Reinventing The Wheel

For years, many cities have undertaken the task of developing a citywide plan, agenda, goals, etc. around children and youth development and success.  In most cases, this work is a collaboration between multiple organizations, including the school district, city agencies (parks and recreation, libraries), city funded agencies and community based nonprofits.  While the core values that these organizations have around youth success are common, bringing these organizations together to discuss and arrive at a common mission and set of goals, objectives, standards, and measures to work towards can take years to accomplish.  Examples of this type of work are the Nashville Children and Youth Master Plan, Milwaukee Succeeds, Grand Rapids Youth Master Plan, Minneapolis Youth Coordinating Board, Chicago Out-of-School Time Project, Ready by 21 Austin, among many others.  Even more examples are included here, on the National League of Cities site.

A sampling of some of these plans is included in a table below.  Even doing a quick scan of these initiatives reveals many common threads in the goals and objectives that were the result of the months/years of collaborative work: youth/children are prepared for school, succeed academically, are healthy, are supported by caring adults, and contribute to the community.

In a recent conversation I had in discussing how to start this type of work, the question was raised “why don’t we just use what has already been done?”  So why spend years redoing the work when it has already been done?

“Reinvent the wheel – to waste time trying to develop products or systems that you think are original when in fact they have already been done before” Cambridge Idioms Dictionary, 2nd ed. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2006

The reason for spending the time, effort and resources is because the participation in this type of process is as important or more important than the output.  Bringing together leaders across the city who may or may not have worked well together in the past to discuss not only their own organizations, but also how as a city they can work towards a common set of goals and objectives is incredibly powerful.  Building these relationships and knowledge about each other’s work should increase the chances of success in work towards the common goals.

Even though there is a lot in common with the outputs (master plan, goals/objectives) from each of these efforts, they also each have a unique aspect to them.  Each of the efforts involved a unique set of people and organizations who have their own perspectives about priorities in their city and communities.  These citywide plans and goals are something that (hopefully) these organizations will be working together on for a long time to come, so it should be something that they each feel a connection with – something that they helped create.

Of course, this does not mean that efforts like this should happen in isolation, when there are clearly good examples of what worked well (and what didn’t work well) in the past.  So, these type of resources should be utilized to learn from, but not for the purpose of cutting out any of the important work in the development of the end product.

“At the same time “reinventing the wheel” is an important tool in the instruction of complex ideas. Rather than providing students simply with a list of known facts and techniques and expecting them to incorporate these ideas perfectly and rapidly, the instructor instead will build up the material anew, leaving the student to work out those key steps which embody the reasoning characteristic of the field.”

Questions like this continually come up in the work we do.  Why spend months developing a particular school district process with participation from unions, principals, teachers, parents, etc. when there are good examples that have already been developed using this same type of process in other districts?  Why hold another community meeting or  focus group session if you think you already know what people think about a particular topic?  Because the process of “inventing” is as important as the “invention.”

 

This blog was written by Cari Reddick. Cari is a Project Manager at UPD Consulting and has over 12 years of project management experience.

 

Samples of Citywide Youth Master Plans

Nashville	Milwaukee	Grand Rapids	Minneapolis
All children and youth will have a safe and stable home and a supportive, engaged family.	All children are prepared to enter school	Early childhood development, life-long learning & education	All Minneapolis children enter kindergarten ready to learn
All children and youth will have safe places in the community, where they are welcomed and supported by positive adult relationships	All children succeed academically and graduate prepared for meaningful work and/or college	Employment & financial independence	All Minneapolis children and youth succeed in school
All children and youth will develop valuable life skills, social competencies, positive values and become law abiding, productive citizens	All young people utilize post secondary education or training to advance their opportunities beyond high school and prepare for a successful career	Basic, physical & psychological needs	All Minneapolis young people have access to quality out-of-school opportunities
All children and youth will have confidence in themselves and in their future	Recognizing the difficult economic realities facing our families, all children and young people are healthy, supported socially and emotionally, and contribute responsibly to the success of the Milwaukee community	Mentoring, afterschool, cultural activities & strategic planning	All Minneapolis children and youth people have opportunities to prepare themselves for the responsibilities of an active civic live
All children and youth will have opportunities to have their voice heard and positively impact their community		Civic engagement, training & leadership
All children and youth will experience social equity regarding access to opportunities, resources and information that are critical to their success in the 21st century
All children and youth will experience a safe and caring school environment that supports social, emotional and academic development
All children and youth will achieve academically through high quality, engaging educational opportunities that address the strengths and needs of the individual
All children and youth will be physically healthy
All children and youth will learn and practice healthy habits and have access to the resources that support these habits
All children and youth will be mentally healthy and emotionally well
All children and youth will have access to and participate in quality programs during out-of school-time
All children and youth will have safe outdoor spaces in their neighborhood that provide opportunities for play and recreational activities
All children and youth will have safe transportation options that allow them to engage in activities, and access services and supports that the community has to offer

