Strategy for School Districts

8/4/2019 Strategy for School Districts

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Strategy for School Districts Wanting/Needing to Improve Their

Performance

The history of American mainstream education for nearly the last five

decades has been characterized by lots of changes but no significant

improvement in our performance versus the best global competition. In

fact they are improving steadily at a pace that even if we improve will leave

us further behind year after year. The changes we have pursued have been;

Greatly increased costso Admin increases have been huge in both numbers of people and

the pay they receive.

o Advanced education school graduate degrees have becomeubiquitous. This is because districts have policies in place thatgive people who get the advanced degree an automatic pay

increase. For example; Arthur Levine (former president of

Columbia Teachers College) wrote in his 2005Educating

School Leadersthat the education doctorate had no value for

any public school administration job.

o The ancillary trappings that used to be very rare are nownecessary so that schools are more and more expensive to

build and maintain. The husk is beautiful but the core is rotten.

o Massive amounts of money are spent on doing the wrongthings better which is much more expensive and only preserves

the unacceptable status quo of poor performance. Terms such

as best practice, special education, response to intervention, etc.

all fit the do the wrong thing better approach.

States generally set low proficiency standards and the national levelNAEP testing which has a more rigorous standard than the states also

is set below the global best competition by 2-3 grades and sometimes

more.

The best performing global competitors use a rigorous, directinstruction process taught by teachers who have robust subject

knowledge. Our education philosophy is to use the

discovery/constructivist approach championed by Dewey et al about a

century ago. Our performance cannot improve significantly unless we


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discard the dumbed-down constructivist approach and replace it with

the direct instruction process. This will require retreading teachers

in both subject knowledge which is currently weak but also in

pedagogy which is currently tailored to the constructivist process that

E.D. Hirsch says hasnt worked and cant work because it istechnically flawed.

The political climate has increasingly moved toward more state andfederal control and less local control over the education process. This

added bureaucracy only serves to increase costs and cast the current

technically flawed process in concrete so that needed change is

extremely difficult.

Education entities have essentially transformed themselves intopropaganda operations whose main objective is to con the publicinto believing that they are doing as well as can be expected but more

money to spend would always help the kids.

With all of that it is easy to see why educators take the comfortable and easy

road of ignoring (masking) their performance in the core mission to

educate children to their potential.

However, just suppose for the thought of it that some brave district

leadership team decided to work on the real issues impeding education

performance. It isnt likely but just suppose it did happen. What process

might they use to travel the road to self-respect and satisfaction in tackling

a difficult task and succeeding?

A good first step would be to put out a press release and parent, patron, and

staff letter to inform everyone of the truth of the districts poor performance

and also that they were committed to fixing the problems as soon as

possible. This could be considered analogous to Cortez burning of ships to

prevent his men from feeling that retreat to Cuba was an option. Their onlyoption was to go forward or die. That brave district would inform everyone

that the ways of operating would be very different than they had been in the

past.

The days of milling around trying to avoid making a decision that might

cause painful but productive change would be past. The focus would be on


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implementation of technically correct education processes. There is

absolutely no need to discuss, experiment or go slow, what needs to be done

is well known. The other countries whose kids get much better educations

than ours do have proven what works, we only need to implement their

good practice. A specific outline of actions to take immediately no matterwhat part of the school year you are in;

Immediately start rigorous subject matter training for teachers. Startwith elementary teachers who as a group have the most to learn.

Concentrate on math and reading first. This training cannot come

from education school faculty. They dont have the knowledge

required as is shown by the poor subject knowledge of education

school graduates.

Immediately discontinue all constructivist curricula. Replace all textscurrently in use with more rigorous material. For example, the

Singapore math texts are cheap and much better than the commonly

used EveryDay Math which does not provide the foundation required

for success in middle and high school math studies.

Immediately train district leaders to be competent change leaders.Education school training and the leadership role models all work to

create maintainers not change masters as Rosabeth Kanter called

them in her bookThe Change Masters. Eliminate political correctness and Group Think as they stand in the

way of robust dialogue, a primary requirement for performance

organizations.

Value honesty in identifying problems. Do not allow a kill themessenger approach. You must face the bald-faced truth of your

performance no matter how uncomfortable if you hope to make real

progress.

Report often to stakeholders about progress being made. Stop paying more for advanced degrees. If the advanced degree

results in better performance then pay more for that performance, if

not, do not pay more. This was recommended by Arthur Levine in

Educating School Leaders.

Use a short-cycle, data driven, prioritized management process.


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Is there just one district out there that has the integrity and honesty to face

and fix the problems so that all kids can actually have the opportunity to

learn to their potential?

Paul Richardson 2011

Documents

Strategy for School Districts