Any attempts at educational transformation need to sit on top of a solid philosophical foundation. This idea was introduced in the first two posts of this series (see here and here). December’s post also described a few management myths. This post and the next will be spent describing other common management myths W. Edwards Deming worked to dispel. As you read the myths, it is important to keep in mind that you may very well experience some cognitive dissonance. There is a counterintuitive thread to much of the Deming philosophy, which of course makes sense given that he advocated for a change in state from the prevailing system of management to something better. This month, I’ll be unpacking the myth of best practices, the myth of the hero educator, and the myth of performance appraisal.

Myth of Best Practices

Over the last two decades, I’ve gone on dozens of school visits across the United States. My travels have taken me to traditional public, public charter, and private schools in the South, Midwest, West, and Northeastern parts of the country. On one hand, these visits were extremely beneficial in that I was able to observe classroom and school practices in many different places. I was able to speak with teachers, building administrators, and district leaders about innumerable challenges and how these leaders counter-acted the challenges with innovative solutions. While I was always careful to study the context of the places I visited, I repeatedly underestimated the challenges inherent in trying these innovative solutions in the schools where I worked.

Over time, I’ve grown more skeptical of best practices because of the importance of the context within which they evolve, of course assuming there is in fact evidence that they do work. On the former point, I’ve come to the realization that there is too often a significant underappreciation for the contextual elements in which “best practices” operate. For example, it is often assumed that a practice or program that works in one high-poverty school or district can be dropped into another such place that shares similar poverty rates without accounting for the myriad other factors that vary considerably between the two places. On the latter point, that is the effectiveness of various best practices, I’ve found the evidence-base in the educational literature is often exceedingly thin for many practices and programs. 

Because of this, we’d be wise to heed Deming’s warning, “To copy is to invite disaster” to avoid the myth of best practices.[1]  Studying a school and their practices without understanding the underlying theory for these practices as well as the context in which they work can in fact lead to disaster.

Myth of the Hero Educator

Similar to any area of life, there are outlier educators with exceptional and rare talents. One of the best-known movies depicting an outlier, a hero teacher if you will, is “Stand and Deliver.” The film famously depicts Jaime Escalante leading his 18 inner-city math students from basic math to calculus in just two years’ time. In reality, it took Escalante eight years to build the math program depicted in the movie. During this time, he completely revamped the math department at Garfield High School starting with convincing the school’s principal to raise math requirements. He also designed a pipeline of courses to prepare students for AP calculus, hand-selected top teachers to instruct those courses, and even convinced feeder junior high schools to offer algebra to 8th graders. 

None of Escalante’s students moved from basic math one year to AP calculus the following year.[2] Instead, progress was achieved over time through system transformation at Garfield with the cooperation of many educators and students. Still, most educators won’t rival Escalante’s tenacity and results; his performance is so far outside the norm that they made a movie about him. However, Knowledge about Variation tells us that the vast majority of educators perform within the enabling or constraining forces of an organization’s systems.[3] Our society has the tendency to create mythologies around heroes that are often embellished and leave out important details (like “Stand and Deliver”). On the other side of the performance spectrum, there are educators who are unfit for their present job. The heroes and those unfit for their present job represent a tiny fraction of the educator workforce. All of this points to the fact that focusing on the system is where the vast majority of the improvement potential lies. The hero educator myth makes for good drama in Hollywood, but a poor strategy for educational transformation and improvement.

Myth of Performance Appraisal (and Rating & Ranking Employees)

Organizational leaders must provide direction and feedback to team members, but this is far from synonymous with administering performance appraisals. Performance appraisals are more about control than they are about providing direction. They are more about evaluation and judgment than they are about giving feedback for improvement purposes. There are four parts to the typical performance appraisal. First, standards are set. Second, there is a time limit set by which to meet the standards. Third, observations and judgments are made. Finally, the evaluation is given to the individuals by those in the hierarchy. The problem is that performance appraisals fail to consider the role of the system on individual performance and fail to appreciate the variation in performance attributable to common causes.

The idea of the performance appraisal, or teacher evaluation system as it’s called in our sector, is like a lot of management practices in educational systems. It has been my experience that discussions about these evaluation systems are always about how to improve them. I’ve learned that a better line of analysis about any number of typical management practices in school systems is thinking through their purpose. Questions like, “Is management practice X useful in the first place?” “On what premise, do we know the usefulness of management practice X?”

In the case of the performance appraisal, another key question is, “What are the factors that differentiate highly-rated versus lower-rated people?” According to Peter Scholtes, there are five such factors:

A. Native ability and/or early education

B. Individual effort

C. Training and orientation on the job

D. Variability of processes and systems of work

E. The system of evaluation itself

If you look closely, only one item on this list is within the control of the individual employee. That is, individual effort. The other four factors have nothing to do with individual performance and yet performance appraisal systems purport to be able to solve the following equation for the value of B: A + B + C + D + E = 100. If this equation is not solvable then you cannot evaluate the individual employee; in attempting to do so you must disregard the contributions of the system on the rating. Much of the credit and blame within the individual evaluation is actually attributable to others, an issue that will come up again next month when merit pay is discussed.[4]

A by-product of performance appraisal as a management practice is that these systems actually make it more difficult to improve the organization as a whole. For one, they can result in mediocrity. Safe goals are set to protect the negative impact that falling short of goals could have on your rating; this is especially the case if the evaluations are tied to compensation. Even worse, systems are manipulated for individual gain rather than optimized for whole system improvement. Rating and ranking employees instills fear and disincentivizes cooperation. Instead of performing this time-consuming sorting ritual, leaders’ time would be better spent working to understand how the system interacts with employees to produce organizational performance.

Blog Series: Transformation from Mythology to the New Philosophy

Next month, I’ll follow up with three additional management myths Deming worked to dispel. In the late winter and spring, I’ll outline fourteen principles that will enable educational systems leaders to move from theory to practice with the Deming philosophy. Ultimately, the goal of this series is to provide you 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] W. Edwards Deming, The New Economics for Industry, Government, Education, 3rd ed. (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2018), 26.

[2] Heather Kirn Lanier, “What Jaime Escalante Taught Us That Hollywood Left Out,” EducationWeek, April 20, 2010, https://www.edweek.org/leadership/opinion-what-jaime-escalante-taught-us-that-hollywood-left-out/2010/04.

[3] Edward Martin Baker, The Symphony of Profound Knowledge: W. Edwards Deming’s Score for Leading, Performing, and Living in Concert (Bloomington, IN: iUniverse, 2017), 20.

[4] The Deming Library, Volume 28, “The Case Against Performance Appraisal,” licensed to The W. Edwards Deming Institute, produced by Clare Crawford-Mason, narrated by Lloyd Dobbins, featuring Peter Scholtes (1989; Wooten Productions, Inc., 1987; CC-M Productions, 1995), DemingNEXT.