Education Leadership - A Vacuum

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Educators are far more likely to be fired for divulging an embarrassing truth than for poor performance

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Education Leadership-A Vacuum

Paul Richardson 2011

Investment Manager Let¶s assume you are an investment manager who has responsibility for managing money for small to medium sized investors. You manage millions in assets. You know that you need to earn your clients trust continuously. You bear this responsibility with a sense that these people are depending on you to perform well for them by accessing growth while protecting against large long term losses. You do this by evaluating carefully the past performance of investments you consider for your clients but also consider the future prospects as best you can totally objectively. You cannot afford to make emotional or subjective judgments. If an investment in a client¶s portfolio is not performing for a meaningful length of time it needs to be sold. Investments considered need to be ranked by suitability for their purpose for a client¶s needs. Obviously, every assessment is not perfect because you can¶t know every variable that has effected past or might affect future performance. But using a rigorous process allows you to avoid catastrophic mistakes. Your performance is reviewed continuously by your clients. And the measure is objective; is their account doing better than the competition or not. Education ³Manager´ Let¶s contrast the above discipline with the typical management of our K-12 education system. First, do ³customers´ have a clear view of your performance? Not really; the state achievement tests only compare school district performance to

other districts within the same state. Information is available on how we compare nationally or internationally but you have to search it out. You certainly don¶t get a ³monthly account statement´ to indicate the up-to-date performance of your account. Schools have adopted a mantra that ³we are doing great´ and you are lucky to have your kids educated by us which is delivered with chocolate syrup and whipped cream to make it go down well. Second, do you continually evaluate your personnel and weed out the weak performers. No, in education, a person is far more likely to get fired for telling an embarrassing truth than for performing poorly. Many private sector organizations use a ³ranking´ or ³stacking´ process that ranks their people by job category from top performer to bottom performer multiple times a year. Why do they spend the significant amount of time to do this? Because it acts as a ³calibration´ of expectations across managers and departments and also gives visibility to relative strength of the different departments within the organization. Perhaps the biggest benefit is that it gives individual managers information to share with the individuals in their bailiwicks to nudge them to improve their performance. Of course those performing at the bottom of the stack are evaluated to see if further counseling or ultimately termination is appropriate. In education the political correctness and group think regimens suppress objective dialog about performance resulting in a culture of mediocrity or worse.

Third, do education leaders look objectively at what their competitors are doing, especially in other countries that are outperforming us? No; they look at other nations education systems but are so brainwashed in the ³discovery/constructivist,´ dumbed-down approach that anything they could learn from the other countries who do not use that ridiculously harmful approach is filtered out by their inbred training from ed schools hence in technically wrong beliefs. Fourth, do education leaders have in place a performance system that rewards truly good performance and penalizes poor performance. No, goals arrived at with the boards of education are ponderously and slowly discussed and finally approved, but are either not goals at all or are put on the shelf and never used in the day to day management of the organization. Certainly there are no consequences for not meeting goals. To the ³not goals´ comment; goals need to follow the SMART format. SMART is an algorithm/acronym for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-based. If you apply this test to education goals you will see they rarely pass it. Now, the No Child Left Behind example was written basically in SMART format but has shown what happens when you actually subject educators to a regime where there are penalties for not meeting the goal. States ask for waivers from the Feds and districts ask for waivers from the state. Also, the states ³rigged´ the game from the beginning because the law specified competence by

2014 but allowed each state to design its testing to determine competence. It shouldn¶t surprise you to learn that they did not take the high road. Thus, the closest we have come to a real performance improvement goal in education has been a disaster only increasing cost due to bureaucratic overhead required but hasn¶t resulted in anything close to the improvements envisioned when it was put in place. Lastly, any endeavor that wants to perform needs to be based on a win-win approach. That is, for the investment advisor case, if the clients win the advisor who manages on a fee related to a percent of assets managed wins too. In education the system is rigged so that the educators win big and the students lose. Oh, they lose surrounded by padding and ³nice´ words but they still lose. That is because the vast majority of kids no matter their place on the performance scale do not learn close to their potential in the current system. We simply must change the management culture in education to one that ³forces´ the system to perform to benefit the kids. The current ³go along, get along´ approach while comfortable is not consistent with serving the mission of educating kids to their potential.

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