The+Blueberry+Story


 * BLUEBERRY STORY**

**A Businessman Learns a Lesson**

**by Jamie Robert Vollmer**

**"If I ran my business the way you people operate your schools, I wouldn't be in business very long!" I stood before an auditorium filled with outraged teachers who were becoming angrier by the minute.. My speech had entirely consumed their precious 90 minutes of in-service. Their initial icy glares had turned to restless agitation. You could cut the hostility with a knife.** **I represented a group of business people dedicated to improving public schools. I was an executive at an ice cream company that became famous in the middle 1980s when People Magazine chose our blueberry as the "Best Ice Cream in America." I was convinced of two things.**

**First, public schools needed to change; they were archaic selecting and sorting** **mechanisms designed for the industrial age and out of step with the needs of our emerging "knowledge society."**

**Second, educators were a major part of the problem: they resisted change, hunkered down in their feathered nests, protected by tenure and shielded by a bureaucratic monopoly.** **They needed to look to business. We knew how to produce quality. Zero defects! TQM! Continuous improvement! In retrospect, the speech was perfectly balanced equal parts ignorance and arrogance.**

**As soon as I finished, a woman's hand shot up. She appeared polite, pleasant - she was, in fact, a razor-edged, veteran, high school English teacher who had been waiting to unload. She began quietly, "We are told, sir, that you manage a company that makes good ice cream."** **I smugly replied, "Best ice cream in America, Ma'am."**

**"How nice," she said. "Is it rich and smooth?"**

**"Sixteen percent butterfat," I crowed.**

**"Premium ingredients?" she inquired.**

**"Super-premium! Nothing but triple A." I was on a roll.**

**I never saw the next line coming. "Mr. Vollmer," she said, leaning forward with a wicked eyebrow raised to the sky, "when you are standing on your receiving dock and you see an inferior shipment of blueberries arrive, what do you do?"**

**In the silence of that room, I could hear the trap snap. I was dead meat, but I wasn't going to lie. "I send them back."**

**"That's right!" she barked, "and 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 all: GT, ADHD, ADD, SLD, EI, MMR, OHI, TBI, DD, Autistic, junior rheumatoid arthritis, English as their second language, etc. We take them all! Everyone!** **And that, Mr. Vollmer, is why it's not a business. It's a school!"**

**In an explosion, all 290 teachers, principals, bus drivers, aides, custodians and secretaries jumped to their feet and yelled, "Yeah! Blueberries! Blueberries!"**

**And so began my long transformation.**

**Since then, I have visited hundreds of schools. I have learned that a school is not a business.** **Schools are unable to control the quality of their raw material, 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.**

**None of this negates the need for change. We must change what, when and how we teach to give all children maximum opportunity to thrive in a post-industrial society.**

**But educators cannot do this alone; these changes can occur only with the understanding, trust, permission and active support of the surrounding community.**

**For the most important thing I have learned is that schools reflect the attitudes, beliefs and health of the communities they serve, and therefore, education means more than changing our schools, it means changing America.**

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