Education
Inspiration for a New Education System
“For too long, we have educated people for a world that no longer exists.”
Russell Ackoff
A leader in systems thinking, Russell Ackoff has been called the “father of operations research.” He was a Wharton professor from 1964 to 1986 who continued to lecture and speak until his death at age 90 on October 29, 2009.
One of the areas he wrote and spoke about was education from kindergarten through college. In 2008 he teamed with Daniel Greenberg to write a book, Turning Learning Right Side Up: Putting Education Back on Track. In it, they wrote, “Mass education was explicitly developed to mold naturally unruly children into compliant, obedient young people. Inspired by the Industrial Revolution, schools were, and still are, designed and operated as much like factories as possible. Incoming students are treated as raw materials to be processed into saleable products. Creativity is actively suppressed, and in most schools conformity—which is anathema to creativity—is valued instead.”
The Information Age is burdened by an antiquated education system and everybody—and all institutions—suffer as a result.
Democracy suffers from ignorant citizens who cannot think critically about the issues before them, who are easily manipulated by lies and distortions, and who weaken government by allowing self-serving special interests to dictate the agenda. That’s a failure of our education system.
Business suffers from ignorant employees who cannot solve a problem or come up with a creative idea or act independently without clear direction. Too many even need remedial help in reading and math. That’s a failure of our education…
19Nov2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedReinventing Education with Baldrige
In the United States, one-third of eighth graders are proficient in reading. One-third of high school students do not graduate on time. One-third of first-year college students require remediation in either math or English.
Is it any surprise that one-third of K-12 teachers approve of how their schools are run?
The figures come from a study of school performance by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Center for American Progress, and Frederick M. Hess of the American Enterprise Institute. The fact that these three organizations can write a report together when they rarely agree on anything suggests that this is not just a right-wing or left-wing issue.
The study evaluated state performance in eight categories: school management; finance; staffing—hiring and evaluation; staffing—removing ineffective teachers; data; pipeline to postsecondary; technology; and state reform environment. You can see how your state did here. You can read about the methodology behind the grades here.
The report offers a blunt assessment: “Our school system needs far-reaching innovation. It is archaic and broken, a relic of a time when high school graduates could expect to live prosperous lives…And while the challenges are many—inflexible regulations, excessive bureaucracy, a dearth of fresh thinking—the bottom line is that most education institutions simply lack the tools, incentives, and opportunities to reinvent themselves in profoundly more effective ways.”
The report’s sponsors “propose a framework for change intended to address the structural problems facing our nation’s education systems.” Someone should have introduced them to the Baldrige model and to the K-12 districts that have received the Baldrige…
10Nov2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedIntegrating Baldrige Big Time
Few K-12 school districts have integrated the Baldrige model as completely as Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS), the 16th largest school system in the country with 200 schools and 22,000 employees serving 142,000 students. Montgomery County, Maryland, is located in the northern suburbs of Washington D.C.
MCPS began its Baldrige journey in 2000 when it received grant funding to implement the Baldrige Education Criteria for Performance Excellence. It conducted its first Baldrige self-assessment that year, the results of which were presented to its Board of Education in January, 2001. Many of the recommendations in that report have been implemented and other opportunities for improvement continue to be addressed today.
MCPS established a Baldrige Leadership Team in 2002 to guide the implementation of the Baldrige Criteria. The team meets monthly to review and improve deployment.
MCPS applied for the Baldrige Award in 2004. In 2005, it received Maryland’s Baldrige-based quality award, the U.S. Senate Productivity Award. It continues to integrate the Baldrige model, including training all schools on using Baldrige as the framework for school improvement planning and developing a guide for classroom teachers on how to help students become co-producers of their learning.
In my experience, few organizations of any type have integrated the Baldrige model as thoroughly as MCPS, as evidenced by its Baldrige-guided Classroom Learning System. Teachers and students use processes and systems to guide class and individual student learning. As its Web site notes, “Students at any age can manage their learning and chart their progress whether it be in Kindergarten or in a…
3Nov2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedEducation: PDSA + Quality Tools = AYP
In the spring of 2008, Community Consolidated District15 learned that eight of its schools had failed to meet adequate yearly progress (AYP) for reading. This is a common issue for school districts across the country that is often the result of student subgroups failing to meet the AYP standard.
District 15 serves 12,000 students in northwestern Chicago at 15 elementary schools, four junior high schools, a preschool early childhood center, and an alternative public day school. It received the Baldrige Award in 2003.
A lot has changed since then. Several key leaders retired. A referendum failed and $25 million had to be cut from the budget, which led to hiring several first-time teachers. Key positions that supported the Baldrige initiative were eliminated. New board members were elected. A new superintendent started in June 2008.
