Talking about money?

In industry, there is an inexorable path products follow from labor intensive R & D, to high cost initial production, to ever lower costs of production as the product becomes commoditized.  Lower production costs are usually associated with lower labor costs realized through either technological advances (increased mechanization leading to lower headcount) or moving to lower wage areas (off-shore outsourcing).  The model has been stunningly successful with clothing and consumer electronics, somewhat less so with automobiles, and as yet not workable in health care and education. [There have been a few experiments in “medical tourism” where U.S., E.U. or Japanese corporations send their employees to Thailand or India for non-emergency surgeries at fractions of cost.]

Health care has maintained itself as a locally-sourced, high-cost product largely because it is one of the few (maybe the only) area where new technology actually increases the cost of production.  Education has been relatively static—the technology we use doesn’t really change much about teaching and learning, and we still do school much as it was done in the 19th Century (a bit of hyperbole, but not that much).  

We in independent schools seem to be somewhat stuck with reaffirming what we have unless we can make a breakthrough on changing how we operate school. Everything else, increasing revenue and cost-control, falls into what Chris Argyris at Harvard calls “single loop” change.  “Double loop” change (deeper) would require doing business differently.  This would seem to be a topic for boards this fall: are there ways of doing school differently that if taken to scale, might dramatically alter the cost basis of our product?  From a generative perspective, the outcome might be to point toward an experiment or two that a school can run (one classroom or division) as pilots to gauge how things might work.

What is your board going to talk about in September?