Schools and Bureaucracy and Some Politics: Empower Your People; Chrysler Does — Part D

Posted on March 5, 2012 by schooldog

Summary: Referring back to last week’s post, a plan to provide study time in our school served as a promising example of the incremental changes needed to further reform in schools. The story is here continued.

On what seemed to be the eve of implementation, in fact with a new study time schedule published, it arose that the details of the study time violated the current teacher union contract. Now wait! Stifle those moans.

The truth was that the program as designed meant a small but meaningful increase in staff work load. Teachers would have modestly less time to cover material mandated they teach, and all would have to retool, without compensated time, either to create systems through which math and science teachers could effectively “tutor” the twenty-five to thirty students for which each would be responsible, or for the study time supervisors of the rest of the student body to enforce quiet individual study time. In my own already overloaded bailiwick as a counselor, I would have one hour less a week to complete my already highly prioritized and impossible agenda. So the proposal was not without a price to pay for the staff involved.

Long story short, a waiver of the union contract was required for the program to proceed. A vote was held, the result was roughly a draw for and against the waiver, so the study time proposal fell into the waste bin, because a two thirds majority was required to pass the waiver. Ouch. What happened to the happy ending?

In post mortem, while it was encouraging that approximately half the staff voted in favor, despite the down side of the proposal, questions obviously arise as to why the other half of the staff voted against. Were they simply too vested in their own insularity to be open to the positive qualities of the experiment, or to the potential benefit to less fortunate students? Were they too stuck to be willing to put energy into the new systems, because change does require extra start up energy?

Probably some of that. Though we have a reasonably competent and hard working staff for the greater part, the sum is not perfect.

However, if I were to guess, I think our history as an overly hierarchical school and school district entered into the equation, and hence the vote. Given a specific chance to voice that displeasure, half the certificated staff voted to “stick it to the man”, in part the principal, in part the district and superintendents past and present, and even the state and legislature, which seems unable to provide adequate funding for schools, despite its clear constitutional duty to do so. Bottom line, cost of living increases for teachers, mandated by the voters, and increases to the salary scale for at least ten years have languished badly, yet here teachers are asked yet again, in the guise of the new study time proposal, to pull still harder in their traces.

The system is broken; some teachers with reason say I am doing my part as much as I can, my back is breaking. Enough. Even those of us who voted in favor understand that point of view.

My message to our principal is to not despair, though he has fired some retribution at our retreating backs. Despite the setback, the enhanced communication and exchange of ideas is without question in my mind on the right track, and he is to be commended for that. Now is not the time to retrench, but to understand the meaning of the vote, even to empathize (for he is not so long from being a teacher himself, but oh so quickly do we all forget), and to continue in the communicative, collegial vein he has begun, because only in that vein will he bring our school to the achievement he clearly desires.

Finally, a couple of big picture observations from this microcosm. It is a truth that teachers and teachers’ unions will be players, whether for the good, or for the bad, whether as contributors to the change we seek, or as obstacles to revamped approaches. In our own state, I wonder how effective the frontal approach of certain public figures will be in lambasting teachers’ unions without at the same time attempting to understand the legitimate concerns of those in the trenches, and then address them. Note that theme in the story I have just concluded; a house divided will at best half-heartedly address the enormous challenges we face in the schoolhouse. A passive aggressive response on teachers’ parts to unsympathetic attack will hardly catalyze the kinds of changes needed when these are the very same players that will necessarily carry out the envisioned reforms on the grass roots level.

Political pressure applied is one thing, and can be useful, as I think No Child Left Behind has managed to do, despite its flaws, but to demonize a critical player, as political contributors many places removed from the real action have been doing of late toward teachers and their unions in our state, simply serves to create armed camps, while the real prize for both sides, education reform, gets trampled upon the warring turf.

Perhaps all parties need to repair to the schools of New Haven, Connecticut, and an example of cooperation and apparent trust between unions and school district management that has apparently produced the kind of reform currently under siege in Washington State, and which I will take a look at in next week’s post.

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Schools and Bureaucracy: Empower Your People; Chrysler Does — Part C

Posted on February 26, 2012 by schooldog

Summary: A program to provide extra help to struggling students in one school shows the potential inherent in staff/administration cooperative planning.

Among the casualties of recession driven budget cuts in our school was the after school activity bus, admittedly a hard ride from a student’s point of view, as it meant as much as a 45 minutes to an hour serpentine excursion on a single bus through the extended area of our school district. Still, it was useful for students who needed extra help after school, even though the dreaded long ride would loom in the background.

With the demise of the activity bus, underclass or low income students who didn’t have wheels were effectively blocked from seeking help from teachers after school, even if an individual were so inclined. That too few were so inclined, anyway, does not detract from the lack of opportunity for such students in a school environment where we try to pull low income students into opportunity. The lack of available transport after school for low income students is in effect discriminatory; as a result such students have limited access to help.

The issue has burbled for the last couple of years. My own partly whimsical and partly pointed suggestion that all students with an F in one class be required to stay after school for an extra hour of help would have required a fairly massive grant to pay for a renewed activity bus run, and extra teacher time, and then was impractical given the 30% or more of the student body who are failing at least one class at a given time.

