The ROI on That Sheepskin

May 112012
 

Colleges are a bit like funeral homes. Talking about getting your money’s worth strikes some as a little crass.

But overcharging people is crass, too. College demands an increasingly big chunk of change, and the returns aren’t necessarily there. Writing recently in The Wall Street Journal, Jack Hough lined up a number of experts to dispute a claim by President Obama that college is a great investment. Hough pointed out that “tuition and fees have increased 184% in 20 years after accounting for inflation, but wages for college grads have risen just 9%, according to Labor Department data.” Moreover, sites such as PayScale indicate that some students end up with a flat-out negative return on tuition investment.

“Mr. Obama’s investment tip is well-intentioned,” Hough wrote, “but in college as on Wall Street, returns aren’t guaranteed.”

Peter Drucker thought about education all his life. He also, as we’ve pointed out a number of times, thought a lot about paying for it. One of his most extensive considerations of the topic was in Landmarks of Tomorrow, first published in 1957, at a time when tuition was already on the rise.

“The educator usually distrusts economic discussion of education,” Drucker noted. “He points out with reason that individual excellence, knowledge and responsibility, rather than goods and services, are the ‘products’ of education.”

But Drucker countered that this was not an excuse to stop thinking in terms of return on investment. “We cannot afford education that does not make the individual a bigger, a better, a more dedicated or a more excellent—that means, a more productive—person,” he wrote. “Whatever does not add to the capacity for sustained growth of personality or contribution is impractical—and may indeed be deleterious. That this or that subject adds to a man’s ability to get a job, or to do well on his first job, is not irrelevant.”

Also, while Drucker believed in the value of student loans, calling it “equitable to expect the graduate to repay, in dollars over the years, the cost of his education,” he, too, may have blanched at the debt burden borne by recent college graduates scraping by at or near minimum wage. As he asserted, “A free society will not finance education by indentured labor.”

What do think: Has a college education ceased to provide a reasonable return on investment? Why?

Drucker for Future Leaders

Mar 212012
 

“Step It Up” is the latest installment in our collection of animations. It tells the story of Sam’s efforts to win the affections of Rosi, all by using Peter Drucker’s “Five Most Important Questions.”

As part of the Drucker Institute’s “Drucker for Future Leaders” program, this short film provides a way for middle- and high-school students to learn basic principles of management. Watch to see if Sam succeeds in getting himself permanently out of “the friend zone.”

The “Drucker for Future Leaders” curriculum unfolds in five parts and is designed to be implemented over the course of a semester as part of a broader classroom curriculum.

The Feedback

Mar 132012
 

Are we specialists or generalists here at the Drucker Exchange? Maybe we’re Drucker specialists about general topics. In any case, when we brought up the subject of specialists vs. generalists last week, it was in the context of General Electric, which once was known for rotating its top managers from division to division as they rose through the ranks, but now tends to keep them in the same unit. What, we asked, would you prefer in a top manager: People who have rotated through several parts of the business or people who have risen steadily within one?

Reader Linda Fishman said either way can work:

I’m not sure it matters either way in management of a company or in many fields. If the professional has excellent core education and experience and is very talented, then he or she can quickly move to and master a new part of a larger business or field and even be able to understand needs of one in which he or she never has worked.

We also asked our readers if teacher evaluations, those thorny creatures, can be made into beneficial tools.

Reader Reggie said evaluations can be helpful—but not if imposed in an adversarial way:

If evaluations are solely used for external reinforcements of desired behaviors then we are only silly Skinnerians hoping that we will get what we want. Using evaluations as rewards or punishments not only demeans the humanity of our craft but goes against what we know about Motivation 2.0 via Daniel Pink’s Drive. Yes, evaluate. Use the evaluation to assist the student as teacher in taking steps to become the master guru.

Reader jean suggested that we still don’t know exactly what we’re doing, and compared schools to hospitals with sick patients:

I still don’t know how one would control for the fact that we don’t want to unfairly penalize the hospital that has the patients who are most ill. I use the hospital because it is a less painful scene for me than a school.

And reader Mike Grayson said worry less about the getting in the right teachers than getting out the wrong students:

Evaluation is important, but what is more important is to allow the teacher to focus on those who want to learn and remove those who don’t from the environment and place them in a different kind of environment that focuses on the correction of behavioral issues.

Hey, we swear we didn’t launch that spitball.

Minds Over Mines

Mar 122012
 

You may have heard the term “resource curse,” but who knew that you could put numbers to it?

According to a study from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the more oil and other natural resources (whether diamonds or coal) that your country has, the worse you’re likely to do in school.

The OECD came to this conclusion by looking at the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, exam, which tests the math and reading of 15-year-olds around the world. Writing in the New York Times over the weekend, Thomas Friedman summed up the findings: “Add it all up and the numbers say that if you really want to know how a country is going to do in the 21st century, don’t count its oil reserves or gold mines, count its highly effective teachers, involved parents and committed students.”

That academic achievement correlates with success is hardly news, of course. But it’s a striking testament to the increasing importance of knowledge work, something Peter Drucker defined and wrote about for much of his life.

Illustration by Marie Rossettie

“Knowledge is the only meaningful resource today,” Drucker declared in Post-Capitalist Society. “The traditional ‘factors of production’—land (i.e., natural resources), labor, and capital—have not disappeared, but they have become secondary. They can be obtained, and obtained easily, provided there is knowledge.”

There was a time, of course, when the United States boasted arguably the best education system in the world. “The only resource in respect to which America can possibly have a competitive advantage is education,” Drucker wrote in his 1967 book The Effective Executive. “American education may leave a good deal to be desired, but it is massive beyond anything poorer countries can afford. For education is the most expensive capital investment we have ever seen.”

