In Schools, On Schools
SPI's blog is named to emphasize that our best ideas come from observations in our own schools as well as at high-performing schools across the United States. We are proximate to the work going on in high-poverty schools that get results for students, and we are working to share these bright spots with others. Through generous sharing of best practices, our mission is to increase access to high-quality schools for all students, regardless of zip code.
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.
Read MoreIn 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.
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.
Read MoreSchool 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?
Read MoreFor 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.
Read MoreThe 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.
Read MoreOnce 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
Read MoreWhy 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.
Read MoreThe methods of improvement science are often counterintuitive at first glance (which is probably why I love the approach!). Take the title of this blog post for instance - Slow Down to Speed Up. When we launch an improvement project with a school, very early on in the project I display this quote from Albert Einstein on a slide -"If I only had one hour to save the world, I would spend 55 minutes defining the problem and only five minutes finding the solution." - and ask participants what they think it means. To me, what Einstein is getting at is that it is well worth the time investment to deeply understand a problem before diving headlong into solutions.
Read MoreThere’s a large gap between the current state of education sector R & D and our aspirations for this research. As sectors, education and medicine have lots in common and analogies are often drawn between the disciplines. However, when it comes to evidence-based practices, there are stark differences between the two fields.
Read MoreTo be clear, I am in favor of building a strong education R & D sector. However, it’s important to acknowledge the serious shortcomings of the current system. It is because of this current state that I am arguing that evidence-based practices don’t work.
I’m making two claims.
Claim #1: The current evidence-base in education research is extremely thin at best and completely misleading at worse.
Claim #2: By their very design, studies that result in evidence-based practices discount externalities instead of solving for them.
On its face, probably wrong, definitely incomplete doesn’t inspire confidence. However, we put this phrase in the footer of almost all of the documents we create at School Performance Institute (SPI) to remind us of its value as a core ethos of our improvement work. When people first see this phrase they typically have a reaction something like, “Wow, that doesn’t inspire confidence!”
We disagree.
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