Yeah, it’s that bad; most of the fails are unnecessary and a product of student inattentiveness to their studies; we don’t sell the game well enough, I guess.

Other staff members recently have engaged in discussion of a more realistic alternative to serve the same need, stimulated by programs ongoing in nearby school districts. The gist of the proposal is to add an activity period to the school day once a week, based upon our advisory system, in which each student has a faculty advisor that stays with a group of 20-25 students for their four year stay in high school, and which has met perhaps three times every two months as needed in very recent years.

The focus would be on math and science skills, our two biggest areas of need. During the study period, for the duration of a month, any student who has a D or an F in one of these areas would be assigned to a “help room” staffed by teachers in that discipline. Those teachers’ own advisories would be dispersed to other teachers’ advisories, where a quiet study time would be enforced.

After a month’s time, grades would be revisited, and those again with D’s and F’s at that juncture in math and/or science would be ticketed to spend the next month of study time each week with a math or a science teacher for help in the respective discipline.

I like several things about the proposal. First, it was a creative attempt to meet a clear need, and would engage low income students into the help loop along with others. It may prosper; it may fail. But without such experiment, good ideas never get a chance to take wing.

Secondly, the system requires students who need help to seek help. Too many such students are not yet mature enough to recognize their own best interest and to seek help on their own, so we need to encourage them and mean it. Yes, there will be some who fight these efforts, but the betting is that enough of the kids will accept this necessary structuring (note my ongoing lament about accountability for kids in our culture), and decide to make use of the help since they have to be there anyway. No doubt a certain amount of staff time, particularly administrative time, will have to be spent rounding up the wayward and herding them to their designated stations. We love them too much to let them off the hook, etc.

Third, uncharacteristically both for our school and for hierarchies as a type of organization, the program arose out of ongoing conversation in which staff, rather than admin, led the charge, in this case the math department. To my way of thinking, for an idea borne out of the staff to bear fruit as a school wide implemented program is a profound turn of events with far reaching implications, and is just short of revolutionary, in schools as I have known them. The stifling of staff initiative I think has been one of the strongest barriers to reform in American schools, and one too little discussed.

The willingness and ability of admin to grow into such partnership as a critical factor also is difficult to overstate. Note in my recent stories of Toyota and Chrysler that bottom line profit concerns on the part of management have been the instigator of  similar reforms first in Toyota in the post Second World War period, and now currently in Chrysler as the American automaker experiences a resurgence of profit. The key in all cases is to unlock the creativity, energy, and ground level knowledge of the boot workers, whether on the factory floor or in the classroom.

Fourth, and really a corollary to the preceding point, the program to be implemented germinated with an idea, but was nurtured in ongoing meetings between staff and administration to work out bugs, fine tune the mechanisms, and anticipate and answer potential problems. Though I was not directly involved, what I heard I liked. How often have we all been visited with a new program from somewhere on high that might have merit, but flounders on realities ground level staff could have anticipated and adjusted for had they been consulted in the first place?

Fifth, in companion to the roll out of the program, it was understood that required twice weekly meetings by department, designed to examine student data in order to fine tune instruction, would be cut to once a week. I made the point in our union meeting that it was an important precedent to be set — the acknowledgment that new task added should be offset by a reduction elsewhere. Heretofore, new programs or new responsibilities were simply added on without such compensation, which had bred much smoldering resentment.

Think again of muri from Toyota, the concept of overwork, in which the product becomes shoddy because workers are simply asked to crowd too much into their work day. For those workers who have their own independent standards of quality effort, the corollary in this context is just such resentment, because the individual teacher of quality is forced into circumstances in which he or she cannot meet their own high standards. Any complaints fall on deaf ears, on the benevolent end of the spectrum, or suffer retribution on the malignant end.

So it would be good to report that the program has been implemented, and despite early growing pains, the good work put in prior is bearing fruit. Unfortunately, on what seemed to be the eve of implementation……..(continued next week)

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Schools and Bureaucracy: Empower Your People; Chrysler Does — Part B

Posted on February 19, 2012 by schooldog

Summary: A fledgling initiative in Washington State with exceeding promise nonetheless demonstrates the pitfalls of hierarchical directives.

Politicians talk about the rising gap between the rich and the poor, the upper economic classes and the lower economic classes. In Washington state, one (fairly expensive) initiative is about to bear its first fruit as a local attempt to address these historic imbalances. The College Bound Scholars program promises full tuition for low income students at Washington State Public Universities and Community Colleges for high school graduates who enter the program in middle school, stay clear of the law, maintain a C cumulative grade point average in high school, get accepted at a Washington public university or community college, and submit a FAFSA, or financial statement, in a timely manner. Though some of these monies would have ended up in the same student hands, anyway, the fund of state money dedicated to low income students was pumped up as well. The real genius of the idea is the hope and incentive it provides for those kids and families for whom the next buck may be way around the corner.

So the program is a good, even excellent idea, which I enthusiastically support as a school professional and as a citizen. Yet, for the episode I will now unfold, I’m gonna start sounding briefly like a Republican.