How to Run a Computer Based Training Session: Three Indispensible Techniques

This week I’m really delighted to introduce Frank Nichols a talented consultant from our strategic partners at Strategic Urban Solutions. Strategic Urban Solutions will be guest posting for us from time to time, and this week will be sharing a training post with us.  

At Strategic Urban we tend to do a lot of work with large institutions: Cities, Non-Profits, Schools, etc. Typically, these institutions will need to move on from their old paper-based methods of doing business and adopt an organizational system. Let’s face it, this is usually long overdue and necessary.  When an organization’s staff need training on these new systems, it can be both rewarding and challenging to be in the position of the Trainer. I will be honest and say that I have not always been good at this. In fact, I wouldn’t be able to offer up any of this wisdom if I haven’t been thoroughly beaten up along the way. After many years and nearly 100 training sessions, I’d like to offer up three techniques that I have found indispensable.

1. Don’t Be a Policy Middleman

Many times when you are introducing a new system or process, it is due to big changes in an organization. It is inevitable that you, as a trainer, will be seen as the middleman between staff and management. In order to prepare staff for the new system, you might have to give them an overview of recent policy changes. Make sure they also understand your role and purpose: to help them adopt new technology. Don’t let your training session become a place for the airing of grievances. Negativity about an organization’s changes can carry over to negativity about the technology that you are introducing.

If you are consulting for an organization, and are not management yourself, you can position yourself as an advocate on their behalf. Show sympathy for the staff, while also maintaining positive representation of the management. One way to avoid becoming the policy middleman is to have the contact information of the policy expert(s) on hand. Inform the staff that they can direct specific questions to that contact so that you don’t get off track. Even better yet; if a policy expert is available to address the policy implications in person, during the introduction, you’ll be free to focus on technology for the rest of the session.

2. Positives Before Challenges

Showing staff a new system or process and then asking for questions can sometimes, understandably, lead to a wave of complaints. If one person comes up with a complaint the rest of the staff in the room might feel compelled to pile on. This is why it is important to take a few breaks throughout the session to discuss Positives and Challenges. I always start with Positives by asking “Now that you have seen some of the system features, what do you like most? Why is this system an improvement on what you have done in the past?” You’ll want to discuss Challenges as well…but hold those Challenges hostage. I won’t move on to Challenges until someone can offer up something positive about the system.

For Challenges, I like to ask “Do you anticipate any challenges in applying this system to your work?”. When you frame it this way, you’ll get thoughtful anecdotes from the Staff instead of complaints. They will help you to understand what they are dealing with when they go back to work, and you’ll be better prepared to use that context for the rest of the session.

3. Demo Before Practice

If you have a room full of staff with a computer in front of them, good luck getting their attention. I’ve been in the front of many training sessions, but I’ve also been in the back. A computer is not only an invitation to check email and social media, but also an invitation to explore the system ahead of the instruction. Getting ahead of the class in a focused computer training session sometimes means getting lost. Each section of the system comes with explanations, demonstrations, and discussions…all of which will be missed by someone who is staring at their computer and going on their own personal journey. How many times have you tried to get through an entire demonstration, only to be interrupted at various stages because someone is trying to click on this or that and it is not working? The solution is: clearly state when you are demonstrating and that the opportunity to practice coming up next. Demo before practice.

Before you introduce a part of the system, explain that you are going to first do a demonstration. More eyes will be on you (More, not all…I’m realistic, you can’t get everybody) and those staff will clearly see the current system component, they will hear your explanations and guidance, and will have an opportunity to ask questions. THEN, you can put them on a mission: “Now that you have seen how this component works, go ahead and complete this step on your own.” The beauty of this is that you can free yourself up to walk around and help people individually, before you command their attention on the next demonstration.

I hope you find these techniques valuable and that you experience the reward of a successful training session. Happy training!

