Schools as Businesses

Rob Evans classic Independent School piece, "Why a school doesn't change or run like a business," richly deserves its place on the must-read list of every new head and trustee. A new companion item, by Mark Burstein in the Chronicle of Higher Education, underscores Evans' points. Burstein argues, compellingly, that there are many ways that business savvy can benefit the educational enterprise. One need only visit a school struggling to make payroll to see the wisdom of this point--Sweet Briar College is on everyone's mind these days.But, as Burstein points out, the fact remains that school people typically don't think of what they do as a business. At their worst, they can view education as something that should be immune from the imperative that every enterprise be a going concern in order to endure. And, at their worst, administrators and trustees can think of teachers as labor and mere costs to be controlled, akin to labor in retail or manufacturing. I often hear both of these polarizing perspectives in schools.Social sector enterprises are different from industry in a fundamental way: they reply on a theory of change to achieve their mission. Think of mission as being what the school exists to accomplish in the world, and the theory of change being how the school brings about this effect. The curriculum and program are one part of the theory of change, but even more important are relationships between the faculty and students. That's where the intangible magic happens, and it is also what looks the most different, say, as compared to manufacturing.In manufacturing, the goal is to reduce scrap (imperfect products) by tightly controlling error variation in raw materials and perfecting the production process. In education, we embrace variation in raw material (student diversity across multiple perspectives, not the least of which are genetics and IQ), and apply our theory of change to add the most value we can to student lives. Variation in outcome is not only normal, but welcome; e.g., students matriculating to an array of universities and pursuing divergent sets of interests. We degrade what makes our sector special when we begin using the language and systems of a mechanistic process to describe an inherently humanistic one.That said, we also fail to ensure that our schools are going concerns when we pretend to be immune from the fact that money coming in must more than equal money going out. Teachers need to know that what they do, more than anything else, drives the schools mission and business success. When teachers avoid connecting these dots and engaging in a relentless self-analysis of value added, they invite others to do it for them using theb language and metrics of industry.As with many things in life, it is both/and not either/or.