Laura H. Chapman explains that education is not a business.
“I live in Cincinnati, world headquarters for P&G. There is something more to notice than this observation:
“Proctor and Gamble hasn’t remained a very successful company because it keeps tossing out its leadership every three months.”
“True, P&G has a history of promoting from within. The wheel does not have to be reinvented every time there is a change in leadership.
“But P&G routinely does a triage on its underperforming product lines, and many of the people who are in charge of them.
“In August of this year, the CEO of P&G announced the company would cut 70 to 80 “core strategic” brands, and reorganize management of other brands into about a dozen business units under “four focused industry sectors,” creating a much simpler management and operational structure.
“The CEO said “There’s a lot of evidence in a number of our business categories that the shopper and consumer really doesn’t want more assortment and more choice, they want more value.
“And P&G wants more tax breaks than the last count several years ago of $3.2 billion, about in the middle of the pack of the largest U.S. corporations that we subsidize for doing business and making a profit.
“Education is not a business. It is a public service, a public responsibility, and civic virtue to the extent that it prepares students to be active participants in determining how the larger society is governed and the values it honors.
“The current triage in education seeks to close “underperforming schools,” fire “underperforming” teachers and principals, and blame students who are “underperforming” for not having enough grit, not having the right stuff, and not fixing the economy.
“Unlike brands that can be vanished from the marketplace, our “underperforming” students do not go away.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I think the analogy is a little off here. Students are not the equivalent of P and G’s “brand”, it is the approach to education that is the brand. Folks here argue mightily that one such brand, the CCSS in ELA should vanish.
Another important difference between education and business are the metrics used to measure performance. Sales figures and consumer satisfaction data are used in business, yet standardized tests have become the sole measure of quality in education.
I believe that one reason the public accepts the use of these tests is their ignorance of the way that results are normalized. How would parents feel if they knew that their children’s test scores are being “graded on the curve.” We all hated that in college – the practice that labeled us based on the dubious merits of a test.
The same thing is happening in education. We are letting testing companies scale the scores of these standardized tests within a black-box system, paying huge sums of money for the scores, then accepting the results that schools or students are under-performing. By their very nature, normalized test scores will always rank students into lower standard deviations, no matter how close or far away they are from the average. And with “curved” test scores it is almost impossible to measure individual gains, because every score is a comparison with other students, not a measure of a student’s mastery of a curriculum.
So let’s take a page from industry – how about using some of the consumer satisfaction data that industry is so good at collecting. If schools or teachers are truly under-performing, students and parents will tell us so.
In addition, there isn’t information on the credentials of individuals creating these state tests and those that are scoring them. In light of the millions of dollars of taxpayer money being spent on these standardized test I believe this is important information. Individuals in the scoring industry have come forward to voice concerns over how the tests are scored. Also, teachers and students can not talk about or discuss what is on the tests.
And beyond that, closing schools and shipping students here and there only makes matters worse for them and, in fact, for the schools that get them. Children need consistency, not disruption. Children need lives that make sense, not upheaval and confusion. The changes are not for better student outcomes. The changes are for some inane idea that tax money is wasted if it pays decent middle class incomes to those who serve the community at large. And I will be danged if teachers don’t work 5 times as hard as “elected” (dare I say bought) government officials in Ohio! It is sickening. Totally sickening.
Are schools perfect? No! Is anything? No! But this current mess is not a solution.
The Prof Dev requirements necessary to change methods, terminology, attitudes, and the forced “buy in” are astounding. And, before we have on change internalized, it is thrown out for something else. We don’t even have adopted math materials currently. We are “trusted” to teach what needs to ve taught, yet we have no specified manner to do so.
But, we are getting chromebooks for all students. It is interesting to watch 5 year olds trying to hunt for letters on a keyboard when the letters aren’t in ABC order and they can’t yet spell.
Schools are not businesses when it comes to teaching students.
Education as business is a wise move. Education was originally viewed as a business back when it was a one rum school house. Yes, the teacher was appointed by the town (a corporations) and its elected leaders (the board of directors) and was removed should the towns people feel that the students (product) were not getting the education the people (customer) expected. Some were along the way we have lost sight of this. We love to grade students, but feel we ourselves are above grading.
