Alan Jones

“Why Schools Should Abandon Strategic Planning”

May 10, 2025 by Alan Jones

The annual strategic planning process at his organization resembled an exotic ritual put on for show. “No one is exactly sure why we do it, but there is an almost mystical hope that something good will come out of it.”

(CEO to McKinsey Consultants)

An annual ritual school administrators and school district stakeholders schedule for the summer is the writing of a district’s mission statement and a strategic plan to implement those goals and values. The ritual takes place at a local conference center, where school district administrators, boards of education, selected members from the school community, and a professional facilitator, gather together for a weekend designed around writing a formal statement of educational values and goals and a strategic plan to implement written goals and practices. This ritual takes on greater importance when a new Superintendent arrives in the district. His or her promised goal in their interview was setting a new vision and mission for the district.

The attraction of central offices to the mission writing exercise is twofold: First, it is a practice that private industry has adopted. The new generation of Superintendents has traded in their instructional leader mindset for a new CEO, master of the universe mindset. Second, it is an excellent exercise in bringing the school community together to discuss and codify educational values and goals.

Stakeholders involved in the process always leave with the feeling they have contributed something special to their district. The two difficulties with both understandings are twofold: first, the private sector has abandoned the writing of mission statements and strategic plans a decade ago; and second, rarely if ever to the educational values and goals written at that weekend retreat become operationalized in main offices and classrooms.

In my recent book, Living Up to Your School Mission Statement[1], I have described in great detail why schools fail to live up to the goals and values written in their mission statements. What follows is an abbreviated version of the reasons why school mission statements and strategic plans fail to become actualized in main offices and school classrooms.

The Failure of Strategic Planning

Reason #1: The assumption that the future is certain and predictable

Strategic plans are written with the assumption that the future will resemble the past. No matter how rational the planning process is carried out in central offices when the plan arrives at the building level, principals experience Mike Tyson’s analysis of planning: “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.” When the school bell rings on the first day of school, the metaphorical punches start flying.

Reason #2: Planners are detached from reality

The stakeholders that attend the two-day strategic planning retreat are detached from the reality of the organization they are planning for. Those participants housed in a relaxed retreat setting rely on hard data—test scores, attendance records, grades, budgets, and behavioral data—with little attention to soft data—interviews, observations, meeting minutes, surveys, photographs, and student notebooks. Basing a plan on what is measurable leaves out the all-important human variables that will make or break the implementation of the plan.

Reason #3: That a strategy can be formalized

The act of planning assumes a logical progression of established managerial steps that will achieve an agreed-upon outcome. In school building offices, however, administrators are continually drawn into situations that require creativity and intuition to resolve. Planning maintains in place organizational processes and categories. Creativity on the other hand creates categories and rearranges established ones.

What all three reasons point to is the distinction between two types of school administrators: categorical and nuanced managers. Categorical managers try to manage by the book, even though the book or plan lacks: clear objectives; buy-in from stakeholders; alignment with other district goals; and resources to implement the plan.

Before implementing a plan, nuanced managers read the room first. What is the actual situation they are becoming involved in and, most importantly, do they have all the organizational tools necessary to orchestrate the desired changes outlined in the plan? Nuanced managers are adaptive information manipulators, opportunists, and organizational architects. Their outcomes may not be according to plan, but, there will be outcomes, ones that make collective sense to those charged with implementation and will advance a mission-driven goal.

The Failure of Mission Statements

The failure of school administrators and teachers to live up to mission-established goals and values falls into two categories: the mechanical and the philosophical. Listed below is a summary of both categories.

Systemic Problems

If you have seen one school mission statement, you have seen them all

No matter the where, the when, the who, and the how of the strategic planning retreat, all the stakeholders will write a mission statement composed of the same educational goals and values: critical thinking, life-long learning, pursuit of excellence, success in a global economy, respect for diversity, develop well rounded, confident and responsible individuals, provide positive, safe, and stimulating environments. I could go on, but, the mechanical problem what these bundles of educational abstractions is what they mean and how those meanings translate into classroom practices.

