On Teachers and Education Spending

As I continue to do my research in preparation for the strategic planning meeting at work, I came across a part in Peter Drucker's book, Management, stressing the importance of knowing who your customer is. Most businesses have several different kinds of customers, each valuing something different.

For a teacher, the customers include the children, their parents and the school administration. It's pretty difficult to be a decent teacher and not care about the quality of your work in the classroom. It's also difficult to work as a teacher and have a lousy relationship with your students' parents. By their very nature, teachers provide a great interface between the education department and the voters.

Having said that, the education budgets are not set by the teachers. Instead, the teachers are used as marketing tools by government education departments to lobby for ever-increasing budgets until they become what they are today, bloated monstrosities. You see, the education department's customers are the politicians. The managers of the education department, the ones who make the financial decisions, have as their customers the politicians, the unions and their own orgaizational hierarchy. Nowhere in this list of customers is one that actually values education. The politicians want votes and the rest want more money.
By its very nature, the education department is designed to grow endlessly and deliver nothing. That's what you get when students and parents are not part of the customer list for those making organizational decisions. It explains the rabid opposition to No Child Left Behind. That effort adds to the list of customers that need to be satisfied and in doing that, adds a performance metric totally alien to the education department - test scores.

You'll also notice that the education departments aren't lobbying to have the huge budget increases that came along with No Child Left Behind taken away. Now there's a surprise.