Most of all, it is absolutely irresponsible to blame the child for our own short comings. At some point parents are going to see through this and then we will lose their support. If an employee in any business continues to complain they can not turn out a superior product because they are not getting paid enough they will find themselves in the unemployment line. This that complain we lack the financial commitment of resources to turn out the best students in the world can not claim to be connected to the world of education since more than 20 other countries are blowing us out of the water, with far fewer resources and money, to the point our A+ students are D students in a global market.
Lets stop acting like the current Congress or a group of 6 year olds and step up our game and show the World we are the best teachers and that we can truly move the needle!
Q, what is the needle?
“. . . a one rum school house. . . ”
Too bad we don’t have those now, especially if it was a big one!!!
H-m-m-m. Did you know that our poor students out perform poor students in other countries? Did you know that our students from economically stable backgrounds fair as well if not better than students of similar demographics in other countries?
I don’t pretend to know what other countries commit to education in the way of resources. Perhaps as a percentage of the GDP would be a good way determining that value. I’m not sure the cost of testing everything that moves should be included. And what did we spend before the marriage of the tech revolution and Common Core? How do we count the public resources that are being diverted into the coffers of the charter industry and their hedge fund benefactors? I don’t think these activities have added value anywhere near equal to their costs. I do wonder…
You can find how much is spent on education (based on GDP) in all of the OECD nations here:
Click to access 48630884.pdf
Thanks, Lloyd. It is interesting to me that the only country that spends more private money than the U.S. is Chile. Our public spending seems to be about average. According to this data set, most of the private money seems to go into higher education.
Laura got it right. Education is not a business, but Joel Kleing, the businessman dealt the final blow to NYC, and now charter schools are scurrying to replace all the low-rated schools…the ultimate fix to a system that has been devastated
Students are products, schools are factories, kids without the right stuff should be kept out of the production line, discarded. It students get into the factory and exit as flawed products, teachers are responsible for that.
Countries with higher test scores are the best. They are the winners. Throwing more money at schools won’t improve them. The best teachers and the best students produce the highest test scores and that is all that matters.
Your values are clear. Your thinking is uncomplicated. I hope you are not a teacher.
RE Uncomplicated thinking
Einstein once said
“It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.”
A shortened version of this is widely quoted:
‘Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”
The primary problem with the misguided efforts by economists and others to reduce student achievement (and teacher achievement) to a single number (a test or VAM score) — and to tailor the education system so as to maximize that number — is that it violates the second part of Einstein’s aphorism “but not simpler.”
And actually, Einstein’s original comment referred to physical theory, for which reduction to a very basic set of fairly simple laws has proved time and again to be highly successful, largely because there turns out to be a very basic set of “building blocks” and a very limited number of possible basic interactions between them.
There is no reason to expect that such extreme reductionism is applicable to complex ‘systems’ like human beings and human societies. In fact, there is more than ample evidence to indicate that it does not. It should go without saying that human beings are not like elementary particles.
Those who believe that measurement of human educational achievement (and the teaching that goes along with it) is amenable to such extreme simplification have a very poor understanding of both education and the limits of the scientific modeling process .
As George Box said, “All models are wrong but some are useful”. Implicit in Box’s statement is the idea that some models are not even useful, a point that the education reformers (over-simplifiers) have missed completely.
Couldn’t agree more.
Public schools students and parents aren’t customer,s either,. My 6th grader does not, in fact, always know what’s good for him and I think sending him to school and telling him the adults there are just like people who work in a service industry and are supposed to cater to him is a horrible idea. No, they’re really not.
I’m not a customer of the school either. I don’t expect them to cater to my ideas about my son, always and in every situation. I expect them to tell me how he’s doing in school. If that doesn’t fit with my ideas about him, well, we’ll have to talk about that, but I could be wrong because I’m not some impartial observer: I’m his mother. Of course I think he’s great. If he isn’t working or is misbehaving I expect them to tell me that, whether that makes me an unhappy “customer” or not.
Jamming everything in the world into a commercial template is a very bad idea, and it also shows a complete lack of imagination.
There are OTHER MODELS for organizations and entities. It’s OKAY to veer from the business template. Capitalism and the private sector will continue to function without cramming everything in the world into that one template.
I don’t want him treated as a customer in school. He’s not “always right” in school. Sometimes it really and truly is up to him to comport to their norms and rules and do the work and he isn’t always going to be happy about that.
