Business Schooled

It’s always an exercise in patience to listen to free-market ed reformers toss out examples from the corporate world as easy, off-the-shelf solutions for “the problem” of public education. Bonuses work in the pharmaceutical marketing industry, they should work for teachers! Fire a principal if her school’s test scores don’t improve, just like a mutual fund manager with a sagging portfolio! If they had to compete for students, the bad schools would simply go away! Education reform is easy — we just need a little less John Dewey, a little more Jack Welch.

So it was gratifying to read yesterday’s installment in the LA Times of the week-long achievement gap debate between Russlynn Ali (Education Trust-West) and Richard Rothstein (Economic Policy Institute).

Gratifying because, in arguing that NCLB has perilously narrowed the curriculum, Rothstein invokes examples from the corporate world and trots out B-school lions Drucker and Deming.

“Today, management consultants urge ‘balanced score cards’ that use qualitative judgment to measure corporate success, along with financial indicators,” Rothstein writes. “They recognize that unbalanced score cards, such as the one used by NCLB, stress only easily measured goals and create incentives to downplay others.”

Which has led to the unfortunate overemphasis on math and reading at the expense not only of other subjects, but of all the things schools are supposed to instill — citizenship, self-discipline, getting along with others, etc. And no one has suffered or will continue to suffer the consequences of narrowing more than low-income and minority students, Rothstein argues, refuting Ali’s assertion that NCLB has been a light in the wildnerness for these groups.

But let’s get back to Rothstein’s assertion that a management consultant would recognize the ill-conceived strategy of NCLB. That even stock market investors require accountability that goes beyond simple reporting of numbers (read: test scores).

Perhaps there are lessons to learn from the corporate world after all.

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