Over the last two months, I described six common management myths W. Edwards Deming worked to dispel. In January, I tackled the myth of best practices, the myth of the hero educator, and the myth of performance appraisal. In February, I turned to another set of three myths including the myth of merit pay, the myth of accountability, and the myth of extrinsic motivators. The point of these two posts was to help education systems leaders see what not to do. I’m now going to turn to a set of 14 Principles that can be used by educational leaders to guide their transformation work. I’ll kick things off this month with an introduction to the Principles for Transformation. After this introduction, I’ll write twice monthly posts describing each principle. 

Both the aforementioned myths as well as the principles receive significant attention in my new book, Win-Win: W. Edwards Deming, the System of Profound Knowledge, and the Science of Improving Schools. One of the core purposes of the book is to list and describe the 14 Principles for Educational Systems Transformation. Win-Win also offers real-world strategies to education leaders of improvement, based on Demings’ System of Profound Knowledge. Having a guiding set of leadership principles is important under the best of conditions, but becomes even more imperative when considering the seismic shifts that have happened to the teaching profession over the last 30+ years.

An Introduction  

In 1988, the most common teacher in the United States had 15 years of experience under their belt. By 2017, he or she was a beginner in his or her first year of teaching. A significant part of this “greening” of the teaching force can be chalked up to the dramatic growth in the number of teachers during this period. That is, the elementary and secondary teaching force in the United States has significantly increased in size over the last three decades. It is also true that the teaching force has become less stable. Intuitively this makes sense; there are now more new teachers, and these beginners are less likely to stay in teaching than more veteran teachers. Taken together, the growth in the teaching force combined with the turnover point to a decrease in the stability in the teaching profession. Increasingly in recent years, large numbers of people are entering teaching and large numbers of people are leaving the field.[1]  

Education in the United States is a complex system. I’m not attempting to draw any causal relationships between the instability of the teaching force and the federal education policies (e.g., Goals 2000, NCLB, etc.) mentioned in previous posts. Nor am I attempting any evaluative judgments regarding the demographic shifts of the teaching force that has occurred over the last thirty years. There isn’t conclusive evidence to suggest that the teaching force is “better” or “worse” in one way or another now than it was prior to the shake-up of the sector after the release of “A Nation at Risk”. These are the types of topics about our country’s education system that rage on in the media and within the political sector that work to grab headlines but are good for little else. What should be of interest to educational leaders is the very large opportunity to transform the system. K-12 teachers represent one of the largest occupations in the United States; the philosophical foundations for educators and education institutions should be one of our highest priorities. 

Experience Alone Teaches Nothing

Having sufficient numbers of veteran teachers in a school is important for both students and beginning teachers. They have a positive impact on new teachers’ instructional quality, their likelihood to stay in the profession, and their ability to improve students’ academic achievement.[2]  As a systems leader, I’d take a school staffed with veteran educators as opposed to new teachers every day of the week and twice on Sunday. At the same time, having schools staffed with veteran educators does not guarantee quality schools. As I learned from Dr. Deming, experience in and of itself without the aid of theory doesn’t teach us anything regarding how to improve quality.

In the absence of a theory of management for improvement of educational quality, we get education reform ideas grounded in the management myths. The major federal education initiatives since the 1980s all have fallen prey to one or more of these myths. Goals 2000 (1994), No Child Left Behind (2002), Race to the Top (2009), and the Every Student Succeeds Act (2015) all included some version of the myth of accountability. Race to the Top was a competitive grant competition between states. Beyond school accountability goals, it also encouraged the design of teacher and principal evaluation systems that judged educators on student and school standardized test score performance. All of the federal initiatives were well-intentioned reforms attempting to shine the light on inequities and inadequacies in our educational system. In practice, they caused problems such as the narrowing of curriculum post-NCLB. 

In the absence of a set of guiding principles and a theory of management, we get tampering disguised as education reform. By tampering, I mean action taken to compensate for variation within the limits of a stable system; it increases rather than decreases variation. Think of tampering as changes in law, practice, or policy that makes it feel as if you are being yanked this way and that within your educational system for seemingly illogical reasons. Prior to understanding the Deming philosophy, I had this feeling without being able to give it a voice. With the System of Profound Knowledge, especially here I am thinking of Knowledge about Variation, I can now put into words the disconnect between outcomes and plans to improve those outcomes (by outcomes I mainly mean standardized test results).