Chaira,
I would say that the long term interests of the student, perhaps best represented by the families wishes for the student, are is best seen as the customer. This is why the analogy given in the post is flawed. P&G is not trying to get ride of the customer for its product, the company is trying to produce a product that the customer will find worthwhile. I think that schools might well have that same goal in mind.
I disagree. Students aren’t customers. It’s a ridiculous idea. What if the family thinks the student should only attend school once a week? Should we get rid of truancy? After all, the customer only believes he or she needs the product once a week, and the customer is always right!
If my kid doesn’t do the work in school he’s not going to do very well. He’s IN this. He has a role and a responsibility. He’s not a passive entity waiting for a miracle teacher. That’s not how I’m raising him.
He’s not in a customer/service provider relationship and it doesn’t matter how hard ed reformers try to jam it into that frame. I may actually disagree with his teacher and I may be WRONG. HE could be wrong about a teacher. He could personally dislike a teacher and that teacher could be great for the other 30 kids in the class. What then? Does he find a new service provider for 7th grade and then go back to his public school for 8th grade?
We had a superintendent who ascribed to this ridiculous theory and she told every parent what that parent wanted to hear, to the detriment of the kids and the teachers in the school. She had happy customers! What she didn’t have was a good school. Thank God she was simply using our district as a stepping stone to a better-funded suburban district. She only lasted 2 years.
It’s a bad template. It won’t work. Schools are more than service providers. They have to be. They have a bigger objective than happy customers.
Chiara,
As I said, it is the long term interest of the student that is really the “customer” if you want to think about that sort of thing. It is probably not in the student’s long term interest to go to school once a week, though it certainly was in one of my children’s long term interest to spend half the school day taking classes for which he received no high school credit. These are judgements that are fairly easy to make.
Why think that customer’s are passive? That would be a very odd description for customers of many businesses. You might totally disagree with Apple’s philosophy of locking down the computer, and you may be wrong, but that does not mean you are not a customer (unless you choose not to buy an Apple product.) I would say that the superintendent of your school made you an unhappy customer. I know poster Dienne became so unhappy with her public schools that she sends her student(s) to a private school. Did you do the same?
Let me ask you the same question I asked Joanna: do private schools approach education as a business? If so, we might think that approaching education as a business is not a terrible thing to do. If not, we might think that allowing students to choose a school does not mean that it must approach education as a business.
From the website of Jamie Vollmer, “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
My POV: treating schools as businesses, at least in some respects, might [and I emphasize “might”] be useful sometimes if the self-styled “education reformers” didn’t consistently pick “worst business practices” instead of “best.”
And not just “worst business practices.” Think proven failures like merit pay/pay for performance and stack ranking [aka forced ranking/rank-and-yank/burn-and-churn].
A train wreck of sometimes catastrophic disasters for public school staff, students, parents, and their associated communities. Just think iPad and MISIS of LAUSD—both completely preventable and totally predictably.
Since the state of public education poses—in the words of so many business-minded creative disruptors—an existential threat to the USofA economically, politically and militarily, then whatever resources it takes to fix things in a long-term sustainable fashionable.
Choice—every parent and student, without exception, has the choice of a well-resourced and supported public school. Period. No excuses.
Remember, the stated ethos of the Gates Foundation is “all lives have equal value.” [google, and see p. 74 of Anthony Cody, THE EDUCATOR AND THE OLIGARCH [2014].)
Time for the self-proclaimed leaders of the “new civil rights movement of our time” to put their money where their mouths are. Equal value = equal worth = whatever money it takes to get the right job done the right way.
Or as Bill Gates might say, “Lakeside School for everybody!”
😎
“All lives have equal value”
All lives have equal worth
To businessmen like me:
Consumers all, to death from birth
And workers, for low fee.
This one went in my quote book.
This pull quote left out an important fact:
“The current triage in education—BASED ON THE THINKING OF BILL GATES TO RANK AND YANK TEACHERS AND CLOSE SCHOOLS USING STUDENT TEST SCORES WITH NO EVIDENCE THIS IS VALID AND LOTS OF EVIDENCE IT IS NOT VALID—seeks to close “underperforming schools,” fire “underperforming” teachers and principals, and blame students who are “underperforming” for not having enough grit, not having the right stuff, and not fixing the economy.
