Bad Management: Teaching Practical Solutions 4

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One of the worst service industry experiences that I’ve had over the last twenty years is a failing entity that suffers from bad management and impacts families all over the United States. It looks to it’s customers for financial aid while charging them for anything over the bare minimum. It reduces hours of business during the week because of the lack of resources and schedules additional shutdowns without customer consultation to cover it’s own training and administrative needs. If this isn’t bad enough it’s employees are required to work no more than thirty five hours a week with fourteen weeks of paid vacation a year while customers are recruited as volunteers to carry out the work that doesn’t get done! Due to bad management and the financial instability of this industry leaders have become professional fund raisers, calling homes out of hours, scaring children with their prerecorded begging messages instead of focussing on running operations and improving the quality of service. In addition, as demand has grown the ratio of practitioners to customers has been increased stretching the already limited bandwidth.

People usually don’t think of Education as a service industry or schools as a place of business but that’s exactly what it is and how they should be treated. There should be no double standard and schools should not get a pass. Bad management should not tolerated in any circumstances.

So how do you tame this neglected, rampaging dinosaur? First of all human resources need to be level loaded to meet demand and in this case demand should reflect the services required during standard hours as well as any additional work needed throughout the whole system for a given year.

Moving teachers to a formal forty hour work week with overtime is not demeaning, insulting or even controversial – it’s common sense and would allow them to pick up some of the responsibilities that are currently farmed out to volunteers. Car pool monitoring, photocopying, library duties and lunch supervision are not glamorous activities but should all be part of the job description of those paid to supervise our kids.

Reducing the “summer vacation” to a mandated six weeks (instead of twelve) would improve the quality of the education our children receive substantially. As I’m typing this I still can’t believe that there are professionals that get paid for twelve months while only working nine! Apart from the absurdity of all that time off it can’t be good from a continuity perspective. Imagine airline pilots not doing their job for a full quarter. How confident would you be getting in a plane on their first day back? It’s like coming out of retirement every September! Some companies don’t give that much time off to mothers after giving birth! Once this audacious arrangement is eradicated we might even see an improvement in the caliber of our teachers since the profession will no longer attract individuals for the wrong reasons. I understand that the operation is seasonal in nature so there is no need to provide classes for the entire year but that doesn’t mean that the teachers should not be working for part of it.

During the additional six weeks of work time that we get back with this change teachers could tear down the current year and start prepping for the next. They could take care of any training needs and use other time available to identify ways to remove waste from existing processes and set up systems to manage the work week more efficiently. Continuous improvement is the responsibility of all professionals, particularly those in a struggling industry. The days of coming in to work to just turn the handle have long gone!

If the summer vacation time was reduced to six weeks for students as well as teachers the review time at start up of the new year would be much less, freeing up several more weeks and allowing time for previously “axed” subjects to be reintroduced which can only improve the quality of the education received by our kids. Some additional services may still need funding but they will be the exception rather than the rule.

How do you move to an arrangement like this when the system has been neglected for so long? Well, those individuals currently employed will be given a choice to either move to the new terms and conditions or continue to enjoy the twelve week vacation break with a six week pay cut (equivalent to the difference between the new vacation quota of six weeks and the old arrangement). New hires will be on boarded under the new contract arrangements. This may sound harsh but without radical changes we will never be able to change the paradigm. Entities like this either fail or deteriorate over time as a result of the instability of charitable giving. Whether intentional or not this situation is a prime example of consumer blackmail because education is so critical to parents that they will simply not allow it to fail and will step in at the first sign of trouble. Don’t worry “government bailout” will never be required here, instead it will just be steady bleeding that kills this monster.

In plain english the responsibility for the states to provide education is not being fulfilled. In many states schools are being kept afloat by parents, and students miss out on key opportunities if PTA’s don’t step in.

Speaking as a parent myself the need to fund the occasional extracurricular activity is somewhat palatable but warping the definition of “extracurricular” to include such things as science, music and drama is totally unacceptable.

So next time you drop your kids off at school because you don’t want to pay the $450 annual fee for the school bus, volunteer to manage the car pool lane, mark papers in class to help the teacher, teach kids about art at school on your own time, pay for the school play or a field trip, or sell coupons to fund the science and music programs, give some thought to how your actions are feeding the beast that is the US Education System.

Well, that’s today’s chat. Hopefully it strikes a chord with someone, somewhere!

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