Under such conditions, a Baldrige mindset can easily disintegrate. The opposite happened at District 15. The PDSA cycle (plan-do-study-act) had become part of the district’s culture, as had the use of quality tools. In the summer of 2008, a team of principals and other district leaders was formed to tackle the AYP problem. The team analyzed test scores and discovered that the district’s intervention programs weren’t working. It developed a placement matrix to guide principals and staff to the most appropriate intervention program for a student’s specific learning needs.
The team also realized that the key to improving student learning was more instructional time with at-risk students. It researched and benchmarked other schools’ extended day programs, then used the PDSA…
2Oct2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedEducation: Fix the System
Add the voice of Ben Chavis to those critical of public school leaders. Dr. Chavis spent seven years as principal of the American Indian Public Charter School, transforming it from the worst middle school in Oakland into a high-performing organization. He uses that platform to argue that public schools don’t need more money; they need competent administrators who are held accountable for their performance. (CNN, “Commentary: Who says public schools need more money?” September 9, 2009)
Systems thinking tells us that the system is responsible for 85-95% of an organization’s problems, and since the leaders control the system, they are responsible for those problems. They need to understand how their system works, set goals, identify opportunities to improve, and develop processes that will close the gap between their goals and current performance.
Money is not the answer to these problems, but inadequate financial resources can make it difficult to address them. Schools are being asked to do so much more than in the past to address social and economic issues that have a direct bearing on their ability to educate. Dr. Chavis has given us an example of how this can be done. Other schools, including the five school districts that have received the Baldrige Award, provide more examples.
Yet the question remains: How much money does it take to educate students? “More” is not a good answer, since more money has been invested in education and it has not produced better results. Examples of this are everywhere, including in the experience of Dr. Chavis:…
11Sep2009 | Steve George | 1 comment | ContinuedMHA Programs Fail to Prepare Students
The Studer Group recently analyzed responses from 3,712 healthcare managers or supervisors to identify the competencies needed for entry-level management positions. The online survey had them assess the competency of new Master of Health Administration (MHA) graduates in 27 areas. The analysis showed that graduates are most competent in areas such as writing and presentation skills, healthcare trends and issues, and information systems and technology.
Unfortunately, those aren’t the most important competencies new graduates need to have.
The competencies they named as most important are:
- Holding individuals accountable
- Leading and managing others
- Aligning team behaviors
- Engaging employees
- Change management
- Time management
- Human resources – hiring and firing
- Professional and management ethics
- Decision making
- Running effective meetings
- Quality and performance improvement
The percent of MHA graduates viewed as very competent in these ten areas ranged from 3.2 to 3.5. That means that for each of these 11 areas, three or four MHA graduates out of every 100 are considered “very competent.”
According to the survey, 24% are not at all competent at hiring and firing, 20.7% at holding individuals accountable, and 19% at aligning team behaviors and engaging employees.
You can read a summary of the survey here. The summary concludes by pointing MHA programs toward a solution: “The skills that new graduates generally possess are in areas for which there are discrete classes or a cross-cutting curriculum. The skills that new graduates are weakest in are those in actual hands-on management and are not typically taught as whole classes or are deferred until the field experience.”
The Education Criteria for Performance Excellence ask how “you identify and innovate educational…
31Aug2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedColleges as Dissatisfied Stakeholders
Colleges have a stake in the quality of education delivered by K-12 school districts. The Baldrige Criteria ask (3.2a1) how school districts listen to, among others, colleges “to obtain actionable information and to obtain feedback on your educational programs…”
Well, listen to this: Less than one-fourth of the class of 2009 who took the ACT test met college-readiness benchmarks on all areas of the test. Two-thirds met the benchmarks in English, slightly more than half in reading, 42% in math, and just 28% in science. And these are supposedly our smartest students.
In an online article on Education Week, Jon L. Erickson, the nonprofit ACT Inc.’s VP for educational services, listed the factors that contributed to the scores:
- Too many high schools lack a focus on college-readiness skills and the key standards to be mastered
- High school students are not taking the right courses
- The courses are not rigorous enough to deliver college-level skill and knowledge
Of course, colleges are not a school district’s only stakeholders. A school district must balance the need to better prepare students for college with the needs of other stakeholders including students, parents, businesses, communities, and the government, and those needs don’t align as often you would think.
But they surely align on this: Schools exist to educate students and this is a pretty reliable indicator that they must improve. And in that regard, colleges are not their only dissatisfied stakeholders.
19Aug2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