They sound nice and please everyone

Any declaration of purpose by an organization assumes that those in charge of implementation will do this rather than that. In these planning sessions, it is never determined what the this is or what the that is. No mission statement should appeal to everyone. They should reflect choices in what an organization finds important and where it wants to go. It should inspire some groups and put off other groups. In these planning sessions, the tension between different goals and values is avoided by ignoring the differences in each goal and value and attending to their similarities.

Philosophical Problem

The leading problem with mission statements and strategic plans is the failure on the part of stakeholders to grasp the fact that the schools they send their children to and the schools they work in each day are in fact, institutions. Institutional-based organizations are compliance-based, whose efficient operations rely on standardization, quantification, accountability, and falling in line. The national, state, and local rules, regulations, and policies governing schools—standards, race to the top, no child left behind, accountability—have all installed in schools’ goals and values that are opposed to growth-based goals and values written into school mission statements: flexibility, individualization, responsibility, inventiveness, optimization.

In addition to governing bodies mandating that schools pursue institutional goals and values, private entities, particularly the testing juggernauts —Educational Testing Service (ETS); American College Testing (ACT); American Council on Education (GED); The Carnegie Foundation (Carnegie Unit); and College Board (SAT/AP)—infuse in our classrooms a pedagogy that gives up on deeper learning in exchange for memorization of right answers and a narrowed curriculum aligned with the contents of standardized tests.

Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, Harvard Faculty Dean, made the following observation about the condition of schooling in this nation: “One cannot understand the history of education in the United States during the twentieth century unless one realizes that Edward L. Thorndike won and John Dewey lost.” This observation goes to the heart of what is so wrong with school mission statements. All school mission statements proclaim they are pursuing John Dewey’s aims—students learn through active participation and problem-solving. These same aims, however, are housed in schools designed to implement Edward Thorndike means—grades, credits, testing, and vocations. Although for over a century school administrators and teachers have tinkered with Deweyan utopian pedagogies—as evidenced in their mission statements—at the end of the school day, most students experience the daily grind of Thorndike’s administrative systems.

So…if not mission statements or strategic plans, then what? In reading many critiques of mission statements, the one that applies best to schooling was stated in a recent interview with Warren Buffett. Although he was not directly addressing the value of mission statements, he was responding to businesses captivation with the analysis of data. In my next blog I will describe Buffett’s problem with solely focusing on numbers. His approach to investing looks past the numbers to the what, why and how of the companies he is looking at—what he terms the value of simplicity. In my next blog I will apply Buffett’s value of simplicity to how schools should authoring their educational mission.

[1] (Jones, A. C. (2021). Living up to your school mission statement : reforming schools from the inside out. Rowman & Littlefield, an imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.)

What is Critical Thinking?

April 21, 2025 by Alan Jones

“I wasn’t clueless about people’s thinking. But a thing grows teeth once it is put into words.”

(Kingsolver, B. (2023). Demon Copperhead)

I want to salute you for everything you’ve done to make the college so much better, while preserving what always made it great: the conviction that to think clearly, we must be able to speak freely; that to disagree intelligently, we must first understand the views of our opponents profoundly; that to change people’s minds, we must be open to the possibility that our minds might be changed. All of this asks us to listen charitably, argue candidly, consider deeply, examine and re-examine everything, above all our own deeply held convictions — and, unlike at so many other universities, to respond to ideas we reject with more and better speech, not heckling or censorship.

(Bret Stephens, Commencement Speech , University of Chicago)

Critical Thinking Defined

Each year when stakeholders—parents, students, administrators, teachers, consultants—gather to write their school’s mission statement, the educational goal that appears most often on Post-it notes is critical thinking. While all stakeholders in the conference room agree on this value, when you ask them to define what they mean by critical thinking the responses fall into one of the following three categories:

Category #1: Verbs from Bloom’s Taxonomy:

Understand
Apply
Analyze
Evaluate
Create

Category #2: A set of steps

Identify the problem
Analyze data
Consider other viewpoints
Draw logical conclusions
Communicate the solutions
Adjust methods based on feedback

Category #3: A set of skills

Reflection in action
Reflection on actin
Creative thinking (thinking outside the box)
Communication
Collaboration

The why, how, and what of critical thinking

In and of themselves, all these responses correctly identify the inherent meanings of critical thinking. Missing from these definitions of critical thinking is how these verbs, steps, and skills relate to other ideas or situations. What follows is a model of inquiry that reduces the verbs, steps, and skills of critical thought to three components of critical thought: the why; the how, and the factual.