Of course, a sub bureaucracy gets established and geared up to carry out the mechanics of the program. And of course said sub bureaucracy has to establish rules and procedures. And finally, said bureaucracy has to tell someone what to do. The workers at Chrysler in the old days would understand.

So it has transpired that we lately received a series of emails on behalf of the Higher Education Coordinating Board (HECB), the generator of the program, which outline a series of ten dates this spring, roughly every other week, on which high schools, and more particularly the “College Bound Scholar” coordinators, are to report whether or not every one of the eligible College Bound Scholars in each senior class (we have eighty) has submitted their FAFSA, whether or not they have applied to college, if so which ones, and/or each students’ current GPA.

Looking down the road in an area of increasingly low income demographics, there are over two hundred eligible individuals coming up in succeeding classes. Each would have to be followed closely within an approximately four week span which is already a high intensity time for counselors due to other reasons.

If I could integrate a sound track into this piece one could hear the moans that emanated from counseling offices in our area. Counselors sit at the crossroads of numerous systems, and often we are nabbed to play a role in someone else’s idea. In this case, we have a competent idea run amuck.

Several points. First of all, the reporting requirement smacks of a bureaucracy checking to see if its minions are dancing to the required tune. This is not my principal talking, nor my asst. superintendent, nor the superintendent, but some custodian of a state program proclaiming from the state capitol. If all such directors of various state programs were to make such demands, we would not get much done of any sequence or consistency.

Second, much of the intent of the program has already been carried out in our building. I know because I have done it. The reporting mechanism wastes my time and takes me away from other more critical priorities.

Third, with a bit of imagination, the information could be gathered electronically via networks already established between the universities and community colleges and the HECB to identify applicants who are College Bound Scholars. The network by its very function could be adapted to identify who has submitted FAFSA’s and who has applied to which university or college. In fact, the people who want to know who has submitted the FAFSA have only a lag time of a week before receiving the information electronically. And much more accurately, I suspect, than the self reports from the students themselves.

The more appropriate use of this technology would be to use it to communicate to building people the names of students who have not submitted their FAFSA so that we might intervene as is appropriate. Doing so in itself would be challenging, but a much more focused use of our time.

Fourth, refer with me to the discussion a couple of weeks ago about muri, the Japanese concept of over work, which leads to inefficiency and waste. Where employees are asked to do more than is humanly possible, workmanship becomes shoddy; in a market system the company bottom line suffers as a result. Similarly with public sector organizations, such as schools, I have argued. The current “HEC Board” imperative was established from on high without an apparent thought about whether or not it could be reasonably carried out on the grass roots level, ultimately the worst characteristic of a hierarchy. Either some of this program, or other activities that carry value, will sink into the tar pit, because not all of value can be sustained at a quality level.

Finally, the appropriate correction of muri is communication between levels, along with an objective evaluation about whether or not the new initiative is sustainable at current staffing levels. Nothing of this sort happened; I grant to do so would have been tedious and a further waster of time, given the distances within the hierarchy that are involved. With that in mind, I have cooperated with the general idea of College Bound Scholars, because it is an excellent idea. But the excellence of the idea becomes corrupted once time is wasted on unnecessary reportage.

In the end, I feel set up to fail, since I cannot do with quality everything I am asked to do, and now I am asked to do more, and some of it makes no sense, yet I am left to rail (bray) at the moon.

Compare this testimony to the apparently more successful experience of the assembly line workers at Fiat/Chrysler, who are invited to create their own work environment to a significant extent, in cooperation with their supervisors.

The good news is that hierarchies can learn to communicate up and down levels, as Fiat/Chrysler has demonstrated. A separate development in our school is a hopeful case in point, though it has foundered from a promising start. Stay tuned for the next episode of “Empower Your People”

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Schools Bureaucracy: Empower Your People; Chrysler Does (Part A)

Posted on February 10, 2012 by schooldog

The next few posts will compare one example of a recent American corporate success that has valued the creative and cognitive input of workers and staff with two organizational episodes taken from my school experience. The first of these school cases involves an almost naïve bureaucratic soft directive, well meaning and even a good idea but delivered in apparent full ignorance of its impact on the already stretched energies of school house workers.  The second school item, by contrast, involves a fairly thorough collegial examination of a support plan for struggling learners, initiated in our school by admin in concert with some staff, echoing similar programs in our area, but vetted through scrutiny by staff and administration together.

So, one corporate success that subverted hierarchical thinking, and two school episodes, one of which instructs how not to do it, and one how to do it.

To the corporate success…..

First off, allow me a tangential thought and an apology for using an article from Time Magazine. From the day I perused its pages semi-religiously as a college student (there are other activities of that day that also embarrass me) I lived with a dawning suspicion that I was following a false prophet. As my sophistication and knowledge of the world grew, and I began to know something on my own about a few things, I began to note the over simplicity of some of the messages Time intoned, which in time led to recognition that the truth of a situation or idea related by the magazine was in some instances quite distant from what a given article claimed. It was not so much slant that bothered me, but the inadequacy of the pictures drawn.

