrative-work-as-big-data-scientists-1407543088
Where you have inept, control freak management, you will find limited outcomes. This is true in education and in the business world.
Dormand,
In your opinion, should anyone other than teachers be expected to “foster this upward mobility”?
I am seeing a lot of upward mobility happening in Michelle Rhee’s household. And in TFA.
Not much in the 80% of my kids’ households here in TX.
Well, we certainly do NOT have the Texas Legislature on board.
It appears that their mantra is
PERPETUATION OF THE UNDERCLASS!!!!
They are big fans of Pearson expenditures, having executed a contract to pay Pearson over a half billion dollars for testing services.
The business is not SUPPOSED to succeed. It is supposed to fail, to pave the way for takeover.
You don’t seriously believe that the profiteers will keep those pesky outcome standards around after they’re fully in control of the market, do you?
If schools could be run like businesses they would have been — long ago. They never have been in the history of humanity and they never will be.
Again, the very best managed schools have much in common with the
best managed businesses.
Please think in terms of Warren Buffett companies instead of General Motors sort of companies.
Alright, so here are the words of someone who has clearly given up on public education (not me). I’m going to paste them here and I hope some of the regulars will have at it. I think the errors are: public schools are a public entity, the auto industry was not AND giving up on public schools is giving up on democracy AND the goal of public schools is not to close the achievement gap. . .that’s one of the goals, but perhaps it’s gotten to narrow of a focus and that’s why people have tried to apply a business model to it. Anyway, here goes (these are not my words, just someone with whom I dialogue, and with whom I do not agree in terms of giving up on public schools or ruling them outdated).
————–
Let’s look at the big picture that is public education: It’s primary objective is to close the economic gap through education of children born into disadvantage. Why close the gap this way? Because education and wealth are highly correlated. This gap is also the greatest threat to our society, it MUST, MUST, MUST be closed. Even if public schools are not the answer it is imperative that we close this gap, or there WILL be civil unrest. The reality is that, despite a lot of progress and resource expenditures, public schools are simply not taking in poor kids and putting them on-par (as measured in life-outcomes) with their wealthier counterparts. We do have success stories, but the big picture is that of failure. We cannot seem to produce these successes in mass quantities. Is it the fault of the teachers? No. But does that mean we should keep doing things the same way while getting the same results. No.
As a result, faith in the public schools is falling. I believe this is reflective of the following underlying problems:
1) We preach and promote schools as artisan shops that bring each child to their full potential, but it is structured, managed, and funded more like a production line where human costs (teachers) are being squeezed out because they are by far the most expensive inputs.
2) Public schools are ground-zero for the battle between haves & have-nots. Much of the school’s ineffectiveness appears to be driven by the desire to make everything in education uniform and fair.
3) Public schools are a dumping ground for social problems that should be handled in the community by family, church, neighbors, etc. Taking time away from educators to deal with physical security (bullies, school-shootings, weapons in school), behavior issues, daycare, etc. only spreads teachers more thinly and thereby drives up the per-minute cost of actual classroom education.
Both #2 & #3 are feeding back into the high cost-per-student problem that is part of issue #1.
Several leaders (in NC, and DC) view school for what it is: A production facility that simply has very high costs and the facility is producing poor end results for the socio-economically disadvantaged students – the very group that society needs to fix most. Anyway, if you can understand that vantage point (you need not agree with it to understand it), then it’s not hard to see why they would want to reduce production costs. Stripping human costs out in favor of standardization & technology (Common Core) is logical, plus it makes things uniform. As an alternative shuttering the large ineffective “factories” altogether and return education to a cottage industry (charter schools & vouchers) which market forces to reshape education is also not without some merit.
Are these bold moves solutions, or will they lead to the same result? You can argue either way, but what you cannot argue about it the fact that the status quo is failing us. To keep doing more of the same thing is ludicrous. Again, it’s not the teacher’s fault. It is just the situation we are in.