The why of the model is the intellectual framework (worldview) individuals develop over time that provides the concepts, ideas, and vocabularies that make sense of the problems they confront in their daily lives, occupations, and the social, economic, and political world they live in. Every person assumes that the intellectual framework they grew up with and built their careers around is natural, normal, inevitable, and should be universal.

The how of the model are the narratives—explanatory frameworks—individuals construct to explain and justify their worldview. The structure of the narrative consists of what is right or wrong with the problem or situation at hand; a strategy—theories, ideas, practices—for how to address the problematic situation; and the resources that will be necessary to resolve the problem. The glue that holds the narrative together is metaphors, analogies, stories, and exemplars, that shape our understanding of events and experiences. There are many different kinds of narratives depending on the problems, the situations, and the experiences under discussion.

The what of critical thinking are the truths—facts on the ground— that are verifiable from experience or observations as opposed to theoretical or abstract ideas. The truth of a narrative is determined by the verifiability of the facts presented in the narrative—can the facts in the narrative be proven true or false through objective evidence? The obstacles that a narrative must navigate are the feelings, attitudes, judgments, or beliefs expressed in a particular worldview and the verifiable facts written into that narrative. Ideally, as illustrated in the critical thinking model below, the why (worldview), the narrative (how), and the facts on the ground (what) should support each other. The foundation of this critical thinking model is facts on the ground. If the facts on the ground are false or unverifiable then the narratives and worldview that they are built upon crumble.

“False Narratives”

The model I am proposing is not a list of steps, or the application of a particular set of skills, or the matching of learning objectives with the appropriate cognitive level. My model asks individuals to listen to the narrative in front of them. In the political realm for example there have been two narratives regarding the role taxes should d play in our economy. The conservative narrative advocates lower taxes, which according to their narrative will spur innovation and business investment, which in turn stimulate economic growth. The facts on the ground do support the claim that tax cuts increase economic activity and potentially some extra revenue, but the revenue gain usually falls short of the initial tax revenue loss. These facts on the ground not only call into question the narrative of lower taxes, but also question a conservative worldview committed to free markets, limited government, lower taxes, reduction in government spending, and balanced budgets.

Liberals advocate an equity distribution narrative claiming that the middle class pays all the taxes while businesses and the top one percent pay nothing. Liberals claim they can fix deficits and increase spending on safety net programs by taxing the rich at high levels. The facts on the ground, however, tell a different story. In actuality, the rich pay most of the taxes and are taxed a far higher rates than the middle class: the top 1% pay 33%; the middle class pays 12%; the bottom pays 0%. These facts on the ground throw into question an economic worldview that leans towards a more progressive structure to provide more services and reduce economic inequality by making sure that the wealthiest Americans pay the highest tax rate.

“Other Facts on the Ground”

Not to belabor the other facts on the ground that call into question the conservative and liberal narratives on taxation, but, just a few more to illustrate the fragility of conservative and liberal worldviews on the policies their narratives promote.

The Narrative	Facts on the Ground
Tax cuts will starve the beast (government spending) by forcing Congress to cut spending	*When Congress passes tax cuts, they increase* spending.**
Europe funds its bigger government spending by taxing the rich more	Europe taxes the rich about the same as the United States. They finance their social welfare programs as the result of value-added taxes, which are essentially national sales taxes that hit the middle class.
Corporate taxes are far below international standards	The United States had the highest corporate tax rate in the developed world until 2017. Even now the tax rate is still in the top one-third of the developed world.
*“Taxing Millionaires and Corporations Can Eliminate the Deficit”*	Even seizing all the wealth from America’s 800 billionaires—every home, business, investment, car, and yacht—and somehow reselling it all for full market value would raise only enough revenue to finance the federal government one time for eight months.

