In an amusing tour de force, NBCT teacher Stuart Egan (in North Carolina) poses the question, what if businesses were run like public schools?
Public Schools Aren’t Businesses – Don’t Believe Me? Try Running a Business as a Public School
No business leader could function under the same conditions.
Comparing schools to businesses isn’t like comparing apples to oranges, it’s like comparing apples to rocks.
For example:
“Be prepared to open up every book and have everything audited. If you are a public school, then every cent, every resource, and every line item is open to scrutiny by a variety of inspectors. Be prepared to be constantly audited and have those findings be available and open to interpretation to people outside of your business, even when those people may not know how your business operates.
“Be prepared to publicize all of the salaries of the people who work for you. ALL OF THEM. Furthermore, there would no negotiating on salaries. In fact they are all set, not by market standards or demand of talent, but by the government. Furthermore, the salaries of all of your employees will be fodder for politicians and the public alike, especially in election years.
“You must allow every stockholder to have equal power on how your run your business even if they own just one share. Actually, you won’t have stockholders. You have stakeholders. And everyone is a stakeholder because they pay taxes. And stakeholders have voting rights. You constantly have to answer to these stakeholders except everybody – EVERYBODY – is your stakeholder. In essence, you answer to everybody, even the homeowners and properties owners when they see that the value of their homes and property might be closely tied to the schools that service the area.
“Be prepared to abide by protocols and procedures established by people outside of the business. These aren’t the rules and regulations or laws established by governing bodies, but rather curricula and other evaluation systems that are placed on your business by people who really have no background in your field.
“You will not get to choose your raw materials. If your business makes a product, you do not get to negotiate how your materials come to you. You do not get to reject materials based on quality. You must take what is given to you and you must produce a product that is of the same quality as a business that may have choice materials. That is unless you are a private school. But they get to charge money. Your business doesn’t.”
Schools don’t run like businesses. Businesses don’t run like schools.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The financial sector (hedge funds) are a business sector that drags down GDP. It’s in a category of net losers, which makes any recommendation from them, absurd, except if the hedge funders are offering a lesson plan in how to leech money from the productive.
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The analogy is appropriate because that is pretty much how businesses are now required to run after Obama regulations. If you ran a business you would know this isn’t far from the truth. Some businesses spend more on audits and regulation review and conformance than they earn in profit and all the top executives compensation is published and shareholders vote on their compensation and retention every year. Perhaps schools should be run like a business?
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Having worked in the business sector until I was 39 and having taught for 21 I definitely say that running a district/school is a lot more complex than most of the business sector except for the medical field. Yes, it is incumbent upon districts and schools to follow proper accounting guidelines in regards to finances. But those procedures cannot ever make the key decisions about the usage of said funds. That’s a different ballgame and in contrast to the business sector where the bottom line mentality HAS TO hold sway, public schools must attempt to satisfy the parents, students and district taxpayers. By definition schools can’t run in deficit and must “balance” budgets every year which requires examining all the expenditures closely and with an eye, not to the bottom line but to what best serves the students.
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Run like a business
Health Insurance CEO “compensation” in 2011:
Cigna Corp., David Cordani: $19.1 million(total 2011 revenue: $22 billion)
UnitedHealth Group Inc., Stephen Hemsley: $13.4 million(total 2011 revenue: $101.9 billion)
Wellpoint, Angela Braly: $13.3 million(total 2011 revenue: $60.7 billion)
Health Care Service Corp., Patricia Hemingway Hall: $12.9 million(total 2011 revenue: $49 billion)
Aetna Inc., Mark Bertolini: $10.6 million(total 2011 revenue: $33.8 billion)
Humana Inc., Michael McCallister: $7.3 million (total 2011 revenue: $36.8 billion)
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“They will not make money. They are a public service.” We’d lose their interest fast. They are not interested in young people, just the money they can make exploiting them. They would rather spend time lying, cheating and getting the taxpayers to underwrite their profit. It is more interesting for them to slice and dice public schools, to squeeze every ounce of “value” out of them than helping young people get a meaningful education, and it is a lot more profitable!
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Simple if one thinks about it. Those who make the comparison don’t think about it.
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They also ignore the similarities that are important. These business-types recommend competition, even between schools in the same district. Can you imagine a business in which separate divisions are put into competition with one another in the same business? That one division deliberately withholds knowledge from another to get a competitive advantage?
The rule is you collaborate within the “in group” and compete with those in the “out group.” There is no advantage to having winners and losers inside of a company. And why would we want to divide our children into “in groups” and “out groups” in order to have competition? Nonsense!
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Education is not a business. There are, of course, budgets and other business aspects of education. That was then.
Corporations are interested in expanding the business side of education so the whole enterprise is subjected to cost/benefit analyses, including productivity measures of the performance of every student, every teacher, every principal.
The infamous “value-added” estimates of “performance” are totally dependent on large batches of test scores.bTesting is a business and it is now expanding to include customer satisfaction questionnaires, indicators of social-emotional well being, and ratings of school “climate.”
You can think of this expansion of the business side of education as a version of mission creep, and also a very creepy mission aimed at depersonalizing education. That is part and parcel of the standards movement and emerging practice of putting as many students as possible in front of a computer screen with minimally trained “support” for navigation and record-keeping of “progress.” Children who are learning about the world from screen time are now being called “glow children.”
The overriding purposes of education, as viewed by the US Chamber of Commerce and other members of ALEC, is to reduce education to a simple-minded equation: either education becomes a business capable of producing big bucks and saving the economy or it continues as a gov’ment run enterprise that drains big bucks from the economy.
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hmmmm….maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing, especially where these corporations (and hedge fund managers) who think they can “correct” the problems of Public education is concerned. If they were suddenly made accountable to ALL of the public, and they were made to answer to all their customers (not just their stockholders), perhaps things would change-both in how business is done and how education was perceived.
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Reblogged this on caffeinated rage and commented:
Thanks to Dr. Ravitch for posting.
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Won’t reformers read this and say, “That’s exactly why we support charters! They’re free from all these cumbersome requirements.”?
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While the general population of Buffalo would prefer teachers be paid like the average worker in the city (many are minimum wage employees), those in the business sector of the city with a comparable educational background earn a much larger salary plus they get yearly bonuses.
If education is to be run like a business, I’d like some of those perks.
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Diane . Charter school are camaleones . What does mean Inc . ? How many corporations like this one are here where in Dade county Fl ?
Any questions , don’t hesitate to ask !
Click to access 2011%20city%20of%20hialeah%20education%20academy.pdf
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