–Frank Nichols is a guest blogger from our friends at Strategic Urban Solutions

Education Reform and Counter Insurgency

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. (BR)

For Whom the Bell Curves

The debate, if you can call it that—“jibber jabber” might be a better term (thanks, Mr. T!)—over linking student achievement data to teacher and principal performance started on the wrong foot and seems to be stuck hopping around on it. Using performance data to identify and reward rock star teachers and “weed out” the ones who probably should be in another profession only tinkers at the margins.

Take a typical bell curve for teachers, with student achievement outcomes as the measure of performance. Now, I don’t know what the exact shape of this curve looks like for public school teachers across the country, but notwithstanding the sad fact that the “The Widget Effect” study conducted by The New Teacher Project found 99 percent of all public school teachers get rated as “satisfactory” or better by district evaluation systems, let’s assume, for argument’s sake, that the true bell curve actually looks something like this:

If the part of the curve that represents the poor performers is 10 percent of the total number of teachers, and if we were able to get rid of them all overnight, the next morning we’d still be left with 3.2 million of the same teachers who teach in public school classrooms every day. And while it often sounds like it (especially if you listen to the most strident promoters of achievement-based teacher evaluations), I don’t think anyone is actually advocating getting rid of, say, the lower half of the bell curve and trying to replace nearly two million teachers. There simply isn’t a pipeline of quality teachers who could fill those classrooms.

At the other end of the curve, the notion that paying high performers more will incent average teachers to step up their game is flawed on its face (as we’ve noted in previous blog postings here). But even if it weren’t, the additional money alone doesn’t help the average teachers know how they need to change their day-to-day actions to join the high performing ranks. Just knowing that great teachers can make a lot more money doesn’t tell you what successful teachers actually do.

In reality, the only way to truly improve overall teacher performance—and thereby improve student outcomes—is to move the entire bell curve to the right; essentially getting the overwhelming number of teachers in the “average” range to perform better.

If that’s the goal, then emphasizing the use of student performance data for bonuses and firings is really missing the point. Instead, the data should be used first and foremost to manage performance: feedback to teachers to help them understand whether or not what they’re doing in the classroom is working; feedback to principals to help them target limited school-based resources (i.e., master teachers, mentors, observations, teaching assistants, etc.); and feedback to central office administrators to help them identify professional development that actually makes a difference and target it toward those who truly need it.

If districts and states stressed these and other less-threatening uses of performance data and spent the first two or three years of a reform initiative getting its teachers and principals comfortable with the necessity and helpfulness of performance data for managing and improving their behaviors and actions, there would be a lot less resistance—and a lot less jibber-jabber—when districts and states eventually start applying the data to high-stakes performance evaluations and merit pay. (DA)

BEHAVE!

Anyone who is involved in establishing pay-for-performance compensation models for teachers and principals should spend a little time in advance reading up on Dan Ariely (The Upside of Irrationality), Daniel Pink (Drive) and other behavioral economists before embarking on a pay system based on the conventional wisdom about what motivates people. Unfortunately, most people, including several prominent superintendents, believe that money—in the form of better pay and performance bonuses—is the key to attracting higher quality teachers to the profession and motivating them to perform better.

I do believe that higher pay would attract more people to teach, though the relatively low pay for teachers compared to other professions is probably not as big a barrier to a better teacher talent pool than the filter of requiring a degree from a teachers college. (But that’s a topic for another blog.) Yet, the premise that once someone decides to become a teacher we still need to provide some sort of bonus structure to ensure that they bring their “A” game to the classroom is flawed for many reasons, but I’ll just tackle two of them.

The first has to do with why people get into the teaching profession in the first place, and it is not to make a lot of money. Ask any teacher why he or she became a teacher and the answer is typically about being inspired by a favorite teacher they had, wanting to give back to the community, an intellectual fascination with a particular subject area, or a desire to work with children and help them learn. If you got into teaching for any of these reasons or their many variations, you don’t turn it off because you’re not paid enough. There are deeper drivers at play, and if we don’t pay attention to the intrinsic motivations our teachers bring with them, we could actually do more harm than good when we set up pay-for-performance systems. As noted in Pink’s book Drive:

“Careful consideration of reward effects reported in 128 experiments lead to the conclusion that tangible rewards tend to have a substantially negative effect on intrinsic motivation. When institutions…focus on the short-term and opt for controlling people’s behavior, they do considerable long-term damage.”

