Our good friend Justin Cohen over at the “Turnaround Challenge” hit it spot on the in an entry on the relationship between good policy and good execution. Justin mentions a Matt Yglesias quote on (of all the things to compare to education reform) counter insurgency strategy. Yglesias says,
“… you can’t initiate a large complicated undertaking that involves coordinated action by hundreds of thousands of individual human beings and then make success contingent on perfect implementation.”
Fresh from a day of pondering state Race to the Top strategy, Justin notes, “I’m increasingly frustrated by the extent to which [education] policy discussions are execution-agnostic.” We’ve been helping three states implement their Race to the Top, and we’ve seen the same thing from the front line.
Think about it. An RTT winner has to now coordinate at least 20 separate new and inter-woven (not to mention politically risky) projects internally AND monitor and support the progress of around 10 projects at each of the school districts participating in their program (which could be as low as 55 and as high as more than 700 depending on the state). This is a management super-lift in organizations that have rarely been rewarded for or capable of managing large complicated projects on their own. Yet, when we look at any state’s application or at a district’s scope of work, we see work plans written as if they weren’t doing anything else, there was no angry teacher’s union waiting for them to mess up, and they have a bench of Harvard MBAs. They are assuming near perfect implementation.
Our advice to these states has been to design themselves around the inevitability of imperfect implementation. In education reform generally, and in RTT specifically, there is no recipe or checklist that we can follow for it to work. We must instead live in a constant cycle of making a hypothesis of the best path forward, executing in earnest, reflecting frequently on our progress, mid-course correcting, repeat.
We’ll get into this in more detail in the weeks ahead.
Welcome to the real world of public education. The historical failure of educational reform will likely repeat itself if RTT policies and implementation plans are developed only by a “bench of Harvard MBAs” and others who may never have spent a day in a classroom with a group of children (other than when they were successful students). No wonder teachers are angry! How would you react if teachers set policies for your work? I understand that systems rely upon a distribution of labor that leaves little time for authentic contributions by those who know the most about the on-the-ground implications of policies. This is where real change needs to be made.
The creation of conditions that nurture childrens’ development and promote learning must be central to policy development if we are ever to have authentic educational reform. It’s not too late in the RTT cycle to accomplish some of this, even if proposals were written without serious input from teachers, parents and students. Their contributions can still make a difference when their voices are included in the continuous improvement cycle you suggest.
As usual Judy, always love your comments. I would like to suggest that your theoretical suggestion is actually true. Teachers have been setting management policy for our nation’s school systems as most upper level managers at school systems started in the classroom and worked their way up. I totally agree that fully understanding the work of a teacher and the work of a classroom and an absolute pre-requisite to good management outcomes. But if you have worked in the administration of a school system or a state, you are struck not by the shortage of the teacher’s perspective, but by the shortage of management skills. On balance, education needs more MBAs, not less.
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