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Sunday, March 18, 2012

Real World Business Advice Applied to Education « InterACT

Real World Business Advice Applied to Education « InterACT:


Real World Business Advice Applied to Education

Teachers, how many times have we heard that we don’t work “in the real world”?  We finish work at 3:00 p.m. every day, we have summers off, and schools are not results-oriented like businesses.  Never mind that we take our work home with us (average teacher works 53 hours per week), or that we work on the weekends and in the summer, or that we earn less than people with similar educational attainment.  But they’ve got us on that last point, right?
For our students, there's nothing "unreal" about school.
Wrong.  Now first of all, we know that school-to-business comparisons fail because schools don’t have customers or products, because schools are not free to choose their mission or control key conditions for their work.  They are not – and shouldn’t be – designed to divert profits away from core operations.  That doesn’t