Commentary : The Bottom Line in Education

Over the past 27 years that I have been in education as a teacher and principal, I have heard various people say, “If we ran our business like they run the business of education, we would be in trouble.” It seems that some people in the business world think that anything that is done in business could and should be done in education to improve our “product.”

Well, yes, we try to follow the tenets of good business management, but a lot of times we can’t, mainly because we are dealing with a sensitive, delicate, fragile commodity known as children. Children don’t come off an assembly line stamped from a mold, indistinguishable from the millions that came out before them or the millions that will come out after them.

If we wanted to increase production of, say, bottled water, we would have to transport more water back to the plant to be bottled, and we would need more containers.

Now I am sure it is much more complicated than that, but so is education. The only problem is that everyone thinks they are an expert on educational matters and most of these so-called experts know just as much about education as I do about bottled water.

Consider the process of manufacturing the bottle that will hold the water. It is made with materials that meet exacting specifications, inspected and, if it isn’t exact in every detail, it is simply rejected. In education , however, we do not have the liberty of rejecting our vessels (students), nor would we want to. The vessels that we are charged with pouring knowledge in do not come off a precision assembly line. If they were all perfect, it would probably be a little easier for the teacher.

All of our students don’t all come to us from perfect little families who live in beautiful homes in storybook neighborhoods. They all don’t eat perfectly balanced meals or get the required amount of sleep each night. Their family backgrounds may not be precisely geared to books and learning, and all aren’t eager to have the teacher pour knowledge into them. We are dealing with human beings who range from one end of the intellectual scale to the other. We get them from backgrounds that many of you couldn’t imagine, from broken families and home situations that may include abuses of many sorts, or just plain neglect. We get them without a bath, breakfast, clean clothes, proper medical attention--and some of them come to us without an ounce of love in their tiny lives.

And then to make things even more difficult, we get them from foreign cultures and lands, and they and their families can’t speak a word of English. This compounds the problem of communicating and teaching and learning. In other words, our students have many imperfections that we have to accept. We take all children and then do our best for each of them. We can’t simply stick a label on them that says, “Rejected, Return to Manufacturer.”

Add to our teaching responsibilities the “other subjects or concerns” that the legislators and the public want covered in the curriculum above and beyond courses like reading, writing, math, science, language, spelling, citizenship and speech. I’m talking about things like Indian education, gifted and talented education, family life/sex education, drug abuse, alcohol and smoking prevention, driver’s education and, now in the hopper, AIDS prevention.

You must add to this mixture all the other concerns that make teaching interesting, such as discipline problems, apathy, absenteeism, vandalism, parents who think that their children can do no wrong and parents who don’t care what wrong their children do.

It gets frustrating at times to try to balance that heavy load. Then what really gets to educators is when we read the headlines that scream out, “Why Can’t Johnny Read?” Personally, I’m amazed at times that some of the Johnnys are reading at all. I give credit to the teachers who take Johnny from where they find him and bring him up to the next level, even if it’s just a few points higher than his last score. That in itself may be a monumental task with some children.

Why do other countries score higher than we do on certain tests? Maybe it’s because the educators and parents stick to their first priority in education and see to it that all those “other things” don’t get into the curriculum and take valuable time from what they feel is most important--the basics. How can the public expect us to cram all of these subjects and concerns into a teaching day and then be upset because the math or reading scores are low.

I happen to have a fine school (public, not private and selective) with a fantastic staff, great students and a super-supportive community. We take all students just the way we find them. We give them our best professional services, and that sometimes includes a warm hug for a hurting child. We reach into our pockets to provide a lunch for the student who is hungry. We cry for the hurt we see at times and our hearts ache for some of the children. And we continue to do our best day after day, year after year.

So, maybe the business of education isn’t run exactly like your business and maybe that’s the way it should be. We are dealing with humanity and the quality of life, and you just can’t bottle that or put an exacting price tag on each unit produced.