Sometimes it seems as if business ethics is truly an oxymoron.

Ponzi schemes scam Wall Street, senior executives shunt shareholder value (and now taxpayer value) into their pockets, a bubble in the housing market collapses and esoteric securities built on risky mortgages lose so much value they seem to be backed by gingerbread houses, toxic discharges from abandoned industrial sites foul rivers and water supplies, everyday staples such as meat and peanut paste and hot peppers become infections in the food chain, lead in the paint of toys endangers children, cost-cutting produces deep mine disasters, drug test results are misrepresented to or hidden from physicians and patients, automobile tires fail catastrophically, accounting firms give clients the opinions and audits they want -- the list seems endless.

Scarcely a day goes by without some new business scandal being revealed. The extraordinary frequency, far-reaching impacts and relentless flow of such events are stunning. Surely business ethics must be the lead topic in the education of professional managers.

It isn't. Although business schools have increased their offerings in such areas as ethics and sustainability, there is still considerable resistance to the idea of mandating courses in managerial ethics.

Data suggest that somewhere between a third and a half of American business schools require standalone courses or modules dealing with business ethics.

When course material in ethics, professional responsibility and sustainability is taught, it frequently surfaces in noncredit workshops. Rarely is such material integrated into required coursework in such functional areas as finance, marketing, and accounting -- precisely the real-world contexts for so many of the problematic events.

Too often business schools provide superficial attention -- a kind of ethics gloss -- to the causes of ethics problems and the means of avoiding such problems. They offer speakers, workshops, comments by business school deans and stories in school newsletters. But they do not teach their students how to manage ethics.

Some schools do add courses but their content rarely makes it into the functional area core -- required courses in such areas as accounting, marketing, finance and information systems. Many of such ethics courses are run as partial courses. Some schools have required courses in managerial ethics in some programs, but offer only workshops or other special activities in other programs (the current status at the University of Pittsburgh).

Sometimes administrators say they would prefer to integrate work on managerial ethics into the functional areas, making a separate course unnecessary. Left undiscussed and essentially unsolved is how students are supposed to learn the tools of managerial ethics to apply in those functional areas. Integration done without a standalone course to introduce the core tools guarantees that what passes for attention to managerial ethics will be superficial.

Business schools are accredited by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business International (AACSB), headquartered in Tampa, Fla. The AACSB has moved away from requiring the teaching of particular courses, as it once did. The emphasis now is on "assurance of learning" -- the AACSB lays out areas of study that it expects all business programs to cover and allows the individual schools to decide how to cover them.

Because most schools continue to teach traditional courses in areas such as finance or marketing, courses that are often preferred by their faculty and expected by their students, the AACSB standards have so far had only limited effects in encouraging business schools to develop innovative, effective curricula.

In the area of ethics, the standards mandate that degree programs in business must include "learning experiences in such general knowledge and skill areas as ... ethical understanding and reasoning abilities" and "include learning experiences in such management-specific knowledge and skills areas as ... ethical and legal responsibilities in organizations and society."

Note that there is no requirement that these topics be covered in courses, or even that they be granted course credit. As long as the school can create learning goals for the topics and make a case for the achievement of those goals, however broad and insubstantial they may be, the accreditation standards may be met.

The assurance of learning approach fails dismally where there is no constituency to offer rigorous, structured, for-credit academic coursework. Indeed, the fact that students learn something in a professional school is hardly an assurance that they will in fact be able to do what is needed once they enter the world of real, not academic, practice.

There's a better way to evaluate a business curriculum. Why not teach students not only knowledge and skills, checking that they achieve them per the AACSB standards, but also, and critically, teach students to be able to do things in the real world, or in circumstances as close to the real thing as possible?

What we need is not assurance of learning, but assurance of doing.

The classical business curriculum relies heavily on canned cases. The uncertain, changing world is not a case. Doing problem sets is not doing.

Solving the real, current problems of business organizations is doing; prescribing management actions as the details of real business crises evolve on a daily basis in the business media is doing; simulating optimal financial management as market numbers hurtle along in the world's real daily markets is doing.

So, how should we teach ethics in business schools?

First, the choice of what to teach should not be framed as a stand-alone course versus a scattering of ethics through the business program. Both are essential: Students need a place to actually learn managerial ethics, and to practice, apply and extend what they have learned in diverse functional business contexts. The answer is not either, but all of the above.

Second, we need to start thinking of the intellectual content as managerial ethics, not just ethics. Opponents of including this material in the curriculum as a required course often attempt to stigmatize it by claiming it is preaching, it is superficial and it is not managerial. They treat it as insubstantial academic gloss partly because they feel embarrassed by what they perceive, and misunderstand, as arbitrary moralizing.

In fact, we don't preach; we teach students how to manage where normative concerns and the techniques of handling them are part of the intellectual toolkit that every manager must bring to the table.

Business schools need to teach not only certain knowledge areas and skills, but also, and most importantly, the ability to actually do things. A movement toward emphasizing experience-based learning throughout the curriculum, developing now at the University of Pittsburgh's Katz School, is consistent with education driven by "assurance of doing."

Studying business ethics is not an exercise in learning right and wrong, nor is it purely an opportunity for students to learn how issues of ethics appear, pervasively, across all the functional areas of business. Students must become able to perceive and assess problematic situations, design solutions and repair organizational systems. That's the ability to manage, not preach.

This is not a call for practice over academics. The point is that the ability to do things, based of course in deep knowledge and an understanding of context and method, is as important in business ethics as it is in any component of a professional curriculum, whether in engineering or dentistry.

The teaching of business ethics, as well as business education in general, must be done to assure not only its accreditors, but also its practitioners and those who must live with the outcomes of their managerial decisions, that what is done is, ultimately, the best you can do.