CURMUDGUCATION: 4 Bad Business Practices for Education

CURMUDGUCATION: 4 Bad Business Practices for Education:

4 Bad Business Practices for Education

"Schools should run like a business" is one of the modern reformster mantras, and schools are so obviously NOT businesses that we can end up overlooking the other problem with this idea-- that reformsters often mean to incorporate practices that aren't even good business practices.

If you have friends or family in the private sector, or if you've just been paying attention, you may have noticed that businesses are increasingly run very, very badly. Many of the principles that reformsters want to apply to education are, in fact, failures in the private sector.

1) Eliminate expertise.

Take, for instance, the belief that industry-specific expertise is not only unnecessary, but undesirable. Even the robber barons rose to power by working up through the jobs of their respective industries and knowing something about how the business work, but nowadays the Cult of Management insists that the only important skill is bean counting and managerial managosity. The last guy to come in to run what used to be one of the major companies in my area had previously managed a toy company and a soup company. He was brought here to run an oil company. He had never worked any job in his life except managing stuff.

These guys frequently make stupid mistakes because they actively avoid listening to people who have worked in their industry. The history of business failures in my part of the country is the history of upper management being filled up with guys who didn't know anything about the industry they were suddenly working in. 

2) Aim at the wrong target.

Reams have been written in the past fifty years about the folly of focusing on short-term financial goals instead of the long-term health of the business. Never mind where the business will be in ten years-- how can we get the stocks to trend upward in the next six months. Since the management nomads will not be here in ten years, anyway, who really cares?

This mistaken direction of the company means that the main job of the company is no longer to CURMUDGUCATION: 4 Bad Business Practices for Education:

PA: Charter Windfalls

The financial crushing of Chester Uplands Schools, where teachers and staff are now working without pay while legislators dither over a long-past-due budget in Harrisburg-- well, this mess has ended up dragging ugly worm into the light of day.

Here's an excerpt from the Judge Chad Kenney's ruling nixing the state's proposed relief for CUSD:

The Charter Schools serving Chester-Upland Special Education students reported in 2013-2014, the last reporting period available, that they did not have any Special Education students costing them anything outside the zero (0) to twenty-five thousand dollar ($25,000.00) range, and yet this is remarkable considering they receive forty thousand dollars ($40,000.00) for each one of these Special Education students under a legislatively mandated formula. This means the legislative formula permits the Charters to pocket somewhere between fourteen thousand ($14,000.00) and forty thousand dollars ($40,000.00) per student over and above what it costs to educate them. While this discrepancy needs to be seen in most instances as the operators of Charters taking advantage of legal mandates, it is clear that the Legislature did not mean for its averages to produce such windfalls to the Charter School industry in a distressed district.

(Hat tip to Keystone State Education Coalition) 

Yes, I have to keep explaining this to people because it seems so incredible-- the state of PA has a payment system for charters that doesn't factor in anything about what it actually costs the charters to educate students. The legislature has set it up so that charters like the ones in Chester can pick up a minimum of $15,000 pure profit. 

You may remember a time when a selling point for charters was that they would do more with less. That has never been the case in PA-- charters promise to do whatever they feel like with as much 

PA: Charter Windfalls