Solutions are the Problem in Education

This is the title of an online commentary for Teacher Magazine written by Mary Kennedy, education professor at Michigan State University. Her point is that educators are bombarded by a plethora of “improvement reforms” and that they cause teachers, especially, to lose focus on the overarching mission of educating children well.

One of the examples she uses is of a National Geographic science initiative that was presented as an opportunity to do “real science” in the field. The project involved having the students take samples from local waterways and contribute them to a national database. The teacher readily participated with his class but found when his students returned to the classroom they had “lost their place” in the curriculum and had to start over for the unit in question, causing less to be taught in the time allowed. She also mentions “inside” influences like “pullout” programs and changes in structure like hourly to block and then back to hourly that cause far too much time to be spent on tangential efforts orthogonal to the primary mission of teaching kids.

Ms. Kennedy, therefore concludes that the problem is too many distractions caused by the “reform mantra” that is bombarding educators constantly. My conclusion is that she couldn’t be further off the mark. It is not the avalanche of new initiatives that is the problem at all. It is the lack of a working environment where focus and discipline are reinforced continuously. Distractions such as she points out in education are common in all endeavors. Such is the way of the world where change is the only constant. A good leader will filter out the vast majority of the distractions allowing through only the very few that actually apply positively to fixing the top priority drag on performance that the team is currently working on. The leader must provide inertia dedicated to focus on the real mission that prevents bouncing about like a ping pong ball as every distraction is acted on. Leadership competence requires not only knowing what to do but what not to do.

A very common problem is that poor leaders say they are working on a long list of goals to improve their performance. In reality just as a ship’s captain can travel to only one port of call at a time, a leader who wants to travel to better performance is advised to work on one goal at a time. Ship’s captains have another trait that could be advantageously adopted by education leaders. That is, no matter how the winds direction or the currents change, they adjust their efforts to stay on the course needed to reach their desired port of call. Goals need to be worked in priority order starting with “killing” the biggest drag on your group’s performance first. I am not talking here about “maintenance goals” which are trying to preserve the current level of operating. The education folks are perhaps the world’s experts at preserving the status quo. Just look at their mired in a rut performance no matter how much talk or money is expended. I am talking about “breakthrough” goals that will take the organization’s performance to a significantly higher level.

The problem she talks about is a direct result of the lack of performance leadership in education. I have pointed out many times that education leaders do not have the proper training or skill to effectively lead to create a performance environment.
In my experience in industry I used the continuous improvement process to maintain focus everyday on improving my team’s performance. To be effective the leader needs a lot of skills and knowledge but most of all needs coaching during the initial implementation of the concepts. Sadly, because the leaders in education don’t have these skills there are no role models to learn from.

Yes, the education school leadership programs claim to fill this need by having graduate students “shadow” an administrator in the field. What good does it do to shadow someone who isn’t doing it well or at all? Also the class work in the ed school leadership programs does not convey the knowledge or skills needed to be a performance leader.

Retooling the education leadership is not the only priority in fixing education but it gets my vote for being the one with the biggest positive leverage on improved performance. It will have to be done by outside trainers who can also coach the leaders through the initial implementation phase when applying the new techniques. The ed schools do not have this skill set in their inventory and could not be effective. I strongly believe that the training should be given to leadership teams at each district on site with the coaching to follow. This allows a robust knowledge base among the team [what one forgets another will remember], works well for team building and for tailoring the training to the priorities of the district’s problems. Sending leaders off to classes at varying ed schools to get exposed to more incoherent drivel is not going to work any better than the current “Race to the Bottom” approach Levine pointed out in his “Educating School Leaders” report (March 2005).

Competent leadership would overcome so many problems that go unaddressed today because leaders have no clue how to solve them. It would be like putting a rudder on the education ship so that progress could finally be “steered toward.” Having leaders who know how to raise the anchor would also help. The sad thing is that working in a well led performance environment is fun and very good for group morale which is missing in today’s education setting.

While it is very clear what must be done, don’t hold your breath until it happens. Only public pressure for real performance improvements will force action in addressing real problems as opposed to the current approach of talking about things with no intent of really changing anything. If you believe the propaganda touting “excellent” performance by local school districts when in fact they are doing very poorly compared to the world’s best performers, you will not be motivated to demand real change. That is the comparison that counts. Anyone can look good if they use a short enough ruler to measure results.