So, with apologies, I nonetheless draw your attention to an article in the December 19, 2011 Time Magazine, entitled “Power Steering: How Chrysler’s Italian boss drives an American auto revival.” The article examines how Fiat took over Chrysler, initially with American government financial assistance, and the manner in which bossman Sergio Marchionne transformed the troubled automaker into a revived industrial powerhouse now competing with increasing success on the open market.

Of course there are numerous angles to such success, but the piece germane to my discussion is Marchionne’s treatment of assembly line workers. To begin with, as reported by Time, rather than close a ramshackle assembly building, Fiat put the workers to work renovating the building, thereby giving them employment, a good thing. Then management brought in Italian workers to train their American counterparts in Fiat’s manufacturing system. Then, and this is the crux, rather than dictate lockstep each moment of the manufacturing process by fiat (clever, huh?), the American workers were first given the analytical skills to examine the assembly process. With those tools, the workers themselves helped to configure the assembly process with quality control, efficiency, and safety in mind.

Time Mag, at least, seems convinced that productivity has been boosted because “workers, not engineers, own the quality control process;” workers are much more “proactive.” Management is reported claiming that the UAW exhibits “very, very strong support” because no longer is hierarchical organization the norm at Chrysler; the UAW likes it presumably because its members are empowered and recognized as respected, thinking, contributing members of the whole. In fact, if other news articles over the past year are to be believed, The UAW and Chrysler have forged a broader partnership via a two tier wage structure designed to honor earlier contracts, but also to allow the old giant auto maker to once again have an internationally competitive cost system.

With apologies for my acceptance of some level of Time Mag “truth”, the upshot seems clear to me — where management and labor are so enlightened as to recognize that each thrives where the other is viewed as a partner, the organization prospers.

Parenthetically, it would be interesting to trace the historical development of Fiat’s and Marchionne’s managerial perspective. Has the Toyota success I discussed in earlier posts influenced the Italians? Or have they somehow arrived at a similar place in isolation? In an international marketplace, I suspect the former.

Next week I will focus this lens on what I see as a bureaucratic blunder in a worthwhile educational cause.

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Schools and Culture: Kid Failure and Adult Voice

Posted on February 2, 2012 by schooldog

Summary: In a national culture that often infantilizes too many young people, how do we in schools create an environment that counters this characteristic of the prevailing culture, and in the process essentially grow in our charges the personal and essentially adult attributes they need to be successful in their lives? Small issue.

Our local newspaper, the Seattle Times, periodically performs the historic task of newspapers by publishing lengthy exposes that prod government or other institutions to long overdue reforms. Their editorial page has consistently beaten the drum for educational reform, has to some extent a finger accurately on the pulse of schools, and with some authority promotes assorted reforms. For that, I respect the Times; they get a lot of the scene better than many outsiders, and they seem to work hard at it.

Recently the editors outlined a blueprint for action for the K-University system. Among the ideas were familiar comments about middle schools, and their status as a sinkhole for the prospects of some students. For reasons that are unclear, too many students flounder in middle school (usually grades 6-7-8), or its cousin, junior high school (7-8-9). Certain characteristics of middle school students, from poor grades, to attendance problems, to disciplinary problems presage poor performance in high school, dropping out, and generally falling off the path to personal and economic success.

From my position in the high school, when I periodically dig back into the lives of the 25% to 30% of my students who struggle in some way (and these are the ones who make it to high school), almost invariably the patterns of failure appear in their middle school record, and then often much of the time in the middle school record of kids who had done acceptably in elementary school.

The Times editorial offered a tidbit I had not known. In a Harvard study that compared kids who attended middle school with kids who attended a K-8 pattern, the latter group proceeded to be relatively more successful in high school, though also showed declines. The Times comments that there may be something in the nature of middle school that may be the culprit, but acknowledges that we aren’t sure why middle school appears to function less successfully than the K-8 alternative.

I can speculate as well as the next. Middle school kids, particularly seventh and eighth graders, are entering a phase of their cognitive and emotional development where they naturally and culturally begin to challenge the authority –parent and adult — whom they heretofore more or less have accepted as the rule giver and boundary setter.

At the same time, the strength of those cultural and familial boundaries are less certain; many commentators have lamented a culture in which too often an openness to diversity of thought becomes misdirected into the disappearance of boundaries. The distinction between right and wrong, healthy and unhealthy behavior, has become less clear, and with it the willingness of authority to exercise normal adult control of the young ones becomes wobbly.

Enter youngsters hell bent to challenge the boundaries. A normal healthy fear of consequences has been muted in the elementary years by permissive family structures and an even more permissive society. As middle school kids challenge the orthodoxy that would have them doing their homework, being respectful of teachers and one another, and in general performing as is necessary to make the next steps to high school and beyond, their elders falter in their certainty, too many kids in effect call the bluff, and tune out the jabbering and correct but ineffectual voices telling them to do well in school. Too many kids prove to not work toward the accountability expected, nor to know how to work hard, or to overcome difficulties because the culture all along has let them off the hook, and now when they are called to account, we emperors have no clothes; we cannot force them to do what we know they need to do, because the aura of authority once lost is difficult to regain. Of course, this is essentially a critique of our culture, not of the kids who, despite their wayward behavior, are mostly still innocents. We have simply failed them already.

