The Wall Street Journal reported today that the stimulus plan had $100 billion in it for school systems, with only one catch to the money. You had to demonstrate that you were making progress in improving the performance of students. This is money on top of all of the foundation money that is available to the same schools with the same challenge. "Show me you are making a difference."

In my mind, this is basically a call for the Balanced Scorecard. Imagine a school lays out their objectives, and then their measures. Then they align their programs to these objectives to drive performance. As they execute their initiatives, their measures begin to rise. The employees and teachers start making recommendations on how to improve performance even more. This is the essence of how strategy management works.

Whether you agree or disagree with the stimulus, at least you have to appreciate that this $100 Billion is tied to some performance measures that will ultimately improve America. Now only if we could get them to all adopt the Balanced Scorecard. The WSJ article can be found here.