Most of the attempts at education reform that I’ve experienced have been overly focused on numerical goals and accountability. The problem is that these goals are hopes without a method to achieve them, and so they remain mere hopes. In other words, reform efforts like Goals 2000, No Child Left Behind, and the Every Student Succeeds Act have not brought about the improvement the reforms’ designers have intended. Goals 2000 was replaced by No Child Left Behind which in turn was complemented by Race to the Top and then replaced by the Every Student Succeeds Act. Pronouncements about lessons learned were made, but in reality, much of the emphasis on numerical goals can be found in each subsequent version of the federal legislation. This can be chalked up to the fact that there was not sound management theory underlying the various attempts at reform. 

Unknown & Unknowable Figures

The management myths outlined previously do not work. Over-focusing on numerical goals and accountability systems in the education sector as mechanisms for improvement leads to problems. This focus is due to the attention paid to numerical goals in schools; they may very well be the most common of the myths. Issues of system capability, variability, stability, and method are key considerations of healthy goal-setting, all of which are normally absent in the design of the vast preponderance of accountability goals in schools and school systems. But I also wanted to bring up one other important point prior to the introduction of the 14 Principles. This is the issue of unknown and unknowable figures. Dr. Deming credited this idea, that being, “The most important figures needed for management of any organization are unknown and unknowable” to his friend and contemporary Dr. Lloyd Nelson.[3]  

The researchers at Sandia (see January’s post) alluded to this idea in their report when they said, “…it is not clear to us that all the measures analyzed by us and others are appropriate barometers of performance for the education system (recall that our selection criterion was that a measure be popular, not necessarily appropriate).” There are important questions left unanswered within the state accountability systems, the unknown and unknowable figures that Deming referenced such as: What effect does a hyper-focus on test scores have on a school’s reading program? What effect does the testing regimen have on students’ joy in learning and teachers’ joy in teaching? Are our schools providing an educational foundation that will have a positive impact on students’ long-term life outcomes?

An important point to understand is that unknown and unknowable figures nonetheless can and must be managed, and are in fact, the responsibility of systems leaders. In the absence of coherent guiding principles, I’m worried about the decisions we’re making in response to the pressures applied by numerical goals, accountability systems, and the other management myths. Short-term gains in test scores are not a reliable indicator of performance of management. Those types of gains can be achieved by methods that are not in the long-term best interest of students nor education systems. 

Systems leaders cannot simply commit to quality, we must know what to do. Ohio’s school and school district rating system just switched from A-F school ratings to a five-star system. It’s a delusion to think either rating system has anything to do with school quality nor that switching from one rating system to another has anything to do with it. Similarly, we cannot improve quality by putting the screws to principals and teachers to do better work. Quality is the job of systems leaders; it cannot be delegated. The 14 Principles I’ll discuss in the coming months will provide systems leaders with a basis for judgment of their own decisions and for transformation of the organizations to which they belong. 

Blog Series: Principles for Transformation

The four components of the System of Profound Knowledge work in concert to provide us with profound insights about how our organizations operate so that we as leaders can in turn work to optimize the whole of our systems. However, there is a step beyond simply avoiding the management myths. The next step is to be able to think and make decisions using the lens provided by the System of Profound Knowledge. This is where the core set of 14 Principles come into play. In the coming months, I’ll outline the principles that will enable you to move from theory to practice with the Deming philosophy. These principles will provide systems leaders with a strong philosophical foundation from which to make sound decisions.

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John A. Dues is the Chief Learning Officer for United Schools Network, a nonprofit charter management organization that supports four public charter schools in Columbus, Ohio. Send feedback to jdues@unitedschoolsnetwork.org. 

Notes

[1] Richard Ingersoll, Elizabeth Merrill, Daniel Stuckey, Gregory Collins, and Brandon Harrison, ‘The Demographic Transformation of the Teaching Force in the United States,” Education Sciences 11, no. 234 (May 14, 2021): 1-30, https://doi.org/103990/educsci11050234. 

[2] Ibid, 12.

[3] W. Edwards Deming, Out of the Crisis (Cambridge, MA: MIT, Center for Advanced Engineering Study, 1986), 20.