Rethinking Schools as More than Businesses

Beyond ROI: What Are Schools Really For?

Questions the rise of return-on-investment language in education policy and school funding. Explores the deeper social, emotional, and civic missions of schools that defy simple metrics. Argues that growth, not profit, should guide educational vision.

Education Is Not a Product, and Students Are Not Consumers

Critiques the commodification of learning and the treatment of students as paying customers. Analyzes how this model reshapes pedagogy, accountability, and equity. Proposes an alternative paradigm of mutual respect and civic partnership.

From Testing Factories to Learning Ecosystems

Explores how standardized testing culture industrializes schools—prioritizing efficiency, compliance, and output over curiosity and critical thought. Offers alternative models of authentic assessment and dynamic learning environments.

The Tyranny of Rankings: How Metrics Undermine Meaning

Investigates how global and national school rankings distort educational priorities. Highlights how chasing prestige erodes trust, creativity, and well-being. Advocates for value-driven evaluation that reflects real student growth.

Branding Over Belonging: When Schools Market Instead of Connect

Analyzes how marketing logic has replaced authentic school-community relationships. Questions whether school choice, slogans, and image management build true educational value. Argues for schools that prioritize belonging, not branding.

Profit Motives vs. Public Mission

Draws the line between education as a public right and education as a private opportunity. Examines the ethical risks of for-profit schools, pay-to-play systems, and venture-backed edtech platforms. Reasserts the democratic foundation of universal education.

Business Models Don’t Fit Human Development

Explains how children’s growth—emotional, cognitive, moral—cannot be measured in quarterly outcomes or competitive benchmarks. Highlights developmental unpredictability and the long-term nature of true learning.

Who’s Accountable to Whom? Redefining School Success

Critiques top-down accountability models driven by business-style performance metrics. Suggests reciprocal accountability, where systems are accountable to students and communities—not just funders and markets.

Efficiency Kills Curiosity

Explores how time-on-task obsession and productivity goals diminish wonder, play, and deep thinking. Argues that real learning needs breathing room and inefficiency. Calls for slow, spacious, exploratory learning culture.

When Schools Sell Out: Ethical Dilemmas of Private Sponsorship

Examines conflicts of interest when corporations fund, shape, or brand public education. Questions what values are smuggled in when money comes with strings. Encourages ethical funding models that preserve independence.

Reclaiming the Soul of Education

Asks what’s lost when schools focus more on reputation, performance, and optics than on the inner life of students. Promotes education that nourishes spirit, ethics, and human dignity.

The Principal Is Not a CEO, and the Teacher Is Not a Sales Rep

Challenges the business management rhetoric reshaping school leadership. Restores the educator’s role as nurturer, guide, and ethical anchor—not corporate manager or performance enforcer.

Data-Driven to a Fault: When Numbers Replace Judgment

Critiques overreliance on analytics, dashboards, and KPIs to drive school decisions. Highlights the loss of human intuition, teacher expertise, and local wisdom in data-saturated environments.

Schools Are Communities, Not Corporations

Celebrates schools as places of mutual care, trust, and cultural transmission. Offers examples of community-led governance, cooperative learning, and shared responsibility. Pushes back against privatization and top-down control.

Funding Education as a Human Right, Not a Market Gamble

Makes the case for full public investment in education as a foundation of democracy and equality. Criticizes unstable, competitive, or performance-based funding models that deepen inequities.

Education Shouldn’t Be a Race

Unpacks the damage caused by framing learning as competition—ranking students, schools, and districts against each other. Proposes collaboration, mastery, and community-building as healthier models.

The Myth of the Education Consumer

Explores how “choice” rhetoric masks deeper systemic issues and undermines public education. Argues that treating families as consumers fragments solidarity and weakens advocacy for quality for all.

What Happens When We Incentivize the Wrong Things?

Analyzes how performance-based pay, school bonuses, and test-linked rewards can lead to manipulation, burnout, and lost purpose. Calls for intrinsic motivation, teacher trust, and student-centered success.

From Market Metrics to Meaningful Measures

Offers a new vision of evaluation rooted in personal growth, social impact, and learner well-being. Encourages systems that reflect what truly matters—not what’s easiest to measure or sell.