What People Mean When They Say Schools Should Run Like a Business
AMP Incorporated was a different kind of company. The businesses that reformers usually have in mind are something else entirely.
After I published the recent post about AMP Incorporated, I found myself returning to an internal conflict I had not fully identified while writing it. For most of my career, I have been skeptical of the argument that schools should run more like businesses. I have seen that argument used to justify cutting programs, deprofessionalizing teaching, and importing management frameworks that carry no understanding of what schools actually do. I have watched it land on educators as an insult dressed up as advice. And I have spent enough time inside the institution to know that the comparison rarely holds up to scrutiny.
So what was I doing writing admiringly about a manufacturing company? The answer, I think, is that AMP was not the kind of business the reformers have in mind. And the gap between what AMP actually was and what people picture when they say “run it like a business” is exactly what is worth examining.
A Businessman Who Changed His Mind
In the late 1980s, Jamie Vollmer was a business executive and attorney who believed, with some confidence, that public schools needed to think more like companies. He was also the president of an ice cream company that People magazine had named the best in America. He carried both credentials into an auditorium full of teachers and delivered a speech, making the case for business-style reform. He was, as he later described it, perfectly balanced between ignorance and arrogance.
A veteran English teacher in the audience waited for him to finish. Then she walked him, step by patient step, into a corner. She praised his ice cream. She asked about the ingredients. She established that his company used only the finest blueberries. And then she asked what he did when an inferior shipment arrived at his loading dock. He told her the truth. He sent them back.
“And we,” she said, “can never send back our blueberries. We take them big, small, rich, poor, gifted, exceptional, abused, frightened, confident, homeless, rude, and brilliant. We take them with ADHD, junior rheumatoid arthritis, and English as their second language. We take them all. Every one. And that, Mr. Vollmer, is why it’s not a business. It’s school.”
To his credit, Vollmer heard what she said and adjusted his mission accordingly. He spent the next several decades visiting schools, studying the institution he had dismissed, and eventually writing a book called Schools Cannot Do It Alone. Along the way, he developed what became known as Vollmer’s List, a decade-by-decade accounting of every academic, social, and health responsibility that American society has transferred to public schools since the Massachusetts Puritans first opened a schoolhouse door. The original mandate was to teach reading, writing, and arithmetic. What followed was more than a century of additions, each with its own logic and its own advocates, none accompanied by a single extra minute in the school calendar or a serious reckoning with cost. Here are just a few of the items on the list: driver education, sex education, drug and alcohol prevention, school breakfast, special education, mental health services, and anti-bullying programs. The list runs for four pages.
What the List Actually Explains
I have carried printed copies of Vollmer’s List into more conversations than I can count. I have shared it with local legislators, school board members, community leaders, and educators who had spent years struggling to explain something they felt intuitively but could not quite articulate.
When discussions about education inevitably turn to money, Vollmer’s list is a helpful tool. Communities across the country look at school budgets that keep climbing and enrollment figures that are not, and they reach a conclusion that feels reasonable from where they stand. Someone is being inefficient. If we just ran it more like a business, this wouldn’t happen.
The List tells a different story. The budget is rising not because schools have become less efficient, but because the mission keeps expanding. Every item on that list has a cost. Every mandate that arrives without funding adds weight to a structure that was not designed to carry it. When a state legislature passes a bill requiring schools to address a new social issue, the bill may be entirely well-intentioned, and the issue may be genuinely urgent. This year, my state, Maryland, signed 80 new education bills into law. Regardless of where you live, I am sure you can guess how much additional funding followed those new laws into the districts and the classrooms. Some cost money. Some cost teacher time. They all compete with everything else the existing laws require schools to do.
I have used the list in conversations with legislators for exactly this reason. A single new requirement can look modest in isolation. Vollmer’s List shows what it joins. The question is never whether any individual mandate is worth doing. The question is what we are actually asking schools to be, and whether we are willing to fund that honestly.
What AMP Was, and What It Wasn’t
AMP committed 10% of gross revenue to research and development each year. It directed the majority of that investment not toward theoretical advances but toward what workers on the factory floor and salespeople in the field were actually encountering. It built local engineering capacity inside each subsidiary so that a plant in Japan or Germany could solve its own problems without routing every decision back through headquarters in Pennsylvania. It paid well, invested in professional development, and promoted from within. The founder, U.A. Whitaker, designed an institution where the people closest to the work had a genuine channel into the decisions that shaped it, backed by real resources and real accountability.
In 1999, a conglomerate acquired AMP in a hostile takeover, decided that the structure was inefficient, and dismantled it. The products survived. The culture did not. My father retired early rather than remain at a company he no longer recognized.
The approach that ultimately destroyed AMP is precisely what most people picture when they say schools should be run more like businesses. Efficiency. Consolidation. Centralized decision-making. Short-term metrics. Cost reduction as a value in itself.
What Whitaker built at AMP was not that. It was something far closer to what good school leadership actually requires. Long investment horizons. Trust in the people closest to students. Structures that channel what those people know back into decisions made at the top. Willingness to spend real money on the conditions that make good work possible, not because it was cheap, but because it worked.
The Comparison That Actually Holds
Vollmer’s teacher was right. Schools cannot run like businesses in the way businesses are typically understood, and Vollmer spent the rest of his career explaining why clearly enough that educators now have a language for it.
But the version of business thinking that reformers bring to schools is rarely anything like what Whitaker built at AMP. It is closer to what the conglomerate brought in after the takeover. And anyone who has watched a school district absorb a wave of efficiency-driven reforms knows how that tends to go.
There is an important difference between learning from exceptional organizations and adopting the logic of ordinary ones. The AMP story is worth telling, because Whitaker’s principles are genuinely rare in business and in education. Sustained investment in people closest to the work. Information flowing from the ground up, not just directives flowing down. Resources and structures aligned with the job's actual demands.
Schools that operate on those principles tend to improve. Districts that abandon them in the name of efficiency tend to find out, years later, what they gave up. That is not a business argument. It is a leadership argument. And it is one that Vollmer learned from a teacher.
Dr. Sean Bulson is a practitioner-scholar, professor of educational leadership, and the 2024 Maryland Superintendent of the Year. He served as superintendent of Harford County Public Schools from 2018 to 2026 and Wilson County Schools from 2011 to 2016. Subscribe for weekly posts on educational leadership, equity, and district transformation.