So, if you inadvertently chip away at the intrinsic rewards teachers get from teaching—which is the main reason they enter the profession in the first place—how is that likely to impact classroom outcomes? (That’s a rhetorical question, in case you were wondering.)

The second flaw in the pay-for-performance premise has to do with how bonuses linked to high-stakes outcomes might negatively affect a teacher’s performance. In The Upside of Irrationality, Ariely describes several experiments that got at this issue. His conclusion is that moderate and high bonuses work well for tasks that are mundane, require little creativity or problem-solving, and are largely within one’s control. So, an incentive for a professional basketball player to make a higher percentage of free throws might work well, as might a bonus for higher productivity on an assembly line. But those types of tasks don’t come close to relating to what a teacher does in the classroom. And for tasks that require innovation, creativity and problem-solving, moderate and high level incentives actually make performance drop. As Ariely notes:

“[W]hen the incentive level is very high, it can command too much attention and thereby distract the person’s mind with thoughts about the reward. This can create stress and ultimately reduce the level of performance.”

None of this is to say that we shouldn’t link pay and bonuses for teachers and principals to performance. No one who has ever worked with us can think that we don’t support such accountability. But there needs to be much more nuance in setting them up than is occurring in most states and districts that are trying it. And what is likely to happen when they fail is that, by association, all pay-for-performance models will be tainted by their failure. (DA)

What it Takes to Be Ready for Race to the Top

If you missed Rick Hess’ blog interviewing Louisiana State Education Chief Paul Pastorek after the RTT Decisions were made, note two things.  First, in lieu of some of the shenanigans coming out of New Jersey and their loss, Secretary Pastorek gives us a lesson in grace.  When asked how he felt about winning states now coming to Louisiana for advice on how to implement their own RTT plans, Pastorek said, “We are sharing our work and our resources with education leaders and states… We will continue collaborating with them because we will all be better for it.  But it’s only human nature to question how some of these states who are relying on our models to implement their RTTT plan were selected for funding, while Louisiana wasn’t.  But dwelling on this won’t change the outcome. And the fact of the matter is that we’re all in this together.”

Second, even though Louisiana did not win Race to the Top, Pastrorek can already see where many winning states will fall short.  On the competition’s insistence that states bring in as many districts as possible, Pastorek said, “”I said this many times, in the [finalist] interview and publicly, that I didn’t think we could handle more districts than we were trying to include and yet achieve the objectives we were trying to achieve… Implementation at the scale the federal government has proposed, at ninety percent, which is implicitly what they’ve required, is going to be immensely difficult.”

But Pastorek goes further on some of the more fundamental issues we’re about to confront, stating, “One reason I think states are going to have a tough time implementing their plans is that state Departments of Education are not designed to implement these programs. We’ve spent a year redesigning our Department around our reform initiatives.  If you look at our organization today, it’s a radical change in how we’ve been doing business.  It’s revolutionary.  And I don’t think that Louisiana’s [RTT] score reflected the capacity we’ve created in doing so.”

At the heart of Pastrorek’s statements is that states have never really asked district’s to answer the question, “how will you radically reform yourself?”  Nor are they designed to behave in a way that promotes innovation among the places where the real work will occur- the district.  For all the thought and work that went into many applications, wouldn’t we be shocked to see states try to ignite a spirit of reform among districts with the tools of its trade to date (ie. top-down plans and compliance monitoring)?  But, that is what we are seeing.  We have worked with five states (both winners and losers) planning the implementation of RTT work, and only one of those five took seriously the task of re-orienting the LEA/SEA relationship to buttress their RTT Reforms.

In the interest of focusing on what is right, let’s skip what the states are not doing and get right to what we see in the state best positioned to ignite reform among its participating districts.

1. First, it recognized that few people outside their core team remember the details of their plan.  To remind other parts of the state agency and the districts the reforms we are doing and the benefits of success, this state distilled the goals and theory of action in its proposal to three slides that anyone would understand.
2. Second, it distilled all of the commitments of the state alongside the commitments of the districts so that districts could get a sober picture of the work in front of them.
3. Third, this state structured a process with the participating districts to explore where they were most likely to fall short in executing their commitments in the plan.

Anyone with a word processor could replicate Steps 1 and 2, but it takes an unprecedented level of trust and collaboration between the state and district to do number three.  Yet, if districts do not know how they will be required to change as they implement the reforms we believe in, how can we ever expect them to be successful? (BR)