Teachers tend to bristle when I say this, but teachers today are like the auto-workers of yesterday. Both groups are talented, hard-working, dedicated individuals battling an influx of technology, cost-cutting measures, and other strategies being employed by “upper management” to fix some very real production issues. Teachers feel like they are being attacked just as autoworkers felt in the 80’s – as though their quest for a fair pay check is killing education. As individual people teachers, and those auto workers have a ton of talent, drive, and dedication. Those auto-workers could absolutely produce a great vehicle, but collectively the auto-factory business model was falling behind other nations’ abilities to produce equally good cars. Reform HAD to come, because the auto industry was no longer sustainable. Some might argue that the reform was too late because our auto industry needs constant bail-outs to survive and has been labeled “too big to fail”. Yes, teachers are on the front line. Yes, they feel attacked for not producing efficiently or effectively. The individual efforts are phenomenal, but the whole is less than the sum of its parts.
That is the bottom line: The whole of public education is less than the sum of its parts. If we knew why, we would have the answers we seek. Perhaps we should start looking there, because roasting our leaders and blaming political parties is not the answer. Neither, IMHO, is nationalization/federalization of our public education system, which is a dangerous by-product of federal funding and national standards.
————————————————————————–
???? some good points, but again I feel like the writer has given up.
There is absolutely no way that alternatives to public schools could be scaled up sufficiently to train our next generations.
It is simply not possible.
His/her first mistake is right in the first sentence. The purpose of public education is to educate a citizenry for informed participation in a democratic republic.
Second mistake is assuming that education will close the gap, rather than that closing the gap will correct most of the problems with education.
Another problem is whose responsibility it is to handle the “social problems” being dumped on public schools. In addition to “family, church, neighbors, etc.” it is society’s responsibility because society bears the cost of not handling such problems. In a democratic republic, “society” is represented by the government.
And a final mistake is assuming that public education must be a “factory model” and that charters/vouchers are the only way to “return” education to a “cottage industry”.
Many of the problems faced by theachers in our public schools
are due to one single root cause.
Earlier, Congress passed a bill to authorize and fund universal preschool education through out the US. This was sent to the Oval Office for Presidential approval and then implementation throughout the land, so that the US could join France and Denmark in having universal preschool training.
The Biil was vetoed by one President Richard M. Nixon, who emphasizes that he is not a quitter.
Our prisons are overflowing as a result of this myopic action and millions of innocent kids have arrived at elementary schools deprived of the very basics of social interactions and the very basics of preparation, thus slowing their classes to a glacial rate of progress.
This, in turn, resulted in many college educated parents pulling their kids out of public schools to put them in nonpublic schools that they probably could not afford and which in many cases, proved to be
dysfunctional as zealot control freaks run the schools set up to capitalize on white flight.
Hard to believe that more education problems result from lack of universal pre-k than from poverty itself. Universal pre-k (if done right, which scares me in the present Common Core/testing climate) could be one aspect of dealing with poverty, but I’d say getting kids adequately fed, access to medical treatment, safe places to live and support for (rather than incarceration of) their parents would all be higher priorities and more beneficial than pre-k.
Dienne—that is exactly how I replied. The purpose of public education is not to close an achievement gap. The purpose is to engage and nurture children and youth in becoming part of our democratic republic.
So many people have lost sight of that. And because of that, we now have the threat of losing public schools.
In fact, most talking points against public schools are really not even about the purpose of public schools.
I also have lately begun to realize that in union states, teachers have needed the protections they have precisely so that the full responsibility of raising children doesn’t fall on teachers. In Kansas City we used to quip, “shall we come tuck them in at night too?” because of the amount of child raising we were doing. I suspect teachers early on noticed that it would be tempting for poor and overstretched parents to want to put some of their parenting off on teachers. And the reform movement has enabled that mindset: that a “wonderful teacher in every classroom” will raise the kids whose parents aren’t or can’t raise them. Like a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage. Nice idea, but probably not likely.
Every day I am learning more and more about the value of unions. All new to me.
Dienne got there first:
“Let’s look at the big picture that is public education: It’s primary objective is to close the economic gap through education of children born into disadvantage”
Education might help do that, but it’s not the purpose – certainly not a primary purpose.
