Dr. LaWanda Green Burwell, Administrator, Baltimore County Public Schools / Senior Examiner, Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Awards
The
No Child Left Behind Act reaches
deeply into the infrastructure of public education in America.
This legislation’s overarching purpose is to close the achievement gaps
because, in the words of NCLB, “…education reform has failed to produce
results.” Results, in
business management, refer to the outcomes achieved by an
organization—typically a bottom line of profits and financial stability.
In education, the bottom line is the achievement of students on tests of
their mastery of state learning standards.
The persistent, significant gaps in achievement, based upon income, race,
and gender, at the national, state, and local levels demonstrate that, even
after 20 years of reform, our educational system has not changed enough to
produce adequate results for all children.
Repeating the same behavior and expecting different results has been
offered as a definition of insanity. Clearly,
through NCLB, the federal Department of Education is using its dollars to
leverage transformation of the way that education is provided to at-risk
students.
In
businesses and other organizations that have focused on improving their results,
there is common understanding that all parts of the organization contribute to
the achievement of results. The
drive to improve the effectiveness of the entire organization has given rise to
the science of management. This science has not been widely recognized as
valuable in education because children are not products or customers.
However, children do not have to be widgets for the science of management
to apply to the organizations in which they are taught.
A
simple definition of an organization is something comprising elements with
varied functions that contribute to the whole and to collective functions.
The American educational system is a series of interrelated
organizations, from the U. S. Department of Education to the state departments
of education, to school districts, to schools, and, yes, even to classrooms. Effective management is needed at every level of the
interdependent and interrelated education system. At the federal level, NCLB has articulated a vision of
requirements that will need to be met for all students to learn to high
standards. These requirements begin
with the results: adequate yearly progress (AYP) on state tests for all student
groups. The requirements of NCLB
also address the preparation of the teaching work force to perform its job in
achieving the results:
highly qualified teachers and paraprofessionals and high quality
professional development. NCLB
requires planning and allows redeployment of funding to support the changes in
strategies that will improve student achievement:
master plans. These and other requirements are consistent with a systematic
approach to managing an organization to achieve the desired results.
The success of both businesses and high achieving schools that have used
the discipline of systematic and ethical management to achieve results
demonstrate what is possible.
Education
reform, as a state level effort, has established standards and testing to
measure students’ achievement of standards. In this climate of public
accountability, thousands of schools and even some entire school districts have
demonstrated that it is possible for children, considered at risk of academic
failure, to achieve to the standards was well as their advantaged counterparts.
Now that we know that it is possible for all the children to learn, what is
needed to fulfill public education’s promise to all children?
It is certainly not just money. ESEA
has provided additional funds to high poverty schools since 1965.
What is the barrier?
Education
organizations, such as the 90/90/90 schools (Reeves, D.B. Accountability
in Action, Advanced Learning Press, 2000) demonstrated that schools that are
90% minority and 90% poor can take more than 90% of their students to high
standards of academic achievement. Schools
that have changed the results for at-risk students often have gone on solitary
journeys to find solutions through years of trial and error.
Some have asked their business communities to help them learn systematic
management. Such schools may
not use the jargon of management, but a review of their approaches reveals that
they certainly demonstrate highly effective management behaviors.
They have focused on student achievement and created the conditions in
the school that allow all staff --as well as all students-- to understand what
they need to do achieve to high standards. Yet, it has been difficult to
replicate the success of some of these challenged schools, even within their own
school districts.
The
science of management says to us as educators that if we wish to change our
results at the school district level, it will mean determining what are the
effects of current policy, procedures, and practices on student achievement, and
changing those elements that are not contributing to the goal of accelerating
the learning all children. Teacher assignments to schools and within schools may
be used to illustrate this point. The
research of the Education Trust and other groups demonstrates that the
conventional seniority system and teacher transfer policies of most school
districts have resulted in the least experienced teachers in the highest need
schools and, within schools, the least experienced teachers assigned to the
children who are performing below grade level.
Successful principals have always worked diligently to recruit the most
outstanding teachers, but they have not always had the support of the hiring and
transfer practices of their school districts.
Recognizing the importance of the quality of teaching in educational
success, NCLB says that students in schools receiving Title I funds must be
taught by highly qualified teachers and paraprofessionals. In order to address
this requirement, school districts must revisit their system wide policies,
procedures, and practices for assignments as well as their strategies for
professional development of all teaching staff.
This focus on the quality and skills of the work force is a priority in
the science of management, but consider how difficult it is to find both the
funding and the time to provide skill-based professional development in school
districts.
School districts, like all mature organizations, have been in operation
long enough and are complex enough to have lost the sharp focus on the
relationship between processes by which the work of the organization is done and
the results. This includes
not only the instructional process, but also the support processes.
Even well-trained teachers cannot be effective if they do not have a
curriculum that is aligned with the state standards, or if they do not have
adequate books and materials, or if schools are closed because of problems
physical plans.
Education
organizations will not be able to meet the requirements by continuing the same
practices that produced the achievement gaps.
There will not be a silver bullet in the form of miracle programs, which
never address the organizational infrastructure, and are usually called the
“flavor of the month” because they come and go so quickly.
All schools, as well as their supporting central offices, will need to
define their contribution to student achievement results and make ongoing
improvements in how they operate. The
summation of these efforts can produce an infrastructure that is effective in
providing the high quality of teaching and learning that the public expects from
their investment in education. The answer to the question of what is the barrier
to fulfilling the promise of public education to all children is the
lack of systematic approaches to managing the organizations that deliver the
education to the children. NCLB
requires that we move past the way we have always run schools and school
districts to managing for continuous improvement until there is equity in
learning for all children.