Out here in California, school starts next week. Being new at selecting schools for my kids, I learned that there are at least two things parents seem to be studying when they make a decision on where to place their kids:

- The proportion of kids at the school with free lunch allowance and
- The standardized test scores of the kids at that school

Those are certainly interesting data points, but are those the real and only predictors we’ve got for academic success?

What if human capital management techniques could contribute to our children’s academic success? It turns out that they do, by using them to help manage teachers. Who woulda thunk it? Our SF Research thought leader and partner Dr. Laurie Bassi (President of McBassi & Co, an HCM auditing firm), that’s who.

The results of her work are even more interesting than the topic itself. Dr. Bassi found that although children’s academic success is partially dependent on the level of their parent’s affluence, and the proportion of free-lunches – the school’s HCM practices are more than twice as important.

Listen to my conversation with Laurie about this study on this short podcast.

My question is really how much of this finding can be applied to other non-profit organizations to spur performance and ultimately drive some real productivity? One example: how influential is smarter HCM on putting our tax dollars to better use? I bet we’d all be interested in the answer to that one.

More details on Dr. Bassi’s study and the findings can be found here.