"Jamie Vollmer. Vollmer is an Iowa businessman who had the same prejudices against public education as do many of our knee-jerk politicians. No more. His is a famous story of lecturing a crowd of educators when he was affiliated with a small ice cream company in Iowa. He says in retrospect his talk was “perfectly balanced — equal parts ignorance and arrogance.” He was asked by an educator what his company would do if it found an inferior batch of blueberries intended for its ice cream. Vollmer said the company would send them back. The educator nailed him, saying in part, “We 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! And that, Mr. Vollmer, is why it’s not a business. It’s school!” Vollmer says that is when the light came on and he realized that “a school is not a business. Schools are unable to control the quality of their raw materials, they are dependent upon the vagaries of politics for a reliable revenue stream and they are constantly mauled by a howling horde of disparate, competing customer groups that would send the best CEO screaming into the night.”
Posted on: Mon, 01 Jul 2013 21:41:20 +0000
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