It is one thing to put the finger on the pulse, and to describe the reality, but another to determine a course of corrective action, whether toward the middle school dilemma, or toward its offspring in the high school. Why is it that a K-8 system is relatively more successful? Note “relatively.” It would be useful to know if they are relatively successful, or simply less prone to failure relative to middle schools.

But perhaps they are relatively more successful because there is no transition during student age known for upheaval. Transitions are always more fraught with difficulty through many human settings. In a K-8 system the authority structure stays intact during a difficult stage of development, particularly in a culture that struggles to maintain structure. Kids need that structure because, contrary to popular culture, they really do not yet know what they are about, though they are getting there.

My wife, a veteran of all three levels of schools, suggests that elementary schools are by their nature more lockstep and prescriptive, and so may better hold in check the incipient educational mayhem.

More needs to be known about these whys and wherefores. However, there is a larger question over time toward which I hope to bring to bear my musings. If we have too many kids who do not know what it is to be accountable, to meet expectations, to work through difficulty and what it is to work truly hard, then what is the regimen, what is the school culture, what is the relationship with the parent community that will begin the slow slog toward acculturating our students in these personality characteristics they so lack, and without which they will not join the march in this technological and internationally competitive age?

Though we lament our current condition, and fulminate about the character of too many of the kids we encounter, it remains our professional responsibility to both the kids and our culture to find remedy for the reality we face.

From where I sit now, I think the answer lies in schools becoming more prescriptive and more structured, and in the adult, professional, and parent community finding a stronger voice that reminds our young charges that though we respect their thinking and their urge to growth, there are important matters in which we still know more than they do, and they had damn well better listen to our prescription, at their future peril. They must take us not as the voice of threat, but the voice of reality and see us as a source of wisdom. Something in that general vicinity, down the road some time later. Stay tuned to Schooldog!

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School Bureaucracy: We Now Learn Good Teachers Are Valuable

Posted on January 25, 2012 by schooldog

Summary: Another in a string of commentary about flattening the school hierarchy, and the value of teacher and staff input to decision making.

Age old is the tale of the teacher, from the wise one, to the prophet, to the poetess, to the prosaic school teacher whose memory is carried life long by former students as testimony to the impact the teacher has had on their lives. Nearly everyone remembers fondly a particular teacher who reached into their lives and made an imprint that carries them to this day.

That pivotal experience of a teacher in elementary, middle school, or high school has entered the chambers of myth and archetype well beyond the individual’s experience, and so has become a bedrock truth; the culture knows that good teachers make a difference. Colleagues know who the better teachers are, and students and parents certainly can identify those who make an impact and those who do not.

In truth, many people go into teaching, and then stay in teaching, because of the belief and then the experience that what they say and do in and out of the classroom makes an impact that their charges will never forget. Makes up for the low ceiling pay, by a long shot. A good teacher’s life is never a wasted life.

So I have mixed feelings when I read in Nicholas Kristof’s column, that “It’s All about Great Teachers.” (Seattle Times, 1/13/2012) Kristof discusses a study by economists at Columbia and Harvard, first reported in recent weeks, that found that certain teachers (“good teachers,” of course) had such an impact on their charges in elementary or middle school, by comparison with that of more pedestrian, or even bad teachers, as to affect their students’ lifetime earnings to a significant degree, as well as whether or not they would go to college, or whether or not a young lady would become pregnant as a teenager.

I suppose it is a good thing to now learn, as we have in other studies, though few as comprehensive as this one, that the efforts of good teachers have been quantified into monetary and specific, measurable terms of social impact. It is probably good that these measures will give argument to the honorable bean counters in congress and our legislatures, that money spent now on quality teachers will reap “profit” in a variety of “products” down the road. I am saddened that something we have always known must be “proven” before we can act on the knowledge, or maybe the knowledge has never been the point, but the will and the wisdom as a culture to act on it.

Hopefully, these econometrics as cited will build on the momentum generated by many other efforts to improve our schools, and the breast beating by well meaning leaders that our schools are a disgrace and must be reformed.

Here I come back to my concern about the impact of school hierarchy on these good teachers whose importance we now recognize. I wondered some posts back why the best and brightest, and the Teach for America crowd, and those who end up on Wall Street rather than the classroom – why would such ambitious independent thinkers put up with the unimaginative structures as they currently exist in too many school districts?

If a good teacher is so important, would not it make sense to bring that good teacher front and center into decision making, because arguably he or she knows something about reaching kids that many of his peers, including administrators, do not, or have forgotten in the years since they have been in the classroom? And, again, if companies such as Google and Toyota thrive on the upward generation of ideas from the grass roots, then why cannot schools adjust and till the same fertile fields?

Why not? Because too many school organizations retard the upward flow of information, are overly hierarchical in their set up, and too controlling in their management posture. Moreover, the incentives to “profess” – that is, to be professional, are sorely lacking. Good teachers affect their students; the irony is that while all applaud their importance, no one seems to listen to their ideas.

