Do We Really Want to Run A School Like A Business?

For as long as I can remember I have heard people outside the field of education say, “schools need to be run like a business.”  Married to an accountant and individual who worked for nearly twenty years for a family business and as a CPA before that, I have heard it more times than I can count in my own home!  It has been said from political circles to barbershops.  Apparently there is a sense that all of the problems in education will be cured if it is just run like a business.  So, for the sake of argument, let’s take a little walk down that road.  Let’s run school like a business.

What business should we emulate?  What business should we model our school after?  Let’s start with Subway, one of the largest restaurant chains in the world.  Talk about a successful company, and one that I patronize regularly for their fresh sandwiches.  Let’s take Subway’s business model and run schools like this corporate giant.  They have a great marketing program that we could emulate that associates Subway with health and wellness, something that many other fast-food chains struggle with.  They have hired former Olympic athletes as spokespersons, and have recently brought back Jared Fogle, the man that lost over 250 pounds eating Subway sandwiches.  Eat at Subway and eat healthy!

Have you ever read the fine print at Subway?  Do you realize that those “healthy” sandwiches are those 6-inch ones with just meat and vegetables.  Start adding cheese, mayo, and other condiments and you have virtually the same type of food available at McDonalds or Burger King.  How about the fact that until a few years ago, the bread used by Subway contained a chemical called azodicarbonamide.  This chemical is also found in yoga mats and the soles of shoes to add elasticity.  How can that be healthy?  Yes, Subway took that out of their bread once it was exposed, but is that kind of business practice that we want to emulate at a school?  Subway and a lot of other businesses have cultivated a particular image that often covers up a lot of things that they don’t want the public to know.  Public schools cannot get away with that, nor should they.

Okay, maybe we don’t want to run our schools like a sandwich business.  How about a different business, maybe a cable company or other television provider?  Maybe schools should operate like Mediacom.  They sell you a basic service and require you to sign an agreement for a couple of years.  Then they come up with new options for new subscribers at a discounted rate, but when those who already have Mediacom want to have those options they can only get them with an upcharge.  With that kind of a model, how will parents respond to upcharges?  And let’s not forget when service is dropped and people who have paid for service have to do without.  Can a school just drop service and do nothing about it?

Maybe we should run schools like Citi Bank or Ameriquest Mortgage or Bank America or Goldman Sachs.  These are businesses that “are too big to fail” despite the fact that they committed fraud and all sorts of other crimes.  If a school follows those same business practices, such as fraud, discrimination, and lying to government investigators, would they be allowed to fail?  Eight teachers in Georgia have significant prison sentences for altering or fixing text scores.  Interesting that African-American teachers are sent to prison for this crime, yet white executives who committed crimes costing people millions of dollars aren’t getting similar sentences.

How about Enron?  How about British Petroleum?  How well have they done with that cleanup in the gulf due to that horrific oil spill?  I would be concerned about a school running with a model that does not take safety and concern for the community seriously.  Or one that sends the message to students that you don’t have to be responsible for damage that you cause.  Maybe American Express, a business that the Consumer Financial Bureau order to pay more than $75 million to settle claims that it charged improper fees and misled customers with add-on products, is a company that school should emulate.

I can remember when you would walk into Walmart and see signs that said “Buy American” and yet today the majority of the products sold in their stores are manufactured in China and most of their employees with children live below the poverty level.  I don’t think this business model is going to be accepted by our community.  We can debate about teacher pay, but what other profession that requires a four-year college degree pays less?  If we were to run schools like Walmart we would outsource all of our purchasing and not support the local economy and businesses, and keep wages for employees at a subsistence level.  Do people honestly believe we would attract high quality people to teach in that kind of school?

It is important to point out that in recent years where laws have permitted, a number of privately owned schools have been open for business under the guise of “charter schools.”  Now we have schools operating as a business.  How are they doing?  Let’s look at a couple of issues with these schools.  First of all, for the sake of comparison, our superintendent would have to be paid a lot more!  Deborah Kenny, who oversees Village Academy Network, Inc., was paid $499,146 last year.  Eva Moskowitz from Success Academy C.S. Inc. was paid $475,244.  To put that in perspective, that is over three-times what our current superintendent is paid.   And when you look closer at some of these privately owned charter schools, such as Kennedy Charter School in Charlotte, North Carolina, you see a student body that has low performing scores on state assessments and the top administrator being paid $187,000 a year.  I am not sure that is a good business model.  Yet if this were a public school, they would most likely be forced to undergo significant reforms outlined in No Child Left Behind.  Also in education look closely at the for-profit colleges and the corruption that has been uncovered.  Corinthian Colleges Inc. has declared bankruptcy “amid allegations that it had falsified grades, attendance, and job placement rates.”  I’m not sure those business models are good for education.  

Politicians and businessmen all seem to think that they know what is best for education.  They all went to school and think they know more about it than those of us who have spent our professional careers in education.  When I look at the mess we have in those two parts of our society, it is crystal clear that the management of schools needs to be left up to the educators.  What two entities in our country have exhibited more greed, arrogance, and corruption than business and politics?  Here’s a deal: If business people will keep their nose out of telling us how to run schools, I won’t tell them how to run their business, even though there are a few things I could teach them!