Education as funny business - business and educational reform

National Review, Feb 24, 1989 by Chester E. Finn, Jr.

Take a successful businessman, accustomed to looking at the bottom line,

invite him to a prestigious education 'summit,' and

it's 9 to 1 he'll come out sounding like an educationist.

Responses like the recent Boston Tea Party are all too few.

BOSTON WAS THE Scene of a rare event the other week. A group of prominent business leaders actually talked tough about the city's rotten schools 'and sought to use the private sector's financial muscle to press for change.

No, they didn't refuse to pay Massachusetts's exorbitant property taxes. But they did decline to contribute more corporate funds to the much-toute"Boston Compact" until significant reforms were visible in the school system. "We are not prepared," said Ferdinand Colloredo-Mansfield, chairman of the Boston Private Industry Council, "to endorse the expenditure of another $100 million over the next four years if the rate of improvement will be no greater than it was the last four years."

The Boston Compact consists chiefly of a pledge by area employers to hire the city's high-school graduates, provided the school department makes satisfactory progress in boosting student achievement, reducing dropouts, and the like. Recently added was an arrangement to furnish poor Boston graduates wanting to attend college with "last dollar" aid, i.e., filling in the crevices left by regular scholarship and loan programs.

But the pace of change in the schools themselves has been snail-like, and the businessmen were disgusted. Schoolsystem leaders had promised in 1982 that all graduates would meet minimum competency standards in math and reading by 1986 and that tbe dropout rate would decline 5 per cent each year. In reality, though, the proportion of dropouts rose sharply, reading levels improved only marginally, and the school department never even got around to detailing the math standards.

Without faster and more striking improvement, the Private Industry Council said in November, forget the Compact. And to the earlier list of needed changes, it now added parental choice and school-based management.

The school system reacted as expected. "The business community doesn't have the. right," whined school-committee chairman John Nucci, "to put a gun to the school committee's head and say, 'Get these changes done or else.' " Worse, he sputtered, the tycoons "tend to look at teachers as if they were widgets. . . . I do not think we ought to worship at the shrine of the business community."

Whether any real change will come of this episode remains to be seen. But its mere happening is notable. Throughout the United States, the most conspicuous feature of business involvement with the schools has been softheadedness. Indeed, one sometimes gets the impression that when normally hard-nosed capitalists turn to education re-. form, they check all their business instincts at the door. They suspend the analytic habits that made for corporate success and instead embrace the assumptions and value system of the education profession. They go native.

This doubtless endears them to the educationists, who are canny enough to welcome largesse without strings, concern without obligations, and accolades without accountability. Failure to attend to the bottom line, however, yields bankruptcy in education as surely as in commerce. Money, concern, effort, and ideas pour into the $200-billion "industry" of primary and secondary schooling. Gobs of mediocrity come out the other end. One might suppose that businessmen, observing that lack of productivity and shoddy quality control are the central failings of American education, would conduct themselves in this domain like major stockholders of a dismally unprofitable business. Where is the return on the nation's investment?

Yet the Boston EXAMPLE is rare. More common is the mindset revealed at a highly publicized education "summit" convened by Fortune magazine in September, a session at which, reports the magazine's Nancy J. Perry, "More than one hundred leaders from business, government, and academia met to discuss specific steps business could take to help the schools." Eight pages of these ideas constituted the cover story of Fortune's November 7 issue. Some were inventive, most were reasonable, and all were well-intentioned. But one searches the paragraphs in vain for a single mention of accountability, for any hint that those running (and working in) the schools should be rewarded for success and punished for failure, for any suggestion of clear and exacting standard's for all youngsters, for any clue that obstinate teacher unions, stodgy administrators, and mossy colleges of education might be part of the problem.

Tbus nobody suggested that shrewder use of technology might reduce personnel expenses, that the unit costs of schooling might be too high, that the desired product-a youngster who knows algebra, say, or can read Frenchmight be produced in wholly different ways, that some programs and activities might actually be eliminated, that middle management may need to be slashed, or that different forms of capital investment can substitute for one another. Let's have none of that business talk, not at a meeting about education! With a couple of exceptions, every proposal emerging from the Fortune summit is part of today's conventional wisdom within the education establishment: more pre-school, fewer dropouts, better teachers, wider access to college, and vast dollops of school "restructuring"-a contemporary buzzword that is about as precise as "excellence" was a few years back.