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Successful organizations, public and private, monitor their
operations--extensively and intensively. UPS and FedEx know where every package
is in transit. Dell is famous for running an extremely tight supply chain,
pushing the cost of holding inventory onto its suppliers by having a crystal
clear understanding of its immediate requirements and only ordering what it
needs when it needs it. Baseball teams employ sophisticated statistical analyses
in making personnel decisions.
Compare such approaches to what has long
prevailed in public education. In 2007, Michelle Rhee, then the new chancellor
of the Washington, D.C. Public Schools, reported that millions of dollars worth
of textbooks and supplies had been moldering, unnoticed, in a warehouse for
months and years. Few districts understand their true costs of recruiting a new
teacher and principals have little idea what their schools' actual budgets are.
. .
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Frederick M. Hess is the director of education policy studies at AEI. Jon Fullerton is executive director of the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University.










