Business thinking has corrupted our schools, according to Anthony Cody, a teacher and teacher-coach in Oakland, California. In an article posted December 3^rd on Teacher magazine, Cody notes that business people saw a shocking flaw in our education system: “There was no bottom line. Unlike a business, schools had no balance sheet at the end of the year—no ‘metrics,’ no way to directly compare one school to another. No way to tell which school was a good return on our investment, and which was wasting the public’s money.”

To fix the flaw, a profit-minded accountability movement pushed for clear standards and tests to measure performance on those standards, and No Child Left Behind emerged.

It will not work. “As a culture and a species,” Cody writes, “we have too many problems that cannot be solved by a one-dimensional view of profit and loss.”

The truth is, focusing solely on revenue and profitability as the single bottom line for business doesn’t work, either. It’s why the balanced scorecard was born. It’s why the triple bottom line—giving environmental and social considerations equal weight to financial ones—has gained traction. And it’s a big reason we’re in the mess we’re in today with global warming and a broken healthcare system and greedy financial institutions and income that, for most Americans, hasn’t gotten much better in years. When all that matters is profit, nothing else matters.

Business thinking has corrupted education. It’s corrupted healthcare. It’s even corrupted business. New thinking is needed. “We must not trade our judgment and our students’ fundamental human needs for a single-minded focus on test scores,” says Cody, “any more than we should allow life on our planet to continue to suffer from a single-minded focus on profit.”

The Baldrige model provides a new way of thinking about how to run an organization to the benefit of all stakeholders. But the model only goes so far. As a nation, we have to decide what we want our organizations to achieve.

Business and political leaders have tried to do that for us and look where it’s gotten us. We can do better.

To learn more about improving education from a Baldrige perspective, read:

• Inspiration for a New Education System
• Reinventing Education with Baldrige
• Integrating Baldrige Big Time
• Education: Fix the System
• Colleges as Dissatisfied Stakeholders
• Baldrige and K-12: Not for the Faint-Hearted

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