Data Has No Meaning Apart from Their Context

In the K-12 education sector, one of the primary uses of data is in state accountability systems. Many states now issue district and school report cards typically based on various performance metrics such as proficiency rates on standardized tests, absenteeism rates, and college and career readiness indicators. Unfortunately though, as James Leonard stated so eloquently in The New Philosophy for K-12 Education:

Absent an understanding of the type of variation present, any discussion of accountability is a burlesque!

Numerical Naiveté

Dr. Russell Ackoff, the eminent systems thinker said, “Managers do not solve problems, they manage messes.” My take would be more optimistic than Ackoff’s assuming managers knew something about variation. This is in fact why I’ve spent so much time over the last year studying this idea as it fits into W. Edwards Deming’s theoretical framework, the System of Profound Knowledge.

Leadership & the Essential Elements of Transformation

The case I’ve been making for organizational transformation is based on the premise that our education system is not broken. Rather, it is a system that is operating exactly as it was designed to operate, and it’s producing exactly what it was designed to produce. I do not believe that our schools need reform or restructuring but rather a change in state. This transformative change in state does not occur overnight, but instead is a process that unfolds over 5-10 years (as Deming would put it, “There is no instant pudding!”).

The Psychology of Joy in Work

Each part of the SoPK is interdependent and equal in importance. Nonetheless, if there is one of the four components that seems to flow through each of the others, it is psychology. A leader of organizational transformation must understand the psychology of individuals, the psychology of groups, the psychology of society, and the psychology of change.

Knowledge has temporal spread

In our organizations, theory must be the basis of all investigation, and the basis for any action we take to improve systems within our organizations has to include testing our theories. The Theory of Knowledge is all about where our knowledge comes from that we use in these improvement efforts. This knowledge has temporal spread.

Variation is the enemy

In the last written work of his long life, The New Economics, Deming had this to say about variation:

Variation there will always be, between people, in output, in service, in product. What is the variation trying to tell us about a process and about the people that work in it?

The main point that Deming was making was that outcomes are either good or bad by the time we look at them. The enemy is variation and the sources of variation in and around the process that produced the outcome. When you combine this point with the core idea of systems thinking - that most results belong to the system - you begin to see your organization through a completely new lens.

Learning to ImproveJohn DuesDecember 29, 2020w. edwards deming, charter schools, school improvement

What is systems thinking?

Perhaps the most radical idea put forth by Deming is the idea that any outcome we see within our system is the result of more than the skills and efforts of the individuals that work within the organization. Organizations are characterized by a set of interactions among the people who work there, the tools and materials they have at their disposal, and the processes through which these people and resources join together to accomplish its work. Central to this idea is that most of the performance differences observed between individuals are generated by the complex and dynamic system itself of which workers are only one part.

Should we be rating and ranking schools?

School and district report cards were released in mid-September to little fanfare because they lacked state test scores. These scores form the heart of the report cards, but were missing from this year’s reports because the coronavirus pandemic shut down schools and prevented spring testing. Maybe this year provides an opportunity to stop and think about a couple of questions related to the report cards. Questions such as, what do the report cards tell us about schools? And, should we be rating and ranking schools?

How do you measure remote learning engagement?

For the last two months, my colleague Ben Pacht and I have been writing about the work we are doing at United Schools Network (USN) in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent school closure order in Ohio (see here, here, and here). In this fourth post in the series, we’ll summarize some key points we’ve made before, plus offer a few ideas specific to measuring and analyzing remote learning engagement.

Successful remote learning requires a whole new system

The transition to remote learning due to the coronavirus pandemic has significantly shifted how United Schools Network (USN) plans and delivers educational experiences to its students. We've outlined our remote learning system—and it is helpful to think of it as a system—in our Education Plan. As soon as that document was created, and the new system was outlined, we immediately started thinking about how to improve it.

Seven Early Lessons about Shifting Education during a Crisis

Once we at the United Schools Network learned about Governor DeWine’s school closure order on the afternoon of March 12, the pivot to remote learning began immediately. The first thing we did was create a COVID-19 Task Force in order to start planning for the initial three-week closure. While those plans were quickly implemented, we’ve now transitioned to creating longer term plans that address learning needs as Ohio schools will remain physically closed to May 1 and possibly beyond.

This limited (hopefully) blog series is our attempt to share what we’re learning during the pandemic. We’ve outlined seven early lessons in this post, which are focused on setting a network or district up for success throughout the closure

Improvement Science Tool: Fishbone Diagram

Why are we getting the outcomes that we currently do? In my last post, I implored organizational leaders to slow down and take the time to deeply understand this question before moving ahead with solutions.

The only way to understand current outcomes is to step back and see the system - the people, the policies, the attitudes, and the physical environment - in which a problem resides.