1. Education is not a business and so we can’t treat it like one, nor expect it to operate like one.

Business is about the numbers on the bottom line, and for businesses that works. While there are certain attributes of business, like a drive for efficiency or increased productivity that we undoubtedly want represented in some aspects of our education system, equating education with a business is like trying to drive a square peg into a round hole.

The main purpose of schools is not to turn a profit nor compete against other schools for students or resources. Schools shouldn’t be forced to cut operating costs by overcrowding their classrooms, firing nurses and social workers, or downsizing their curricula. Downsizing is one of the potential perils of doing business, but in education that isn’t an option. Why not? Because in order to achieve educational success we must focus on providing our students with more quality learning experiences, not fewer, and downsizing ensures that this goal is unreachable. Some businesses evaluate their employees quantitatively and use numeric equations to determine their benefit to the company. That practice doesn’t work productively in education. If students don’t perform well on tests, we blame the teachers for being ‘low quality’, we blame the principals for hiring the teachers, and we blame the district for hiring the principals, ad infinitum. However, there are, literally, countless factors in student performance that make it impossible to use a reliable quantitative measuring stick to gauge progress in education.

2. Learning is not a task, it is a process.

Learning is about growth and development, intellectually, personally, and socially. Today’s education system is narrowly focused on knowledge as a way to pass a test. Students must master certain concepts to pass mandatory statewide, standardized tests, but this isn’t learning. Learning is not text on a page, it is not empty words hanging in mid-air and it is not little circles that you bubble in. Learning is lively discussion, active debate; learning is arguing, learning is feeling, thinking, doing—Reconstructing experiences in your own terms and in your own ways, to grow and develop.

3. Students are not statistics, they are real people.

Taking a standardized test turns you into a number; it dehumanizes you and ensures that school is more of an obstacle course you must complete than a place of genuine learning and development. You are told that you pass, or you are told that you are a failure. As long as we look at students as numbers or statistics, rather than as individuals we will be unable to help them really learn, as opposed to being desperate to avoid failure or perhaps punishment—they will be unable to love to learn or value education as it should be valued.