Needed—skilled cross country race drivers

Whether you are talking about the famous Baja races or the ones run in other parts of the world (Sahara desert, etc.) these races put a premium on driving skill. The drivers need to be prepared to deal with any condition that arises from torrential rain, to wind driven sandstorms, to mud, to ruts, to rocky terrain, to crossing streams, to rutty suspension breaking roads, etc. Every race offers a different set of circumstances that the drivers must face and cope with. The winner is most often the most skilled but luck and educated risk-taking play a role in determining the winner in each race.

The above is a good analogy to being a leader in any organization that must perform against its competition. In today’s increasingly competitive global environment leadership skill can make the difference between surviving or not. While every good leader spends significant time planning their road to success, they know that they must be prepared to alter their plan to fit the unanticipated situations that arise in any endeavor.

When you look at our education system we have a “programmed to fail” situation. Processes are specified rigorously. Follow the recipe or you will be penalized by loss of funds or other sanctions. The whole enterprise is one of legislators and the bureaucracy they create with their legislation creating a lockstep army of educators who are not allowed to deviate from their process even if they are about to march over a cliff. The concept that anyone can specify the detailed operational regimen of such a large and complex operation is ludicrous. Of course, it isn’t funny at all, because it designates a process that is ineffective in providing the results that are imperative to serving our kids and our society well. The approach used in education has created a system where change is not allowed unless it is specified from on high. It is like the race driver in the above example getting to a river with a bridge washed out. In the education process example he would have to wait until the bridge was repaired because deviations from the process plan were not allowed. In an organization where the race driver (leader) has the end goal as the driving force there is freedom to detour to the nearest bridge to solve the problem that wasn’t anticipated when the plan was made.

If we were as serious as we say we are about improving education performance, we would do two things. Greatly improve the skill level of education leaders (retool them as Levine says is needed in his Educating School Leaders), AND take away much of the bureaucratic Gordian Knot approach of specifying process to nine decimal places, replacing it with a system that specifies desired results with incentives and penalties based on achieving those results.