between the professions of business and education, except perhaps that business
performs better. The bottom line in both, they say, is performance, and if schools
would focus more on performance goals and constantly measure their progress
toward them, they would be far more effective. I don’t disagree with establishing
performance goals and measuring them in education But let’s acknowledge that the
goals of schools and the goal(s) of business are as different as a rainbow is from a
rainbow trout.
The Bottom Line
The bottom line in business performance is routinely measured by one goal,
making money: did we make more money this quarter than we did in the previous
quarter. Businessmen provide a product or service from which they intend to make
a profit. They would quickly replace that product or service with something else, if
they saw an opportunity for larger profit in the change. Most schools (for profit
institutions excepted) are not in the business of making money; the profit margin
they seek is realized as each student labors to reach his or her highest potential.
The money put into school budgets (sometimes grudgingly by taxpayers or tuition
payers) is not expected to register a profit in dollars and cents, pounds or shillings,
baht or rupees. The profit is measured by the knowledge, skills, character and
habits of mind and heart which its students develop over time. That bottom line is a
bit more slippery and doesn’t lend itself to crisp and efficient measurement on a
balance sheet unless you count only test scores.
The Products of Business vs. the Products of Education
In business once the design of a product is determined, the product is
expected to come out looking and operating the same regardless of how many
replicas of the original are produced. If it doesn’t, someone has messed up. The
product has no say in what it will become. It cannot resist being what it was
designed to be, nor can it dispute or defy the design or production process. A tube
of toothpaste cannot suddenly decide it wants to be bubble bath or an aspirin.
In education both the raw material and the product are people. If all students
emerge from schools wanting to be doctors, something would be radically wrong.
Someone, or more likely, many someones would have messed up. The design
specifics in business favor standardization, the design specifics for education
demand more and more customization. Or should. Viva la difference!
But there is an even more significant difference. The end products of the
labor of businessmen are fabricated things. They are produced according to a
prescribed schedule set by their creators. The end product of the labor of educators,
on the other hand, is the personal growth of young people, and that growth flowers
and bears fruit on a schedule that is natural and organic. It is not subject to the will
of others. Educators may plant the seeds of learning. They may nurture and tend to
those seeds with loving care, but they can’t dictate to them when to break into full
bloom. Like the famer who plants his seeds in October and must wait for them
to become corn according to nature’s schedule, so too must educators and those
who depend on their efforts linger in suspended hope.
The Raw Material
When men of commerce craft a product, they select the best raw material
they can find. If the raw material is substandard, they return it. Society, with few
exceptions [private schools and some charter schools], does not allow educators to
be so selective. The expectation for schools is to educate to their highest potential
all who come through the classroom doors. There are to be no castoffs. That is a
public school’s mandate.
Recognition for Success
Here’s where a businessman enjoys another advantage. When the product of
a businessman has been successfully completed and delivered, he, and those who
helped him make it, get credit for its success. What they have produced has been
susceptible to no influences other than theirs. No one credits the product with
having crafted its own success or failure. The manufacturers alone get credit.
There is a reassuring clarity about all of this.
There is no such in clarity in education. Students are subject to a variety of
influences, both internal and external, beyond the classroom —influences that
shape and mold them academically, socially, emotionally and even physically.
Despite the best efforts of his or her teachers, a student may emerge from school in
a shape much different from the one teachers intended. Sometimes this is good;
more often it is not. Additionally, consistent with the nature of the mission and
spirit of education, upon graduation, it is the student who is credited with his or her
success with a muted bow to the individual’s parents and perhaps a teacher or two.
This is as it should be since one of the goals of schooling is to develop self-
confident, self-directed learners. On the other hand, when a student isn’t successful
in school, or in life, society often looks beyond the individual and blames the
school, and its teachers.
Key Performance Indicators
Businessmen gauge success with KPIs (Key Performance Indicators)
that are usually clear, uncomplicated and easily measured. In addition to the
aforementioned bottom line of quarterly profits, these KPIs, usually include
production quotas, sales quotas, and market shares. In education, while some KPIs
are easy to measure: results on standardized tests, the number of students on the
honor roll, the number engaged in extra-curricular activities, the number of
graduating, and the number going to college, these measures don’t come close to
telling the whole story. How do you measure commitment to life-long learning,
character, citizenship, altruism? What accurate performance indicators can we find
to measure the growth of a poet, a philosopher, an inventor, a budding
entrepreneur, a future priest, social worker or mother or father? Some things lend
themselves more easily to measurement than others and should be measured and
examined. For the rest, we would do well to remember a comment attributed to
Albert Einstein: “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything
that can be counted counts.”
The Bottom Line Revisited
Educators can learn some things from businessmen and their profession: the
concept of continuous improvement, out of the box thinking, clarity of mission and
transition planning to name a few. There are also many things that those in
business can learn from educators: managing with limited resources, addressing the
needs of multiple stakeholders, personalizing service, motivating a workforce to
name a few.
But the bottom line is that, in the end, education and business are very
different enterprises. As psychologist Michael Thompson has noted, the variables
and metaphors in farming and education have more in common than those of
business and education.
Business and education are both worthwhile endeavors, and while those in them may both be able to walk the same path and eat from a common lunch pail for a while; in the end, like the traveler in Robert Frost “The Road Not Taken,” they must recognize and accept the divergence in their paths and go their separate ways. Education will never be well served by educators too timid to stand up and point that out. Nor, in the end, will businesses.