The rank, yank and close public schools thinking of the for-profit, corporate funded, fake public education reform moment is based on a foundation so flimsy that it can’t support any weight. In other words, a movement built in a vacuum with no oxygen and no space suit.
Only fools would believe the corporate driven, fake reform moment will work unless we focus on the real agenda—the one the edu-baggers won’t admit—-to get rid of public education regardless of the damage caused, because that’s what the oligarchs want. They want to control what children learn and think while reaping profits from the almost one trillion in annual tax dollars that supports public education in the United States.
Mind control of the future consumer masses and profits is the end goal and the only goal—a short sighted goal at that because if successful, it will destroy the U.S. civilization, democracy, republic and culture turning it into a militarized, police state at war with the world.
If you doubt that, take a look at the latest cover of Time Magazine.
“The Paradox of Parasites”
The Paradox of Parasites:
They prey upon their host
Consuming it with deadly bites
‘Til host is just a ghost
“The Needle in the Haystack”
Arne lost his needle
And piles the haystack higher
While Dee and Dumb of Tweedle
Are playing with the fire
Why couldn’t Milton Friedman have been hushed with these words the very first time he uttered the unthinkable. . . that our schools should all be approached like businesses in a free market?
Why was he not slapped down?
Joanna,
Do you think that the well known private schools like Dalton, the Lab Schools, Phillips Exeter, etc. are run “like a business”?
I think this is a difficult question to answer. If the answer is yes, then there is a strong prima facia case that good schools can be run like businesses. If the answer is no, then there is a strong prima facia case that allowing students to choose a school (and even charging the parents tuition) does not mean that the school “runs like a business”.
Well notice my word choice was not “run,” but “approached.”
Product verses experience.
Does an amusement park offer a product or an experience? What about a hospital? What about a school? What about a fire department?
Joanna,
I am happy with the word “approach” instead of run. Do you think that those private schools approach education as a business? Surely private schools are the most likely to take that approach since they can not force anyone to attend or pay for others to attend the school.
I would say that amusement parks offer an experience, hospitals offer healthcare, schools offer the opportunity to learn, fire departments offer reduced risk of catastrophic fires.
I am positive that students at elite private schools are not subjected to teaching TFA temps. Urban students in America are being further exploited by the loss of their neighborhood schools. So far charters are causing great disruption without showing great promise, When they do show promise, the results are suspect. How can anyone think they are a serious solution to the problems of educating the poor when they can reject students? What they are is a money making enterprise for the wealthy at the expense of poor children and their families. The goal is to offer a cheaper “product” to children whose families believe they are getting something better. It’s just a bait and switch scheme.
Retired,
Certainly students at the top private schools might be taught by uncertified teachers with no job security, defined contribution retirement plans and are typically paid a good deal less than public school teachers. But they are not taught by one of the .1% of teachers that are TFA.
But that is really beside the point on this thread. The question at hand is if private schools approach education like a business.
Private schools get to choose their clientele, TE. Public schools do not. I know there are exceptions to that rule, and you will find the one or two schools that are exceptions, of course. However, since standardized test scores tend to trend upward with parental income, and many (certainly not all) private school students come from higher incomes, it would stand to reason that private schools would generally be stronger in standardized test scores. Now, there are far more things that schools should be about than standardized test scores, but that’s a discussion for another time.
Threatened,
There is no doubt true that these schools are so popular that they can pick and choose who can enroll and give them tuition. I don’t see that as relivent to the question at hand. Do or do not the these private schools approach education like a business? I certainly understand why so many posters are avoiding answering this question. Either answer creates problems for the orthodox views here.
teachingeconomist
October 26, 2014 at 4:46 pm
Chiara,
As I said, it is the long term interest of the student that is really the “customer”
I’m a for-profit service provider. Sometimes what my client wants is NOT in their long term best interest. They don’t know that because they’re not lawyers and they’re not in 4 county courts once a week for years and they haven’t done 500 cases that are a lot like what they bring me, and I am and have.
I have to tell them they’re wrong and we’re not following their strategy, and sometimes that makes them very unhappy. It doesn’t matter. I have a duty that goes beyond making them happy and so do teachers and so do public schools.
Chiara,
It seems that we agree that even for profit providers will rightly do what is in their customer’s best interest. It would seem that the concern about students being allowed to attend school for one day a week would not happen.