Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Make Schools More Like Business? (Part 3) � InterACT

Make Schools More Like Business? (Part 3) � InterACT

Make Schools More Like Business? (Part 3)

This post was originally conceived of as the second part in a series on the application of business thinking in the field of education, but then in a moment of blogger inspiration I put in a different Part Two and this piece became Part Three. If you haven’t read the prior entries, there’s no particular need to read them in order, but here are the links to Part One and Part Two. Taken collectively, I think they provide convincing evidence that the current trends in education “reform” are reflective of attitudes that do not make sense in the business world – despite what they tell us – and they certainly won’t work in education.
At the end of Part One, I mentioned Bob Sutton, a Stanford business and management professor, author of several books, and blogger at Work Matters. I highly recommend taking a look at anything on his blog – it never ceases to provide useful tools for reflecting the educational workplace. However, for the moment, I’m looking at his posts on the blog of the Harvard Business Review. In What Every New Generation of Bosses Has To Learn, Sutton argues that the real challenges and solutions in the workplace are not anything incredibly novel, or hard to understand. In an educational setting, I would ask this question about schools or systems in crisis: has