Tag: leadership

“Why Schools Should Abandon Strategic Planning”

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.)

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

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 10-80-10 Rule”

by Alan Jones

      In one of his appearances, the late Steve Jobs described what he termed, the “10-80-10” rule of leadership. The rule is a leadership principle that prescribes where effective leaders should spend their time:

  • 10% of the time should be spent communicating your vision for “the thing.”
  • 80% of the time should be spent moving the “the thing” forward.
  • 10% of the time polishing the thin, and helping others to understand why and how you are tweaking “the thing.”

      “THE THING” in this leadership principle is any product or outcome the organization is set up to create. Applied to schools “the thing” or “things,” are listed in school mission statements. Popular things listed in these documents are as follows:

  • “Well prepared for college and a career path”
  • “Life-long learner”
  • “Productive global citizen”
  • “Learn to think critically and deeply”
  • “Develop diverse skills, talents, interests, and abilities”
  • “Nurture each child’s curiosity”

      The obstacle that school leaders run into when trying to emulate the 10-80-10 rule is school offices that fail to address the first 10% rule: “10% of the time should be spent communicating a vision of schooling.” Yes, most schools do write a mission statement; and, yes, the mission statements are a mixture of many worthwhile educational goals. The schools I led, however, were designed around two conflicting purposes for schooling. The first reason, which was articulated in school mission statements, was to create critical thinkers or to put it another way, thinkers that would distance themselves from conventional wisdom.

      The second reason, the reason that schools were designed to implement, and which school communities supported with their tax dollars, was the goal of socialization: accept the world as, with all of its rules, requirements, and constraints. The school facility, along with the organization of curriculum and instruction, established a schooling regime, founded on standardization, conformity, regulation, credentialing, accreditation, and accounting.  There was little space in our school where mission-driven goals—love of learning, democratic participation, asking challenging questions—were valued or promoted.

      Numerous surveys of student attitudes towards schooling have reported student discontent with a school organization and curriculum that values a grammar of schooling grounded in memorization, recitation, and quantitative measures of what has been memorized and recited on a test. Each of these values establishes an instructional regime that endorses the following principles of teaching and learning:

  • All knowledge is fixed and resides in a textbook
  • Teachers are truth-tellers
  • Practice makes perfect
  • Points are deducted for incorrect answers
  • Facts first/meaning later
  • Timed tests indicate speed and learning
  • Abstractions describe reality

      I could on, but, will stop here to point out that each of these principles, and many more I could list, have no basis in the research, and, create learning environments that are antithetical to engaging the minds of children and adolescents. I will not go into detailed refutations of the reach learning principle. Suffice it to say that an instructional regime founded on fixed knowledge, accumulation of facts, repetition, correctness, and replication, not only distorts the educational values written into school mission statements but turns the remaining elements of Jobs rule of leadership into a problem of engineering rather than enacting.

      The distinction between both processes—engineering and enacting—is how school administrators respond to student dissatisfaction with the grammar of schooling. Typical indicators of student dissatisfaction with the grammar of schooling are low test scores, poor attendance, high drop-out rates, and high disciplinary violations. When questioned on these quantitative indicators of low student engagement, school administrators offer an engineering fix: lower class size, hire more support staff, lengthen periods, adopt a program, and drop electives. Rarely in these conversations do administrators return to Jobs first 10%—their vision of schooling, and whether that vision— mission-driven values and goals—is being realized in classrooms that surround their school offices. Instead, they proceed to tinker with an engineering solution—the other 80%/10%—with little or no effect on schools that for most students (74% in a recent survey) feel like a prison.

      Schools intent on living up to their school’s mission statement must return to Jobs first 10%—the purpose of schooling or more broadly what it means to be educated. Presently, the purpose of schooling has been reduced to institutional goals: replicate on a test what a teacher tells a class or what is assigned in a textbook. The alternative model of schooling, one which John Dewey and a group of progressive educators pursued at the turn of the century classrooms where students are asked: to see relationships; reexamine practices, habits, assumptions, and biases; to decide how to live their life; to challenge the final vocabularies of their parents.

      Dewey’s model of schooling or what it means to be educated, would require a complete redesign of the structure of schooling and teaching methodologies to restore agency to student learning. I will not go into the particulars of what these classrooms would look like—well, in fact, there would be no classrooms per se—but the remaining Jobs 80%/10% rule would be devoted to moving the “thing” forward, the thing being learning environments that encourage students to think about what they know, what they care about, and what they want to know more about.

“Dad, there are no bad decisions”

by Alan Jones

(Daughter to Father)

The idea for this blog originated with a conversation I had with my daughter regarding a new business venture she was orchestrating. Both my wife and I had managerial backgrounds, so, we were questioning her recent business moves—a lot of “what if” statements. She patiently responded to all of these queries with what was in my mind sound business and organizational logic. At some point in the questioning process, I sensed my daughter was becoming somewhat frustrated with the barrage of “what if” questions. In the middle of one of my “what if” questions she made the comment that introduces this blog: “Dad there are no bad decisions. People keep looking for certainty, for safety, for decisions that are not bad. But, you don’t grow in a job, in life, in anything you do without learning from bad decisions. You have to find out what works for you.”

     As I thought about my daughter’s comment, I reflected on the countless decisions I had made in my job and personal life. They all fall on a continuum from the highly rational to the highly emotional. As an individual prone to a rational decision-making model, I focused on the decision-making process: identify the problem>gather information>evaluate alternative solutions> and select the option with the highest utility. I discussed my thoughts with my wife who said to me: “Al, you missed the point of what our daughter said.” She went on to explain that it is not the process for making a decision that should be examined, but rather the process you use when it turns out to be a bad decision.