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School Bureaucracy: The Flattening of Structure: Muda, Muri, and Mura

Posted on January 17, 2012 by schooldog

Building on last week’s introduction to the history of the Toyota revival following the Second World War, and its use of the thinking of Edward Deming, this post explores some of the managerial concepts that have been key ingredients to the Japanese automobile mastery of international markets, which may in turn provide fertile ground for school reorganization and teacher revival in this country.

A key concept in the Japanese management philosophies derived from the teaching of Edward Deming is the effort to eliminate waste, as a way of building profit. Three sub-concepts drive the hunt for waste in the production system — muda, muri, and mura. I thank Wikipedia for the following explications.

Muda roughly translates as an examination of the manufacturing process for “non value adding work.” If certain motions and processes are identified as not adding value, then they are to be eliminated. Those who exist in particularly rigid school bureaucracies may nod knowingly. Though in my personal school circumstances I can’t say I do a lot that I don’t think arguably adds some value, partly because of my own decisions, some of what I do is more valuable than other uses of my time. Perhaps in our financially strapped profession, muda would also ask what are the highest values in our hierarchy of tasks? Lower value adding tasks would be sacrificed in favor of higher value adding tasks.

While this concept may be more clearly applied to profit oriented manufacture than to student learning, its philosophical underpinnings could profitably undergird how we spend our time and energies in schools. As it is, new duties chronically are assigned on top of previous ones, and inevitably priorities are made via whatever is the latest program or initiative du jour. Because there is only so much staff time and energy available, older practices that may hold higher value simply sink into the tar pit. I see little systemic effort to evaluate priorities, or to identify the highest added value within a menu of possible activities.

“Muri” translates as overburden, unreasonableness to the point of absurdity. Here I laugh. This one I definitely relate to. I scramble into too much of my own personal time to complete the heavy load of tasks on my professional plate, and now our central office, via our principal, has downloaded a new responsibility that will either simply not get done, get done shoddily, or replace something else that itself may have higher value.

The contrary wisdom in muri is that such overburden leads to shoddy workmanship, poor production, problems with worker morale, and the like. This is not a union call to equitable working conditions, but an overt recognition by management that an overburdened worker is a liability to the efficiency of manufacture, while a worker challenged within a system in which it is more possible to do his or her part becomes an asset. How enlightened this seems from inside the belly of the beast I inhabit.

Note the inherent respect for the worker, and the recognition that the guts of the enterprise is on the factory floor. I argue that the guts of the school is within the classroom and within the teachers’ purvey, a concept which gets lip serviced somewhat these days, but I suspect a great majority of line staff  would respond much as I have just above.

“Mura” refers (if I understand it correctly) to the synchronization of systems within the production process so as to reduce the waste of over inventory on one hand, and on the other hand the waste of down time in one unit of production while the preceding unit catches up. True that kids and learning do not readily fit into this system of thinking as well as do widgets. But once again some useful inferences can be drawn for the benefit of schools.

One inference involves an implicit paradigm shift from hierarchical communication, so familiar to school bureaucracies, to systemic communication, which engages multiple way communication both horizontally and vertically. In an oversimplified industrial example, personnel on the final assembly line and those who operate the separate production line that makes the engines have to be on the same wave length so that each line synchronizes its production pace with the other. In a school, teachers of freshman need to communicate with teachers of seniors so that the younger students learn the building blocks they will need as seniors. Similarly, the discipline and teaching of a wayward student requires the consultation of teacher and administrator. The administrator enthralled with his new program needs to hear the concerns of the teacher who recognizes the value of the idea but already feels under water without the addition of new duties. In each example, a genuinely mutual dialogue may produce an enhanced final product. And so forth.

Further integral in these notions of system is the implicit respect given all levels. If I recognized that I as a principal or superintendent cannot do my job without the full cooperation, intellect, and energies of the people in the systems with which I engage, then I must respect their implicit power to support or sabotage, and if they then produce, I must respect what is essentially my subordinate’s professionalism. I would wager that few of those who work in hierarchies, school or otherwise, feel respected in this way.

It is a short journey from respect given workers/colleagues to putting the onus on management to design systems in which teachers cum workers can be successful. Put another way, managers in such a philosophy recognize their task is to “fix the system”, not the people.

The tendency to blame both up and down the hierarchy is muted by the systemic approach. The finger is less likely to be pointed at one or another, but the question becomes, “how can we work together to produce a higher level outcome.” Teamwork is the norm, is in fact the lifeblood of a systems approach.

Parenthetically, in the family therapy world, there exists a centrifugal tendency in dysfunctional families to blame the parent, or to blame the kid, or the step parent, ad infinitum. A systems approach mutes these upward cycling accusations by working to refine the family system, which is seen as the cause of the dysfunction in the lives of the individuals, rather than some flaw in the individuals themselves.

