{"id":1283,"date":"2008-04-08T15:45:27","date_gmt":"2008-04-08T19:45:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shermandorn.com\/wordpress\/?p=1283"},"modified":"2008-04-08T15:45:27","modified_gmt":"2008-04-08T19:45:27","slug":"should-schools-borrow-the-best-or-the-worst-from-business","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/?p=1283","title":{"rendered":"Should schools borrow the best or the worst from business?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today, Florida TaxWatch issued a set of recommendations<\/a> for cost cutting in education (hat tip<\/a>), and one quotation put in a separate box stood out for me, from Florida TaxWatch’s Center for Educational Performance chair David Mann:<\/p>\n

Education should borrow from business practices:…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As Good to Great<\/i> author Jim Collins<\/a> might ask, that’s all fine and dandy, but do you want schools to borrow from good business practices or bad business practices? It strikes me that we’re in a recession because of a bunch of pretty lousy business practices. Should schools follow down that path?<\/p>\n

In particular, the report focused on the proportion of school spending that goes towards food, transportation, air conditioning, and other expenses, noting that in Florida, 19.7% of funding is reported for these categories, in contrast to 17.8% for the U.S. as a whole. Maybe we’re higher than average on those categories because a higher proportion of children in Florida are poor, plus we have county-wide school districts and choice programs that involve busing, plus we have higher air conditioning costs because we’re in Florida<\/i>. For goodness’ sake, it’s well known in the state that our governor has a fan with him at all spots because he doesn’t want to be shown sweating. (I don’t want to know what temperature his offices are kept at. Wait a minute: I’d love to know, but maybe his office wouldn’t want us to know. Any reporters out there, my guess is that thermostat settings are public records…)<\/p>\n

Then there are recommendations that make little sense, such as one to maximize economies of scale. Florida has county school systems, a centralized system of data warehousing, etc. I view that recommendation as hand-waving. Or the proposal to outsource more; haven’t we had enough scandals with Florida’s privatization in the past decade? <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today, Florida TaxWatch issued a set of recommendations for cost cutting in education (hat tip), and one quotation put in a separate box stood out for me, from Florida TaxWatch’s Center for Educational Performance chair David Mann: Education should borrow from business practices:… As Good to Great author Jim Collins might ask, that’s all fine […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1283","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education-policy"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pag0MB-kH","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1283","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1283"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1283\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1283"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1283"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1283"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}