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Districts Compare Notes on Best Business Practices

Houston organization leads effort to refine school management.

Houston

In the corporate world, it’s commonplace to compare one’s business practices with those of competitors. But ask school district leaders how their student-assessment, teacher-hiring, or staff-training systems stack up against their peers’, and you’ll likely get a shrug.

Productivity guru C. Jackson Grayson thinks he can change that. Through the American Productivity & Quality Center, a nonprofit organization here that he founded 30 years ago to focus on organizational improvement in business, he’s helping districts “benchmark” their management processes.

That means letting school systems make apples-to-apples comparisons of their internal workings, to answer such questions as “Are we slow or fast in getting test results back to teachers?” and “How efficient are we, relatively, in terms...