Finally, back to respect given to all human elements of the organizational process. This need not mean the abdication of managerial prerogative, but does describe a kind of dialectic, worker and manager, teacher and principal, engaged in an in depth dialogue about the work at hand, in which each unique perspective is exposed to the other in a mutual challenge and response, with the notion that the ultimate implementation will represent more than the sum of the parts. James Womack, a founder of what is called the Lean Enterprise Institute, as I mentioned earlier as an offshoot of the Deming/Toyota partnership, put it thus:

“The manager after all doesn’t just say ‘I trust you to solve the problem because I respect you. Do it your way and get on with it.’ And the manager isn’t a morale booster, always saying, ‘Great job!’ Instead the manager challenges the employees every step of the way, asking for more thought, more facts, and more discussion, when the employees just want to implement their favored solution.”

“Over time I’ve come to realize that this problem solving process is actually the highest form of respect. The manager is saying to the employees that the manager can’t solve the problem alone, because the manager isn’t close enough to the problem to know the facts. He or she truly respects the employees’ knowledge and their dedication to finding the best answer. But the employees can’t solve the problem alone either because they are often too close to the problem to see its context and they may refrain from asking tough questions about their own work. Only by showing mutual respect – each for the other and for each other’s role – is it possible to solve problems, make work more satisfying, and move organizational performance to an ever higher level” www.lean.org/womack/columnarchive.cfm?y=2006&ey=2007#col755

I could live with that.

The culmination of the paradigm shift is an emphasis on continual improvement. Systems are not static; they are ever in flux. There will not be a point of arrival, but always adjustments to changing conditions of the human or economic environment. While hierarchies tend to stasis, systems with internal communications have a better chance of making adjustments to changing economic conditions. In the case of schools, the adjustments might be to alterations in the funding environments or to the subtle differences between individual kids’ needs.

Sounds almost utopian, and I assume falls prey to all the interpersonal foibles to which the species succumbs. Yet as a system in the perpetual making, in a competitive setting where failure to succeed means the death of the organization, this philosophy has had demonstrable success in the Toyota post second world war “miracle”.

With modest progress, but still in a statistical scorched earth environment metaphorically related to post war Japan, would not American schools benefit from some absorption of the principles that lifted Toyota to its heights? Some would argue that such cooperative enterprise is more fitted to a communitarian culture such as the Japanese, and less so to the American ethic of the isolated struggle. If that is to be the argument, then apparently it is no wonder that the Japanese auto makers have come to dominate the world automobile market, and in recent revivals their American counterparts have found it useful to borrow some of the same philosophy, as we shall see in subsequent posts.

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School Bureaucracy: The Flattening of Structure — Deming, Toyota, and Lean Management

Posted on January 9, 2012 by schooldog

Summary: A look at management philosophies from the corporate world that encourage worker input.

So it is the New Year, and we are back in our traces. Vacation in the Florida sun still warms the Northwest gloom to which we’ve returned. A kayak tour in the mangrove tunnels, though Floridian, lends insight to the precarious nature of today’s New Orleans. A sunset on Boca Grande will be one I will describe numerous times in the months ahead – the blue iridescent water, the pink glow around the horizon, the scalloped shadows on the white sand, and magical visits from dolphins just offshore. A heron stalked its way along the sand amid its human, transfixed audience. As with memorable trips in the mountains, the images will return to me in flashbacks for days.

Schools. I did promise to go easy on my complaints about bureaucracy, and instead examine mechanisms that hold promise for “flattening” the bureaucracy, in the parlance of those who think about these things. “Flattening” refers to practices that bring levels of hierarchy into closer communication with one another in various ways, either by limiting distinctions between levels or by self conscious establishment of conversation between levels. In other words, move consciously to render the bureaucracy at least somewhat less bureaucratic, therefore more efficient and creative, less frustrating and corrosive to the spirit. At least that’s the idea.

A fundamental component of the phenomenal rise of Toyota in the years since the Second World War has been the transformation of the Japanese “brand” image from cheap junk to quality product. This metamorphosis goes well beyond image to the substance of the Toyota automobile. For perhaps the last forty years, not only Toyota but Honda and Subaru have set the standard for durable automobiles that just keep on going, while the reliability of comparable American manufactures has lagged.

Ironically, an American industrial organizational expert, Edward Deming, played a key role in this reversal of fortune. Obscure in the early 50’s on this side of the Pacific, he found his audience in Japanese industrial circles more receptive, depleted and devastated by war as they still were. Deming preached a gospel of quality control, of continuous improvement, and of worker contribution to systemic progress. Over the years as Toyota adopted Deming’s principles, those principles seem to have been transformed by language and culture into something uniquely Toyota. In turn in more recent years, American manufacturers, back on their own heels, have taken to studying Toyota’s techniques, among them “quality circles”, which in a triumph of globalism, have been successfully reintroduced onto factory floors in this country. Quality circles recognize the value of input by front line workers in the improvement of both quality of product and efficiency of manufacture.

Through brief research on the internet it is clear that the industrial philosophies and techniques involved are rich and complex, and not subject to easy reduction. Yet that same brief internet survey (abetted by years of eclectic reading on my part) suggests the Toyota experience might hold lessons for school organization.

For example, if it has been important to its rise to industrial might for Toyota to invite input from workers on the factory floor, then might not American schools utilize some of the same mechanism?