Somehow oxygen was omitted.
Yes these basics are critical, but let’s get prepared for Kindergarten.
But lately it has become the primary focus, which has helped fueled reformers.
The best talking point is: public schools are vital to our democracy because. . .
It is scary that people are losing sight of that, and the whole Common Core thing certainly didn’t help because it accepted that notion and took things too far in a certain direction, which made people even more upset with public schools.
Joanna,
Public schools are vital to our democracy because they teach us to live together; they teach us about the duties and responsibilities of citizenship; they teach us our common heritage without taking away our differences; they teach us to respect one another because we are all equal; they belong to all of us.
Dr. Ravitch,
I am going to quote that on my FB page. 🙂
Preacher’s daughters can say bold statements without people thinking it too deep for a casual FB post. Maybe everyone can. . .? Maybe everyone should try.
Thanks for continuing to be a leader in this cause. . .it is a vital cause.
To be exact, my post reads:
I quote a wise woman:
“Public schools are vital to our democracy because they teach us to live together; they teach us about the duties and responsibilities of citizenship; they teach us our common heritage without taking away our differences; they teach us to respect one another because we are all equal; they belong to all of us.”
Our society has lost sight of this. We have reduced schooling to trying to close a gap that is propelled by poverty and neglect on many levels. We have held teachers responsible for more than teaching, and now we are having a bit of a crisis because of it.
We will get through this crisis. My one prayer is that we get through it with public schools still standing strong because that indicates our democratic republic is standing strong. Indeed, we travel on mission trips to poor countries to try and set up what we have going on here, and in our own country we try to tear it down, blame it for everything, and rip it apart. It breaks my heart.
Teachers are not responsible for the industrial strength micro-management being foisted upon them, nor are they the primary and exclusive facilitators of unpward mobility.
Need to add a few more items (and I am sure there are plenty more)
Most glaring:
Some of your 35 clients (let us say about 5) are pulled for various services and miss half of your presentation sometimes being pulled at the beginning and arriving 5 minutes before the end, sometimes missing all of it, sometimes leaving midway through.
Some of your 35 clients just arrived to your classroom for the first time even though you have been sequentially “pushing your product” since the start of the school year.. and this happens throughout your year.
The other thing missed is that you have to do this at least four times a day, every day, with different groups of 35 clients each time. And it may not be (probably won’t be) the same product each time.
Here are others:
Before the meeting, on your own time, you are required to paper the walls of the meeting room with construction paper and borders, with colors approved by your superior.
You are to post examples of the clients’ reflections on the walls with post-it comments.
You are to pay for any items missing in the meeting room.
During your presentation, you are to monitor bathroom visits by the clients and make sure they sign out correctly.
During your presentation, a loud speaker will go off with comments by your superiors.
If a presenter in the neighboring room has to go to the bathroom, you are to cover room while straddling both room.
You are to telephone the clients’ parents after the presentation, on your own time.
Benten32,
Amen to all of that. Many of those clients are always looking for ways to disrupt the meetings so that they can pedal their own wares, mayhem. Finding an authority willing to come help with the mayhem monger is often a futile endeavor. It just goes on and on…
“The Blueberry Story: The teacher gives the businessman a lesson.”
[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.
[end quote]
Link: http://www.jamievollmer.com/blueberries
Go to the link. There is an addendum by the author.
😎
Jamie Vollmer’s Blueberry story first appeared in Education Week (Volume XXI, Number 25 · March 6, 2002) based on an epiphany he experienced in the 1908s and was cited in Larry Cuban’s “The Blackboard and the Bottom Line: Why Schools Can’t Be Businesses” (p3), published in 2004! (Harvard University Press).
We can’t say that we weren’t warned!
There is an inherent hypocrisy in comparing public schools to business. See my comments at http://publicschoolscentral.com/. My book “The Origins of the Common Core: How the Free Market became Public School Policy” (which is being published by Palgrave Macmillan and due for release in January, 2015: http://www.amazon.com/The-Origins-Common-Core-Education/dp/1137482672) examines this issue in detail the fallacy of applying business models to public schools.