“The Iron Cage of Ideologues”

The Achilles Heel of my model for critical thinking is what I will term the Iron Cage of Ideologues. The cage houses a narrative about how the world works and how it should work. Unlike other narratives, narratives authored by ideologues have rigid prescriptions for how we should think, how we should act, and how we should interact with other people. Once that cage door shuts any deviation from the theories and rules prescribed in that narrative is not subject to further debate, dissent, reason, inquiry, or criticism.

Ideological narratives originate from worldviews that inform our every thought and action. What sets these worldviews apart from other worldviews is the certainty of the attitudes, values, stories, and expectations espoused by that worldview and the command that followers of that worldview strictly follow the established rules and norms of that worldview. The Communist Manifesto written by Karl Marx is the best example of a programmatic statement of how economic systems work, how they should work, and why they are not working the way they should. The many narratives that have supported and promoted a Marxist worldview remain locked in an ideological cage with the theories, vocabularies, and calls to action prescribed by Marx and Engels.

I am not suggesting that my critical thinking model cannot be applied to Marxist theory and action. Entire libraries are filled with critiques of the problems with Marxist theory. But these critiques originate from outside the ideological cage. Those nations and populations locked within their ideological cage must leave my critical thinking model at the cage door.

“What it Means to be Educated”

The reason that critical thinking appears in all school mission statements it is a skill, if done well, that best answers the question: “What does it mean to be educated?” Although there are countless definitions of the educated mind, my model of critical thinking lays out a series of habits listed below that signal the educated mind in play.

The habit is where the listener fully concentrates, understands, and responds thoughtfully to what a speaker is saying.
The habit of setting aside personal worldviews and narratives to evaluate the worth of opposing worldviews and narratives.
The habit of gathering and analyzing facts supporting narratives and worldviews.
The habit of mastering vocabularies from different disciplines opens up pathways to understanding the relationship between worldviews, narratives, and facts on the ground.
The habit of calling into question personal worldviews and narratives that are not supported by the facts on the ground.

The Achilles Heel of the educated mind is fragmentation—the learning of facts, vocabularies, and skills designed to pass a test or do academic research. My critical thinking model is designed to perform the habits of thinking necessary to make sense of the issues and problems we confront in our daily lives and undertake courses of action that best support our worldviews and narratives with the facts on the ground.

“The Blunt Realities of Popular Reform Trends”

March 24, 2025 by Alan Jones

In researching for my most current book, I noted some reform trends that school districts adopted to address a school-wide problem. In past books on school reform, I came across the same reform trends, but, as these books went on to explain, these reform trends were at best quick fixes, not solutions. At worse, the problem deepened. Although the themes of my books are on reform failures, I thought I would devote this blog to the top trends in school reform efforts and why they are doomed to fail.

A Program, A Guru Will Save Us

If your district is making heroic efforts to solve a school-wide problem, there is more wrong with the school’s organization than what is perceived to be the problem. A well-run organization has embedded systems that work in perfect harmony to achieve the values, goals, and practices of the organization. When heroic efforts are called for, some systems are not functioning properly or the systems in place are not aligning with the values, goals, and practices of the school or district. Bringing in a Guru or adopting a program does not go to the source of the problem. It will worsen the problem by adding additional systems to faulty systems or adding values, goals, and practices that confuse or marginalize already established goals, values, and practices.

Raise the Bar

In the last decade, the go-to governmental intervention has been a form of “raising the bar.” Although school administrators, their boards, and state regulatory agencies would nod in agreement with this mandate, behind the closed doors of school offices, raising the bar dictates is interpreted as a threat: “Raise the bar or we will hurt you.” In the words of W. Edwards Deming: “Whenever there is fear, you will get wrong figures.” And, as Deming predicted, inducing fear in school offices, has led to dishonest data and impaired performance.

Leave No Child Behind

A spinoff of raising the bar was a Presidential commitment to leaving no child behind. While on the face of it, who could disagree with leaving any child’s behind? The implementation of this seemingly worthwhile goal, however, was merely a variant of “raise the bar or we will hurt you.” Under this law schools were mandated to meet annual yearly progress targets (AYI) or receive a continuum of negative consequences from a needs improvement label to being taken over by state authorities.