In more recent years, the ability of American students to excel in the classroom has come into question. Many other parts of the world—including Macau, Slovenia and Poland—outrank the U.S. on the OECD chart. For his part, Friedman said that Taiwan is his favorite place when it comes to mining its people’s “talent, energy and intelligence.”

What about you? What country do you think is best positioned in this knowledge age—and why?

The Gift of Teaching

Mar 092012
 

How do you evaluate something as intangible as teaching?

However hard it may be, we’ve been trying especially hard in recent years to find ways to measure teacher performance. In New York City, much to the chagrin of the United Federation of Teachers, the Department of Education has released a database ranking almost 18,000 teachers individually. Across the country, schools are now evaluating teachers by student test results in all sorts of subjects, beyond just math and reading.

As we’ve noted before (and more than once) Peter Drucker believed strongly in schools measuring performance. (Whether he would have supported making every teacher’s name public is another matter.) “The greatest change—and the one we are least prepared for—is that the school will have to commit itself to results,” Drucker wrote in Post-Capitalist Society. “It will have to establish its ‘bottom line,’ the performance for which it should be held responsible and for which it is being paid. The school will finally become accountable.”

Illustration by Brian Stauffer

As for whether something like a bubble test could do the job, Drucker’s feeling was that, yes, it could. “‘The development of the whole personality’ as the objective of the school is, indeed, intangible,” Drucker conceded in Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices. “But ‘teaching a child to read by the time he has finished third grade’ is by no means intangible. It can be measured easily and precisely.”

What Drucker couldn’t explain, though, was how to make a poor teacher a good one. In fact, in his memoir, Adventures of a Bystander, Drucker lamented the power of those “who promise to be able to teach teaching” and observed that “we have focused on teaching as a skill and forgotten what Socrates knew: teaching is a gift, learning is a skill.”

And, of course, if this is true, it doesn’t leave much room for teacher improvement.

What do you think? Can teacher evaluations be made into productive tools for improving our schools—and, if so, how?

Joe’s Journal: A Miracle Full of Surprises

Mar 062012
 

“The innovative organization understands that innovation starts with an idea. Ideas are somewhat like babies—they are born small, immature and shapeless. They are promise rather than fulfillment. In the innovative organization executives do not say, ‘This is a damn-fool idea.’ Instead they ask, ‘What would be needed to make this embryonic, half-baked, foolish idea into something that makes sense, that is feasible, that is an opportunity for us?’”

–Peter F. Drucker

“Reading Recovery” is a program developed to bring at-risk first-graders up to grade level in reading and to maintain grade-level standards of achievement in subsequent years. Marie Clay introduced the program in 1966 in Auckland, New Zealand, as a part of her doctoral studies at Auckland University.

Clay focused the program on individual strengths and taught accordingly. By emphasizing the strengths of each student, Clay discovered new ways to tailor instruction and to accelerate learning.

“By the end of 1967,” Clay wrote, “we had a well documented miracle full of surprises.”

Clay went on to work with the faculty of Ohio State University in the 1980s, and was a Distinguished Scholar there in 1985. Her 1993 book, Reading Recovery: Guidelines for Teachers in Training, has had an enormous impact, selling more than 8 million copies.

A program of very small beginnings and unexpected successes, “Reading Recovery” has had a profound effect on teaching and learning. In our knowledge society, we need to make sure that everyone is proficient in reading, and the program that Clay created has proven invaluable in helping us get closer to this goal. “Reading Recovery” is now being exported and is increasing literacy rates across the globe.

The lesson here, as Peter Drucker knew so well: Be alert for small ideas that have big promise; babies can grow into something very special.

Scandal For School and School For Scandal

Feb 132012
 

The Miramonte Elementary school in Los Angeles has, at least temporarily, been purged.

Two teachers in as many weeks have been accused of sexual abuse of students, and, in a move drawing national attention, Superintendent John Deasy has transferred every single teacher in the school while investigators look into who else might have done or known something.

Clearly, the circumstances here are especially troubling. But the question remains: Is a mass action like this ever the right thing to do from a managerial standpoint?

In one sense, the decision to take everyone off the job is less of an overreaction than it might seem. If Deasy were to remove just some teachers (apart from the two alleged offenders), while leaving others in place, it could violate Peter Drucker’s dictum that organizations attain “equity and impersonal fairness in its personnel decisions.”

Drucker also would have appreciated the difficulty that any school administrator, like Deasy, has in balancing competing interests. He or she “has to satisfy teachers, the school board, the taxpayers, parents and, in a high school, the students themselves, Drucker observed. “Five constituencies, each of which sees the school differently.”

Illustration by Sergio Membrillas

At the same time, if Deasy’s move were not simply a near-term measure—but, rather, a permanent clean sweep, as the teachers’ union originally feared—the calculation might change. Drucker, after all, believed in making the best of an existing workforce and not painting with too broad a brush.

A particularly dramatic example could be found in postwar Germany. “When Konrad Adenauer became Germany’s chancellor in 1949, he inherited a discredited, demoralized civil service deeply tainted by its subservience to the Nazis,” Drucker recalled in Managing in the Next Society. “He had himself been twice imprisoned by the Nazis, but despite heavy pressure, especially from the British and Americans, he shielded the civil service from de-Nazification. He restored its job security and the privileges the Nazis had abolished and gave it unprecedented freedom from interference by local politicians.”

What do you think? Is a top-to-bottom dismissal of existing staff ever the best policy?

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