The Corporate Model:
• Lehman Brothers: Collapsed at a cost of $1.6 billion, setting off a world-wide financial crisis;
• AIG (insurance): Collapsed at a cost of a $150 billion US Government bailout;
• General Motors: Bankrupt, rescued by the US Government in a $50 billion bailout;
• JP Morgan Chase: Hedging losses of at least $8 billion;
• MF Global: Lost $1.6 billion in illegally appropriated investor funds;
• Countrywide: Made at least $30 billion in “faulty” home loans;
• Barclays: Falsely reported borrowing costs, fined $450 million;
• GlaxoSmithKline: Falsely advertised drugs, fined $3 billion dollars.
And so forth. Of course we should be fair and balanced and mention such successful corporations as News Corporation (Murdoch), British Petroleum and ExxonMobil, as well as Goldman Sachs.
There are two aspects of the corporate model that are advertised as superior approaches to educating children: profits and leadership. The former is sometimes coupled with, or labeled as, competition.
Public education is funded by taxes—approaching $900 billion annually. No conceivable amount of individual largess or foundation prizes is going to move the needle. Can we get away with less spending? All indications are not only that we cannot, but that when the question is put to them, voters support higher per student expenditures. Putting aside the question of fairness involved with property-tax-based school funding, when considering the corporate model we must assume that corporate profits, management fees, and executive salaries must come from somewhere, most likely the classroom.
Given fair competition between a not-for-profit and a for-profit organization, contrary to the view promulgated by the media, the odds favor the former. Profits are a constant tax, as it were, on the resources of the for-profit organization. Not-for-profit entities, on the other hand, do not have to generate profits, which leaves more funding for internal investment. The preferred strategy of for-profit corporations, therefore, is to ensure that the competition is not fair. The not-for-profit organization is drained of resources by means of political pressure, non-competitive requirements not levied on the for-profit organization (e.g., accepting all students), while the for-profit organization is given short-term infusions of cash as a loss-leader with a view to super-profits once the competition from the not-for-profit ends.
Despite the constant drumbeat of praise for competition and “choice,” in the real world corporations hate competition. Their ideal is monopoly, or if that is unavailable, oligopoly—domination of a field by a few large corporations, such as with banking, automobile manufacturing, insurance, computer hardware and software, big box stores . . .
Another aspect of the corporate model, ideological rather than essential, is the cult of leadership. Why are we to believe that this semi-mystical concept matters at all to corporations, much less to organizations like schools? Did the actuaries at AIG work harder under the long-time CEO, Maurice “Hank” Greenberg than under his hapless successors? Robert Diamond of Barclays is seemingly the very model of the modern corporate leader. Was it a lack of “leadership” that led to the recent disaster at Barclays? At best “leadership” is a synonym for managerial competency. For decades one of the main forces behind innovation in America—the real originator of the Internet, for example—was DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Does anyone know the names of the men (presumably) who “led” it?
Leadership is native not to democracy but to autocracies of various kinds. It is indeed a tired truism that leadership is best understood when discussed in German. Wherever the cult of leadership holds sway, democracy is endangered.
The corporate model when applied to education is about extracting profits for corporations and their shareholders from public revenue and replicating in the most basic of democratic institutions, the schools, an organizational model native to monarchies and dictatorships.
Schools work best when they enable excellent teaching and that is not done by top down diktat, but by collaboration among professionals. Teachers who are supportive and good facilitators can mentor others in order to build a learning community in a school that continuously raises intrinsic standards of teaching and learning. Teachers who are particularly skilled at fostering others to do their best are essential. Charismatic principals are not needed, are often not helpful, except in situations where the schools is threatened by the “leadership” of higher level, corporate-trained, administrators. The solution to that is to eliminate higher levels of administration from public education.
In an era of distributed computer power, what value-added is there for a district of tens or hundreds of thousands of students? Many of the best schools in America are already virtually stand-alone entities. This is obviously the case with the not-for-profit private schools to which the 1% send their own children. If central school district administrations add value, why do the parents of students at Brearley, Spence, Collegiate and Trinity not demand that those school be taken over by the New York City Department of Education?
Public schools in wealthy suburbs often consist of a single feeder group of an elementary school, a middle school and a high school. If there were any value-added by district administrations, surely the parents of Beverly Hills and Palo Alto, Scarsdale and Princeton would demand amalgamation with the Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York City and Newark school districts.
Small, independent, public schools, collaboratively administered, funded on a comparative-need-basis from state-wide revenues are an alternative to both the corporate model and the present top-down model followed in most large districts. We know that something like this (except for the revenue sources) works well for the 1%--and even for the 10%. It is time to try it for the 99% as well.