Also on the internet I looked for examples of Deming’s thinking applied to school organization, either directly in his name, or through derivatives, though I never in many year’s of reading about education recall having encountered one such reference. The magic of Google brought only a few references, including one from a researcher in North Carolina in 1997 that reported he had found little transference of Deming’s principles to school management orthodoxy.

From my position of partial knowledge (I told you I was dangerous!) it looks as though Deming and Toyota’s principles, also now transformed into something called Lean Management, have seldom crossed the membrane between private and public and fertilized thinking about the organization of American schools, though it may be that enough of their thinking has entered the orthodoxy as to flavor school organization in some places, albeit without direct reference to Deming or Toyota. The Gates Foundation flirted with related ideas in its championing of small schools, but I don’t know if their experiments self-consciously reflected Toyota’s experience. At any rate, Gates seems to have abandoned (to my thinking prematurely) that direction.

By no means do I claim expertise in organizational theory; however, there are aspects of the Deming/Toyota/Lean systems as I read about them that I think hold promise to our thinking about schools and their organization. Simple internet searches of “Edward Deming”, “Toyota Production Systems”, “Lean Management” and related topics such will quickly bring the curious to more of an introduction to these concepts. For example, if you are among the curious, look for concepts of waste reduction and “muri, muda, and mura.” The dive into Deming and Toyota will continue next week with a taste of these principles.

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Schools and Culture: Hope in Small Things

Posted on December 18, 2011 by schooldog

The heavy and long days of winter have descended in this Northern climate, and so too does the school year begin to lose the freshness of the new fall school year, and begin the long slog through winter darkness toward spring, the longer days, and the brighter weather. The anticipation of two weeks of vacation is part of the rhythm of this deep winter, for students and staff both. Both attention and energy wane as the daily school routine plods on.

I am not self consciously a Christian any more than I have always enjoyed the Christmas story, all wrapped up in school holiday and presents, and having been raised in an environment that inevitably has left me with some Christian perspectives, mostly those that Christians share with other religions. Nonetheless, I find myself reflecting on the meaning of this season, which in a secular fashion represents the rebirth of hope, not only of salvation in the Christian sense, but the notion that after the winter comes the spring, after a low cycle, a higher one, after struggle an accomplishment.

I wonder what this means for me as a school professional, at times wearying of the sundry battles with students for their attention and energy, with myself for efficient use of my time, and with the system within which I work for the respect of being listened to – all battles conducted on a daily basis by anyone who cares about what they are doing with kids.

When I despair that my efforts with kids seem not to bear enough fruit, or I am angered when my rational input is rebuffed for insubstantial reason, I sometimes am tempted to withdraw my energy from the game, and reapportion it to my private life. Yet, dang, just when I least expect it, some fruit of my labors ripens, and voila! I am encouraged to press on, because sometimes there is progress. I am reminded that rats learn more thoroughly through partial than consistent reinforcement. I, rat.

As I pause to visit family in Florida, here are some reminders to myself of gifts received in my work recently at moments when the grind threatened to turn me sour.

I thank my heretofore good student Enrique, who so mysteriously left school last week, vowing for private reasons that he was done, who suddenly showed up Friday, and announced he was back in the game.

I thank the teachers who turn thoughtful while discussing their students, whether in a staffing, or providing me with input for college recommendations.

I thank the district counseling coordinator, call him Hernando, who has resurrected an older successful practice in our district counselor meetings by opening them to genuine dialogue between levels. We counselors feel more respected, and the district will be better for the kind of input folks in our position can provide to district concerns, such as the drop out rate, the failure rate, and the like.

A bright Somali fellow, in country barely a year, but with better English than that, with whom I share a joke of subtlety that belies our generational, cultural and linguistic barriers.

A grandparent picks up the dropped responsibilities of a parent, and may guide him yet, with our help, to graduation in June. A grace for the student; a gift to our labors just when we might have lost him.

It’s a long run to wherever it is we are going with this education thing, with schools and their reform. It is imperative we note the moments within the turmoil and the frustration and the defeat that bring uplift and resolution and even triumph, though it be in small things, and that we allow these events to salve us our toil, justify our efforts, and keep us going.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

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School Bureaucracy: The Google Testimony

Posted on December 12, 2011 by schooldog

For some weeks now, I have tired of repetition of stories about the rigidities of school bureaucracies, and have been hankering to explore what I think are promising avenues to combat and reform the power structure. To do so, I’m going to begin in familiar pages.

Those who have read these pages more than a couple of times will recognize that I find inspiration frequently in the pages of the “Atlantic” magazine, and this time is another instance. James Fallows, a senior editor of the magazine, writes often of technology and society, in particular computers and society, and then even more specifically about his experiences as a journalist managing his professional life with technology, together with implications for the broader culture. In the November Atlantic (“Hacked!”), he relates his and his wife’s adventures when her computer is hacked and a significant amount of her data lost, at least initially. In his address to Google, both his and his wife’s email carrier, he descends into the proverbial belly of the beast in order to challenge Google’s initial assertion that, well, they were able to retrieve some data, but a substantial part was just gone, sorry. Fallows’ instincts prove apt, and timely, because lo and behold, