LETTERS

School Administrator, Oct, 2000

Entrepreneurism in Education

As former superintendents who have created for-profit schools and other businesses related to education, we found your treatment of privatization in the May issue fair and thoughtful.

In researching our new book, The Educational Entrepreneur: Making a Difference, we discovered three commonalities among educational entrepreneurs. First, without exception, the driving force for all is the improvement of education, not profit. Second, we found these entrepreneurs were more apt to ask, "How can we improve education and learning?" rather than "How can we improve schools?" Third, these entrepreneurs are excited about their personal decision to maintain the original goals of their chosen profession, and they believe they only have changed their strategies to achieve the goals.

We hope the primary motivation of companies and individuals engaged in for-profit educational businesses will be quality educational programs for students.

CHARLES W. LAVARONI and DONALD E. LEISEY

Directors,

International Academy for Educational Entrepreneurship,

San Rafael, Calif.

The focus of several articles in your May issue brings awareness to the new options available to administrators for outsourcing educational services, whether in specific areas like Title I or management of an entire school.

As a former school board member, I know boards contracted for legal, financial (accounting), transportation, food, laundry and maintenance services from the private sector. Now schools have another choice in providing educational options for their students.

The mission of the Association of Educators in Private Practice is to promote education reform through entrepreneurship. The majority of our members are teachers who have hung out a shingle, but we also have many corporate members representing the largest companies in the education industry.

Another valuable resource for your readers: the Education Economy, a free electronic newsletter read by thousands of education company executives, investors, academics, policy experts and education leaders. You can register for the weekly newsletter at www.eduventures.com.

CHRIS YELICH

Executive Director,

Association of Educators in Private Practice,

Watertown, Wis.

Parents as Customers?

I frequently experience a measurable increase in blood pressure when I read Paul Houston's Executive Perspective columns. They generally lean in an apologist direction, Yet I also find nuggets that are right on. His column, "Treating Parents as Our Customers" (May 2000), has several such points.

But I wonder, not necessarily in disagreement, if parents are really the customer for a couple of reasons.

The requirements for graduation in practically every high school are actually determined by higher education. If you want to go to Someplace State College, you have to have four units of English, three units of math and so on. Therefore, higher education has established the specifications for the product so, de facto, are they the customer?

Then there's the business community. The school-to-work movement has grown from corporate heavyweights complaining that students don't know what business needs them to know. So maybe business, as it tries to modify the specifications of the product, is the customer?

Parents should be the customer, but I wonder if many parents really know enough to make this call. If all you have ever been fed is a bowl of vanilla ice cream and somebody asks you if you are satisfied with it, you are likely to say yes. But put a hot fudge sundae on the table and ... well, you know where that argument goes.

Some kids get hot fudge, some get vanilla ice cream, some get tapioca and some get cold oatmeal, but all deserve hot fudge with the works.

JONATHAN H. BUTZON

Executive Director,

Charleston Education Network,

Charleston, S.C.

My Daily Dose

I enjoyed the Focus article by Mary Summers and Mary Wells ("Changing the Dynamics of a Board From Hell," March 2000) so much that I pulled it off the AASA Web site and put it in my daily planner.

DAN FRAZIER

Superintendent, Marcus-Meriden-Cleghorn Community Schools, Marcus, Iowa

Attention to the Homeless

Bruce Hunter, AASA's director of public policy, is to be congratulated for his poignant and timely column ("The Unpopular Issues of Poverty and Isolation," April 2000) on the glacial speed of Congress in addressing two serious issues in the United States. It is to Hunter's credit and the alertness of AASA that this issue was kept in front of us as an extraordinary problem that needs to be addressed in the presidential campaign, as well as in the federal budget debates for 2001.

His column, however, lacked focus on the real impact on children, particularly those who are homeless and school-less. Approximately one million, or 40 percent, of the homeless population are children. They are basically segregated from their peers and classmates. They are poor, unstimulated, excluded and deprived--a matter that we can no longer ignore or tolerate.

All school leaders should be responsible to put this issue squarely at the feet of every congressional representative as Congress debates the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. The McKinney Funds to support homeless children should be significantly increased after holding the line for six years on such appropriations. That is unconscionable.