There is an inherent hypocrisy in comparing public schools to business. See my comments at http://publicschoolscentral.com/. My book “The Origins of the Common Core: How the Free Market became Public School Policy” (which is being published by Palgrave Macmillan and due for release in January, 2015: http://www.amazon.com/The-Origins-Common-Core-Education/dp/1137482672) examines this issue in detail and the fallacy of applying business models to public schools.
Even aside from the challenges the author describes in her letter, the main reason that schools can never succeed as a business is because businesses are not required to benefit anyone other than the owner or shareholders. Why would we give our children’s future up for someone else’s profit?
Reblogged this on Learning and Labor.
This blog clearly articulates how the expectations of teachers are lofty given the resources and conditions we are actually given. However, it would be interesting to look at the comparison between building administrators and privatized company managers. What are the similarities and differences there? Not knowing much about the private sector, I wonder if the job turnover rate is as high, or if the employee satisfaction is as shaky as what I’ve seen in educational organizations.
The rate of employee turnover is one of the best means of measuring the quality of management in an organization.
Costs skyrocket with high turnover, as mistakes escalate.
Well managed business organizations experience little turnover.
Private businesses (and post secondary institutions) have a huge advantage over public schools when it comes to retention. If a valued employee wants to leave, the business (and university) can pay them more. This is not an option with public schools, so they will inevitably lose moe staff (and especially very productive staff) than any business.
TE-
You are subscribing to what students of management call “Theory X management”
which assumes that all workers are lazy and will not do anything until driven or paid more.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_X_and_theory_Y
Few organizations outside top down hierarchical ones allow that obsolete and dysfuncitional line of thinking in the business world.
Most of the time that an outstanding employee is lost, there are other issues that are far more important than pay. That said, if pay is not fair, I guarantee you that you will lose a ton of people and thus have huge recruiting and training expenses.
And then they will leave you for a better managed company that appreciates their professionalism and lets them achieve closure in the tasks that they perform.
Dormand,
I am suggesting that businesses have a degree of freedom to address outside offers that are not available to principals of schools.
I see counteroffers ALL THE TIME in post secondary institutions. If my institution is willing to pay enough, the faculty member stays. If not, my institution does not retain the faculty member.
Salary is the easiest aspect of a job to change. If a manager is not allowed to change that by a penny, there is lmuch less hope in retaining staff members that others find valuable as well.
If you are unable to look beyond the compensation level as a motivation for leaving, there is no basis for any further discussion.
You have a “Theory X” mindset, and I will leave you to your opinion.
Dormand,
I can certainly look beyond compensation. My point is that compensation is easy to change.
Tell me what a principal can do to change the mind of a valued teacher who has decided that there are better opportunities working with a different institution?
If a manager of any organization is having difficulty retaining the best people, then it is critical that the root cause of the dissatisfaction be determined and mitigated.
This is serious.
It is quite likely that that person is not appropriate to manage other people.
Dormand,
One of the tools at a managers disposal is pay. Faculty at my institution are offered 20% pay increases from institutions with better academic reputations.
What advice do you have for the Dean?
Accept that most people will leave for institutions with better academic reputations, other things being equal, even if no increase in pay is offered.
I suggest finding means of inproving the academic reputation of your school to staunch the exodus.
Dormand,
The goal is to not make other things equal.
The way to increase academic reputation is to retain faculty and recruit better faculty. The way to do that is to pay them enough to stay, and pay others enough to move. Public school principals do not have that option.
Again, what advice would you offer my Dean when faced by an offer or when a department comes with a name that they think they can move to our institution.
Your situation may not be sustainable.
Dormand,
With enough resources, I suspect my institution could do well. For example, I think it likely that Dr. Ravitch is paid between $200,000 and $300,000 a year. If my institution offered a half million a year she might consider moving away from the coast. Maybe it would take more, perhaps an offer to control the hiring of a couple of assistant professors and associate professors. It may take an offer that includes her control of a number of full professor hires. It takes resources.
You may have defined a Jerry Jones-like scenario.
If an institution cannot retain its best people, why should the top people in the field even
consider joining it, regardless of the salary offer?
You can see why no top coach will talk to Jerry Jones.
Dormand,
You might remember where we started this discussion. If the most talented teacher in a public school says that they have been offered another opportunity for employment, the principle can not raise her salary by a single penny. The private school, the post secondary school, the private employer has an unfair advantage in retaining that person.
Frequently treating her/him as a professional is all that is desired. The best in the business world and many in the academic world are not money motivated.
That said, if pay is not fair and adequate, you will have disssatisfaction and turnover.
If any organization cannot retain its best people, it may well not be sustainable, at least with that management team in place.
Autocratic management styles are guaranteed to prompt the exit of highly professional people, who don’t have to tolerate that nonsense.
Dormand,
The adequacy of the pay is determined by the outside offer. Remember that faculty pay in post secondary institutions is individually negotiated with each faculty member.
Faculty movement is generally not from a lack of professional treatment, but about another institution being able to promise access to more resources, including salary.
It is common for organizations with unreasonable working conditions and/or ethical considerations to pay well above normal pay just to get people to switch to them.
They are unable to access individuals who are not money motivated who consider their current situation to be fairly compensated and where they are treated as professionals.
I suggest that you take some time to study the literature on Gregory’s Theory X management so that you can get a handle on your apparent overemphasis of people being available to any employer who will dangle higher pay at them.
If Theory X worked, everyone would want to work on Wall Street to get the big bucks
in return for accepting situational ethics and miserable working conditions.
There are a few other career fields noted for being particularly attractive to money motivated individuals, but I will not go into that.
I will say this: If one does find that s/he is highly money motivated, academia is not the field for you.
80% of the problems in the business world are caused by these types.
Dormand,
I think the thing you are not really understanding here is that a faculty members job is pretty much the same across similar institutions.
Let’s think about a humanist thinking about moving from one R1 institution to another. The dimensions of concern within the control of the dean of either institution will be 1) teaching load, 2) sabbatical and leave policies 3) research support (which includes travel support among other things), 4) salary and benefits. Things outside the control of the deans will include locational preferences of the faculty member, personalities of the members of each department, the physical environment, the strength of the graduate program (though deans can give individual faculty members the ability to hire new faculty members in order to build a department), etc.
Every dean knows that there are times during a productive faculty members life when the danger that he/she will be poached by another institution increases. Promotion, for example, is a dangerous time because faculty at other institutions review the candidate’s academic work in detail and sometimes conclude that they should try and hire the candidate away. For more senior hires the dangerous time is when the last child graduates from high school.
Reblogged this on From experience to meaning… and commented:
Lisa Woods writes a clear explanation why schools don’t run like businesses.
TE-
Your impression that all organizations have similar environments for their faculties is not
valid.
i can give you examples of incredible schools where faculty and staff would work for under market wages just to be a part of the organization that is so incredibly effective.
Fortunately, each of these pays above market.
I suggest that if you explore the universe of schools, you will find that those who do exceptional performance in developing human capital resources have an exceptional commitment to making their organization a great place to work. Having participative management is a key. I would refer you to Rubinstein’s “College Payoff Illusion” for guidance on exceptional performance by a school.
When you find a top down management style in any organization, you will find far less effectiveness as compared to a participative management styly organization.
As I have other pressing projects that need my attention, so this will be my swan song in blog posting on this particular topic.
A key thought is that any organization is dead in the water if it cannot retain its better performing people. As it should be.
Dormand,
Perhaps you missed my statement that similar institutions require faculty to do similar work.
My original point in this thread was simply that institutions where managers cannot increase a faculty member’s compensation when the faculty member has an outside offer will experience more turnover than otherwise identical institutions where a manager can increase a faculty member’s compensation when that faculty member faces an outside offer.
Once again I am amazed that such a simple, and I would have thought non-controversial point, generates controversy on this blog. Perhaps that is the nature of online forums.