Putting aside the questionable practice of measuring a school’s performance based on standardized testing programs, blaming schools for leaving children behind ignores the village where these children reside. No one institution in this village can be blamed for decades of societal neglect and outright discrimination that have denied children in these neighborhoods access to not only well-resourced schools, but adequate health care, well-paying jobs, affordable housing, and safe streets. Sanctioning schools for poor academic performance is just an exercise in blaming the victim.

Standardize Performance

Next to raising the bar, the other popular governmental intervention is standardizing performance and all the instructional tools associated with instructional performance. Although aspects of this reform movement have fallen out of favor, all fifty states now have adopted curriculum standards. Forty-one states have adopted the Common Core state standards initiative. Along with standardizing the content of the curriculum, many states have adopted some form of standards for teaching. The deep-seated problem with the standards movement is the act of teaching, in the real world of classrooms, is a highly idiosyncratic art that defies efforts to standardize or improve. The same could be about standardizing curriculum which is in direct opposition to school mission statements that proclaim their instructional programs develop the diverse talents, interests, and abilities of their student bodies.

Privatization

The newest trend on the school reform agenda is all forms of privatization, from charter schools to voucher systems. The thinking behind this movement is a combination of private sector managerial techniques, along with providing parents a seat at a zero-sum game where winners attend the best schools, and the losers are “left behind” in poorly performing schools. Putting aside the morality of setting up a system where the roll of the lottery dice determines the quality of schooling a child will receive, the privatization movement ignores two blunt realities: First, over the last decade at least, the performance of the private sector in this nation has been far from stellar. Second, the underlying assumption in this movement is that privatized schools have adopted innovative approaches to teaching and learning. They have not adopted innovative approaches to teaching. What their performance has benefitted from is a sorting system that picks and chooses what children will be left behind and what children will comply with a pedagogical regime that would fall far short of what contemporary research on effective teaching methodologies prescribes.

The Knight Riding in on a White Horse

When all of the above reform trends fail, school districts look for a Knight on a White Horse to rescue their instructional programs. The Knight is a Superintendent or Principal who has built a reputation for turning districts or schools around. The Knight on the White Horse solution has been popularized in several movies—Lean on Me, Stand and Deliver, The Pirates of Silicon Valley, The Social Network—where charismatic school leaders or private sector CEOs, literally raise test scores, restore school discipline, and make billions on innovative ideas and organizational structures.

Although the Knight on a White Horse is a popular narrative in entertainment venues, it suffers from the three blunt realities of institutional schooling: First, by their very nature, they are a rare breed, even rarer in the public sector whose compensation packages fall far below what Knights are paid in the private sector. Secondly, the incentive and organization tools Knights employ in the private sector are either unavailable in the public sector—incentive pay structures—or are in opposition to teacher mindsets valuing affiliation with colleagues and students over the competitive mindsets of their private sector counterparts. Lastly, the disruptive skills of the Knight on a White Horse travel poorly in institutional environments that value certainty over novelty. To put it another way, the disruption of institutions and the effective operations of institutional systems involve two entirely different leadership skill sets. I will not go into the particulars of each leadership skill set, but, suffice it to say, that after Knight rides out on his White Horse it takes a great deal of patience, attention to detail, and coaching skills to put the stable back in order.

“The Reflective Practitioner: Part 3- WHY there is no WHY in Main Offices”

March 1, 2025 by Alan Jones

Donald Schön’s book, The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action, elaborates on what is the professional norm for implementing policies, procedures, initiatives, or solving difficult organizational problems. The first part of that norm—“reflection in action” is a mainstay of all main offices. The second part of that norm—“reflection on action” is largely ignored in those same main offices. If a reflection on an action question randomly appears in a main office or around a conference table, the response from the administrator sitting at the front of the table would go something like this: “Interesting point, Peter. We are under a time crutch, so let’s move on to the next item on the agenda.” If you were to further question administrators on why they ignore WHY questions, they would offer the following rationale for moving on to the next item on the agenda:

The WHY has already been decided upon

School administrators at the middle management level have been trained to implement. The assumption when a policy, a procedure, or an initiative, lands in an inbox, is the WHY has already been determined at offices and governing bodies.

