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.
Read MoreThe 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!”).
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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.
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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.
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In order to achieve equitable outcomes for all students, schools must undergo a transformation on an order of magnitude seldom seen in the history of organizations. One such example from history is that of Japanese industry after World War II. This transformation was assisted by a team of American engineers, scientists, and statisticians, but arguably the most instrumental was W. Edwards Deming.
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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?
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As schools consider how to restart in the fall, some are galvanizing their community to consider this an opportunity for reinvention, a way to rethink how we educate our young, while others simply want to get students back in the building and return as quickly and safely as possible to the normal that existed prior to the pandemic. Regardless of a school’s position on the spectrum from restart to reinvention, a more sophisticated manner in which to analyze student engagement and track efforts to improve engagement will be necessary.
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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.
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As we are all aware, the COVID-19 pandemic has fundamentally altered how our society has functioned over the past few months. The education sector is no exception. As science teachers can attest, one of the unfortunate, enduring realities for life on this planet is that a minuscule virus, just microns in diameter, can leave an outsized impact on life as we know it. Yet a second enduring reality is that the form of life known as Homo sapiens is awfully resilient, and educators across the country are thinking creatively to ensure continuity of education for our students in a remote setting.
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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.
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