Schools should learn from business: avoid competition

No business deliberately seeks competition; quite the opposite, businesses often spend lavishly to avoid it altogether. In nearly three decades of business management, twelve years as a strategy consultant to the Fortune 100, I’ve only seen one case where a business induced competition, and it backfired terribly. So why do we want to create competition for public schools? First let’s look at how businesses address it.

Indeed, one of the primary activities in business is the hard work of finding markets or niches where there is little or no competition. Some call it differentiation. This free-from-competition nirvana is usually measured in large market share, like that enjoyed by Microsoft’s Windows software among operating systems in the 90s, and it yields massive profits. Ultimately the goal is monopoly, although few that approach or achieve it will call it that for fear of reprisal. Whatever it’s called, it’s always found through smart investment strategies like acquisition, training, new technologies, hiring, lobbying, and research and development (R&D). The less that a business invests to get it, the more competition it will encounter. The more it invests, the less competition will matter and the greater the return on investment. While there are points of diminishing return, it’s generally that simple.

So why are we asking schools to act more like businesses and force them into conjured competition, when this is precisely not how businesses act? Wouldn’t it be better if schools were able to truly emulate the successful business?

If smart, capable kids are our objective (akin to profits in business), then why, pray tell, are we taking an already insufficient investment in public education and splitting it to create new schools in an effort to induce competition, when we should be doing precisely the opposite? And why, pray tell, would we measure and reward public school teachers based on centralized standardized tests -- the ultimate homogenizer? Here the only thing we create is sameness. Combined with vouchers that funnel public money into private schools, we’re paying for mediocrity twice, because we have more schools than we need, but none that do outstanding work. And in Wisconsin, a so-called business-friendly administration and legislature is forcing an agenda of sharply reduced investment at precisely the worst moment.

This is not what a good business would do. A good business would invest to reduce the threat of competition, knowing that the alternative is to lose its best talent and ideas and its position. A good business would take stock of its performing assets and would work to put its non-performers to better use. A good business would set new goals to take a new place of importance and value in its market. A good business would ask its employees to assist in the change. A good business, if unionized, would ask the union to help, and a good union would provide it.

For Wisconsin’s schools, this would mean protecting our world-class public schools and providing sufficient turnaround attention to the weak ones. Our objective should be to set the mark for academic achievement worldwide. For Wisconsin’s teacher’s unions, this would be an opportunity to gain international stature as a flexible and forward-thinking enterprise. Of course in due time, we could expect Wisconsin’s children to become role-model global and local citizens. Only then would we be truly open for business.

So as citizens, we must ask ourselves; do we want to increase the potential of our kids to do well in our community, the nation and the planet and give them a chance at a better life? If this is our goal, then we should do as a good business would: we should minimize competition and maximize investment.

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Copyright, Nicholas Hayes 2011, All rights reserved.

Note: This article (thanks Lori D) postulates that the rush to create competition for public schools might better be viewed as a lobby-fueled investment to reduce competition for education privateers. Follow the money. http://www.progressive.org/rc051111.html