Morning Shots

Republicans must not remain on the sidelines in the struggle for control of LAUSD.

Even though they may be tempted to sit back and observe—with, I might add, a slight sense of glee—Republicans have a duty to their community to take an active role in the power struggle taking place for the fate of the 770,000 children in LAUSD.  After all, those children are not Democrats, Republicans, Greens, Peace & Freedom, Libertarians or affiliated with any party: they are kids.

The prominent groups and political figures engaged in this battle have been opposed to many positions held by Republicans in the past, and most likely will be in the future. But as an American, this cannot be an excuse to avoid the responsibility of standing up for the community in which I reside.

As a community advocate, I have appeared in front of the LAUSD Board and the Superintendent  Roy Romer in opposition to actions they were about to take.  I am the first and sometimes the loudest voice to oppose a board decision.

The shortcomings of the current system are not in question in the effort to oppose AB1381. The effort to pressure California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to veto AB1381 is focused on the attempt by Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa to take control of the district—a move which has only addressed the shift of power, not a solution to the current challenges.

The mayor, who left the California State Assembly as Speaker, has called on his friends in the Assembly to draft a bill which would circumvent the vote of the people who elected the Board Members of LAUSD.  The bill, which has been rushed out of the State Senate Education Committee, will begin working its way to the desk of the governor in a matter of weeks.

Let us look at

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You can’t work in education very long without hearing The Blueberry Story. In it, an executive of an award-winning ice cream company gives a speech to a group of teachers – teachers who grow angrier by the minute as the executive tells them how business principles could save education.

As the executive finishes his speech, a teacher begins asking questions about the executive’s company, which recently had its blueberry ice cream named as best in the country. She catches him flatfooted as she points out the difference between businesses and schools: if a business sees inferior products arriving on the receiving docks, they can send them back; schools, on other hand, take every student, no matter what challenges those students face.

It’s a compelling story, and it’s been used for years to explain why schools struggle so mightily to produce results: without eager, capable, and committed kids, the argument goes, there’s no way we can produce strong and capable graduates.

There’s only one problem: the analogy is fundamentally wrong.

It’s wrong to consider kids just one more ingredient in the mix. There are a lot of ingredients that go into the education system – from textbooks to teachers, from buses to blackboards – but kids aren’t on that list.

If we looked at the analogy correctly, we would see that children, along with their families, are education’s customers. Just as an ice cream company needs customers to buy its premium ice cream, schools need children and their families to essentially buy their services. Every child going to school essentially walks in and hands over thousands of dollars to that school and, in doing so, expects in return to receive a relevant education so that they may successfully function in the world around them.

But are we providing these consumers with a product

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In a 1970 article entitled “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits,” economist Milton Friedman famously argued that a business exists for one purpose: to maximize returns for its shareholders. If shareholders want their money to go to social causes, he said, they’re perfectly capable of making that decision themselves, and the businesses they invested in have no right to make that decision for them – it simply isn’t what a business is set up to do.

Given this line of thinking (which remains widely held even today), many people assume that business’ interest in education is simply one more case of companies looking for new markets to conquer.

But is it really that simple?

Certainly there are companies that sell to the school market, and companies that want to manage schools. But they represent only a small segment of the total business community. The profit motive of this small group of companies doesn’t explain why businesses in almost every industry contribute billions each year to support education, nor does it explain the widespread political support that NCLB, vouchers, and other reform tools receive from businesses that have no interest in running schools.

Rather, it is the widely acknowledged crisis in public education that drives the business community – which is essentially both an investor in, and customer of, our schools – to see involvement as an imperative, literally something that must be done to ensure its own future. They see involvement in public education as an investment in the short- and long-term health of their companies, and in the continued strength of the markets they serve.

They look for the following returns on their investment in education:

• Workforce development – Employers are already complaining about their inability to find qualified workers in nearly every industry, and projections show this shortage

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