      What struck me with this response is the feedback function, which is what my daughter was focusing on, and the most important function in the act of learning, is exactly the function schools pay little attention to. Yes, schools do provide feedback, in fact, mountains of feedback, but, it is in the form of red pen notations or perfunctory recitation of correct answers on a forced choice testing instrument. There is little attention paid to the “why” of a wrong answer, or a process for checking for wrong answers, or for considering how some wrong answers but be corrected in different circumstances. The source of these poorly designed feedback functions is in assessment instruments that are not designed to analyze decisions, but, to identify wrong answers. After school, however, in the real occupational world, bosses are not looking for the right answers, but rather the effective enactment of goals, policies, and plans.

      The source of the effective enactment of goals, policies, and plans is a repertoire of leadership and managerial moves that are built around bad decisions or the often-repeated organizational axiom: “I won’t do that again.” This short axiom illustrates workers in the trades and professions engaging in a feedback function that has examined the causes and effects of a process that resulted in bad outcomes. Most importantly, within that process, the worker has determined what he or she ought to have done. Those of us in leadership or managerial roles have our private thought process for analyzing bad decisions—mine in particular was the “five whys tool” which for me always led to the root cause of the bad decision.

      Returning to my daughter’s comment, over time the knowledge base developed over the analysis of bad decisions, produces sound professional judgment and what works for you—there are no bad decisions.

The House of Cards of School Reform Failure

by Alan Jones

In my four decades working in different positions in schools I have experienced several national and state school reform initiatives designed to improve student achievement. As a participant in these waves of school reform, what I observed firsthand mirrors the findings of several research studies of the two most recent national reform initiatives: the standards movement of the 1980s and the accountability-based reform of the 2000s. The research concluded the following:

  • The rise in student achievement was meager.
  • Teachers adopted surface-level features of the reform initiative (materials, student group arrangements), but did not make fundamental changes in how they taught.
  • Overall the changes in instructional practice were piecemeal and superficial.
  • School leaders, for the most part, were satisfied with these same superficial changes.

      My involvement in both small and large efforts to change teaching practices all ended with the same dismal outcomes documented in the research. At times, those of us in school offices played the standard managerial blame game—poor parenting, recalcitrant teachers, lack of resources—to explain, what became for me, the grammar of school reform failure. From my perspective, I assumed that our administrative team had drawn up the perfect plan to fully implement the goals and practices of the reform initiative. The failure of these reform initiatives to take hold in the classroom must be due to forces outside the control of my colleagues and myself.

      Later in my career, when I was consulting with school districts struggling to implement a reform initiative, I was able to assume a third-party person’s objective view of the implementation process. At first, I noted some missing components to the plan: poorly designed staff development; lack of a defined curriculum process; confusion over the goals and practices of the reform initiative. I noted these particular shortcomings, but, these deficiencies were just that—particular shortcomings.

      What pulled these particular shortcomings together was a private sector framework developed by James Clear. He titled the framework: The 3 Stages of Failure.” Below is a brief summary of each stage of failure:

Stage 1 is a Failure of Tactics (HOW Mistakes): Failure to fully develop systems supporting the initiative or failure to pay attention to the details of implementation. You had a good plan and a clear vision, but, as the saying goes: “the devil is in the details.”

Stage 2 is a Failure of Strategy (WHAT Mistakes): The agreed-upon strategy fails to deliver the results expected, your team is clear about why you adopted the initiative and how to implement the initiative, but chose the wrong WHAT to make it happen.

Stage 3 is a Failure of Vision (WHY Mistakes): Your organization does not set a clear direction for yourself, a direction that is not meaningful to you or fails to provide an understanding of why you do things you do.

      Clear’s framework brought to light the fundamental shortcomings of main office plans for implementing a new organization or instructional change. During the summer, when these plans are developed, school administrators follow the tired and true managerial components of running a school well. In their careers, school administrators become adept at aligning the certainties of management—budgets, personnel, timelines, logistics, workflows, and scheduling—with institutional goals—efficiency, stability, standardization, and accountability. Where all three stages of failure creep into main offices are initiatives that ask school administrators to implement initiatives that require working with the uncertainties of teacher backgrounds and dispositions; the uncertainties of theory-based pedagogies; the uncertainties of goals; and the uncertainties of administrative commitment.

      In the summary below, I will place the shortfalls in the implementation of the district I worked with into Clear’s three stages of failure framework:

      Stage 1:   Failure of Tactics: The instructional systems required to support the reform initiatives required to support the initiative —professional development, curriculum materials, expertise, release time, space, scheduling—were nonexistent, poorly resourced, or unevenly delivered.

      Stage 2:   Failure of Strategy: The managerial norms for rolling out a new instructional initiative—announcement, distribution of materials, scheduled workshops, documentation of benchmarks, assessment schedules, and instruments—were poorly aligned with the depth and breadth of training and organizational changes required to implement the substance of the reform initiatives.

      Stage 3:   Failure of Vision: The reform initiatives were poorly aligned with mission-driven goals and values and were often in conflict with the goals and values of recently adopted initiatives.

      The other realization I took away from Clear’s framework was the implementation of the goals, values, and practices of new approaches to teaching and learning required a commitment from administrative offices that all THREE stages of implementation—tactics, strategy, and vision—be in perfect alignment. In looking back on my efforts at fully implementing new approaches to teaching and learning, I had to honestly admit to myself, that one or more of these stages was not fully developed or fully aligned with the other stages. The time and resource pressures from outside governing agencies and central offices to implement a mandated change initiative too often result in cutting corners or one more of Clear’s stages, Like a house of cards, pulling one of Clear’s cards (stages) out of the implementation deck, results in the collapse of the goals, values, and practices of a school reform initiative.