What Makes a School Successful?

This week, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) released the 2009 results for the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). The Executive Summary, available here, begins with a table that compares the performance of countries and economies in the study. Eight countries and three economies were statistically significantly above the OECD average in reading, math, and science: Shanghai-China, Korea, Finland, Hong Kong-China, Singapore, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Netherlands, and Belgium. The United States scored average in reading and science and below average in math.

The Executive Summary is one of several documents available at the OECD site that interpret the data. As the husband of a high-school librarian and a participant in regular dinner-table discussions about education and how to improve it, I was struck by a few points in the OECD’s analysis:

• “In all countries, students who enjoy reading the most perform significantly better than students who enjoy reading the least. Practicing reading by reading for enjoyment is most closely associated with better outcomes when it is accompanied by high levels of critical thinking and strategic learning.” My wife has long preached reading for enjoyment, but that’s just one part of this equation. I would argue that very few…

Best-Practice Teaching

Doug Lemov has written a book about a surefire way to improve education: Develop better teachers. Lemov is a former principal and teacher who is now a consultant to school districts. He looked at Stanford research that showed that in one year, the top 5% of teachers can raise students one-and-a-half grade levels, while the bottom 5% put their kids a half-grade behind. And then he asked: “What if we could make all teachers a little bit better?” (“Made to Stick: Watch the Game Film,” Dan Heath and Chip Heath, FastCompany, June 1, 2010)

You could start by firing the incompetent 5% across the U.S. but then you would need 185,000 new teachers to replace them. So Lemov asked another question: “What if we could make all teachers a little better?”

Sounds great, but what makes some teachers better? He decided he had better find out. He started with a great teacher in New Jersey, observing and videotaping him in action. He found another teacher and repeated the process, and then another, and another. Five years later he had recorded and analyzed hundreds of hours of videotape. He put his findings in a book: Teach Like a Champion: 49 Techniques That Put Students…

Great or Just Lucky?

We study the steps taken by high-performing organizations to understand what they do well and how we can make our organizations better. That may be our first mistake.

A provocative report by Deloitte claims that the best practices of “great companies” may be more instructive as fable than fact. In “A Random Search for Excellence,” available here, Michael E. Raynor, Mumtaz Ahmed, and Andrew D. Henderson argue that success studies such as Good to Great, Built to Last, and In Search of Excellence are just as likely to be studying lucky companies as good ones.

“It’s only too likely that whatever benefit practitioners have realized has been distressingly haphazard, the consequence of a form of placebo effect (you expect it to help, so you perceive that it does, quite independently of any true causal connection), a Hawthorne effect (the mere act of focusing on something you were neglecting improves performance regardless of what motivated the increased attention), or luck (even a broken clock is right twice a day).”

The report backs up this assertion with detailed analysis of more than 230,000 firm-year observations using a “regression algorithm to create an ROA value stripped of everything but firm-level, or management, effect.” You’ll have to read…

3 Ingredients to Improving Healthcare

I recently wrote about the Thomson Reuters study that identified the top 100 hospitals based on clinical quality and efficiency. According to Linda Wilson at ModernHealthcare.com, the study identified three ingredients the top 10 hospitals in this list often use “for successful quality improvement: a corporate-level coordinating committee, ample involvement in planning from front-line caregivers, and a systemwide electronic health record.”

Wilson shows how these ingredients are making a difference at one Top 10 hospital—HealthEast Care System in St. Paul, Minnesota. HealthEast’s goal is to help physicians and nurses improve quality. “The bedside caregivers are constantly challenged to be delivering the right care, at the right time—every time,” said Craig Svendsen, CMO for HealthEast, which relies on the three ingredients to align caregivers with best-practice quality of care.

The Modern Healthcare story also quotes Jean Chenoweth, head of the 100 Top Hospitals programs at Thomson Reuters. In an era of public reporting of quality data, she says, system-level board members and executives should ask themselves: “Does the mission of the health system need to change if it doesn’t have quality in its mission?”