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Many school reformers have eagerly adopted the language of the business world, and that makes a lot of people nervous. I'm not worried by the business speak per se. I'm more concerned about what happens when we draw the wrong lessons from business.

The School Administrator has a wonderful set of articles this month on a promising reform strategy that first came from the business world: the balanced scorecard. They make for very good reading, because they take us far beyond the standard story about reforms inspired by business. You can pretty much sum up that story in four short sentences: Focus on outcomes. Be innovative. Give people choices. Get the incentives right.

The balanced scorecard goes a good deal farther. It looks at process, a word that gets precious little respect these days. Here's how Atlanta superintendent Beverly Hall describes it in The School Administrator's feature article:

All school systems focus on student achievement — these are the critical outcomes that we track as educators. But to get to those outcomes, you must measure and evaluate everything we do as a district. The balanced scorecard is our way to look across all departments and ensure they are aligned to our strategy. It gives us transparency and clarity into how our central office (often the target of unfair attacks about a "bloated bureaucracy") supports the district’s progress and children.

The article's authors (Robert Kaplan and Dylan Miyake) elaborate:

The balanced scorecard captures both the financial and the nonfinancial elements of the strategy and describes the cause-and-effect linkages that drive results. It allows a district to look ahead, with leading indicators, rather than always looking back with lagging indicators.

 

As evidence of the strategy's success, the authors point to Atlanta Public Schools, which have become a model for urban school reform, though you wouldn't know it from reading the papers. As we ponder the lessons we can learn from business, we would do well to take notice of Atlanta.