The Business of Education

In today's lecture, we talked about structure.  Structure is an essential element of business.  This inspired me to think about school as if it were a business and the structure which it is made up of.  The structure is as follows:

Superintendent -- CEO

School Board -- Board of Directors

Principals -- Managers

Department Heads -- Mid-Level Managers

Teachers -- Workers

Students -- The Product

Parents -- Investors

Government -- Auditing Authorities

I believe that it is acceptable to think of a school as business.  The only difference is that the workers (teachers) can't be fired as easily as workers in a typical business.  If this structure is accurate, and parents are the investors, then the schools need to be sure that they always act with the parents' best interests in mind.  In my managerial finance class, we learned that the goal of every corporation should be to maximize shareholder wealth. In the case of education, maximizing the wealth of the investors would mean maximizing the learning of the students.  If every school operated with this mentality, I believe that the business of education would improve.