Time

All new policies, procedures, and initiatives, land in an inbox with a time frame that typically starts with the beginning of the new school year. That time framework leaves little room for asking WHY questions, and, perhaps, answers that would require lengthy discussions and revisions to the initiative.

Schools are institutions

Although all school mission statements pursue aspirational goals—agency, interests, relationships, novelty, diversity—the organization of schools pursues institutional goals—efficient, predictable, quantifiable, and accountable. A deep dive into WHY questions will end up with aspirational answers, which will call into question the institutional substance of most school-wide policies, procedures, and initiatives.

Lack of vocabularies

Main offices are dominated by institutional vocabularies—budgets, procedures, logistics, timelines, regulations—with little or no academic vocabulary present in the main offices—theories, concepts, and ideas. Even if an academic term were to be uttered in the main office, the managerial mindset of school administrators would be unable to connect a theory, a concept, or an idea, to the goals and plans of an institutional policy, procedure, or initiative.

Career Paths

The course structure for certification in school administration and the career paths for aspirating school administrators’ value “getting stuff done.” Early on in the career of a school administrator, he or she learns that padding your resume with institutional accomplishments—balancing budgets, passing referendums, completing building projects, implementing technology plans—are fast tacks to school and district leadership roles. Not so much for resumes filled with teaching and learning accomplishments—curriculum rewrites, designing teacher training workshops, implementing new pedagogical programs, supervising classroom instruction.

An Impatience with Ivory Tower Talk

Although all school administrators have a background in an academic specialty and have earned multiple university certifications in school administration, when administrators graduate from universities they quickly abandon the goals and values of the academic mind for the institutional goals and values of the managerial mind. This abandonment is on display in a look of impatience or sometimes sarcasm from fellow administrators who detect a conversation or meeting is taking an academic turn. Always, in the background of these conversations and meetings, is getting stuff done—not questioning what stuff should be done.

“The Problem with Subjects”

January 28, 2025 by Alan Jones

A topic I will keep returning to is the subject-centered curriculum. All schools organize their curriculum around subjects. As a means of organizing facts and procedures into a meaningful explanation, subjects appear on the surface to be a logical response. Of course, the other function subjects serve very well is the institutional goal of documenting student progress, which, in this case, amounts to attaching a credit to each subject. The source of the credit system was developed by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. The unit system, developed in 1906, measures the amount of time a student has studied a subject. For example, a total of 120 hours in a subject meeting four or five times a week for 40- 60 minutes each year earns the student one unit of high school credit.

While managerial main offices value the documentation ease of the credit system, the subject-centered curriculum fails to serve students or future employers well. The problem with a subject-centered curriculum is this particular organizational structure sets up a firewall against any form of interdisciplinary learning and relates poorly to the ill-structured problems and processes that control real-world organizations. Subjects never pose the critical real-world questions that are asked daily in the private sector: What do we know? “What will we do?” How do we do it?

The distinction between information and knowledge is missed in schools. Curriculum guides and textbook are organized into subjects, which treat the mountains of information they contain as if they were imparting knowledge. Information in transformed into knowledge when it is applied to a problem, a process, a plan, a strategy. The only application in the subject-centered curriculum is to pass a test, earn a credit, and eventually earn a diploma. In the world of institutional schooling earning subject matter credits for the memorization of information underlies the organization and delivery of the curriculum.

For facts and procedures to become meaningful in a real-world context, they must submit to a method of study and a disciplinary framework that systemizes cause-and-effect relationships where these floating-around facts and procedures take on a predictive quality. To put it another way, classroom instruction ought to focus on assisting students with seeing relationships rather memorizing discreet pieces of information. The distinction between information and knowledge is just that: the former asks students to file in their minds around names, dates, theories, concepts, and procedures; the latter asks students to see and establish relationships between those same names, dates, theories, concepts, and procedures. The primary pedagogical function that teachers serve is creating problems or dilemmas where those relationships come into play.