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For years now, education reformers have been getting earfuls of advice from business leaders.

Turning this convention on its head last week, a USA Today business Reporter looked to an educator for insights on leadership. The paper's corporate management reporter interviewed Molly Howard, NASSP's 2008 Principal of the Year, about the qualities that have helped her raise academic expectations, student performance and graduation rates at her high-poverty high school in Georgia.

To be sure, Howard invokes important concepts such as Total Quality Management and distributed leadership, both of which have been staples of business improvement discussions for decades.  Yet she cautions us not to take the comparison between schools and businesses too far.  Unlike businesses, public schools cannot simply discontinue their low-performing product lines to focus on the high performers and improve their bottom line.  Their mission is to educate all children, regardless of background or prior performance.  As Howard insists in the interview, "that's a big, big difference."

If only more business leaders would follow USA Today's lead and seek advice from award-winning educators.  Now more than ever, there are a few things businesses can learn from the best public schools. For example:

• Don't gussy up your results in the short term, or you'll surely regret it in the long term;
• It's the most vulnerable Americans who will bear the brunt of your worst failures.

Of course, this advice would be too little, too late.