We have been concerned with the increasing use of business terms when talking about schools. Schools are very different from most businesses, and we find those hostile to public education use the “business speak” the most.

“The marketplace excels in many ways—it keeps capital circulating, it spurs innovation, finds efficiencies, and all the rest. But business is also prone to overhyping its capabilities to believing its own press, to adopt reductive thinking too readily in the interests of simplicity. The ‘ROI’ in the classroom takes a thousand forms, and in many cases bears no fruit for years after the initial ‘investment.’ In short—business is well-suited to throwing up strip malls, not to building the cathedral we need.

“The mindset that has had a chokehold on educational policy for far too long confuses the sowing of upheaval for meaningful activity: charter schools displacing existing ones, the Whack-a-Mole-style flailing at a rotating set of standards that will make the elusive magic happen, the vindictive purging of teachers and administrators who ‘fail to deliver,’ and so on.”

Read more here: http://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/20151013/OPINION/151019957/framing-education-as-a-business-attracts-the-wrong-people?X-IgnoreUserAgent=1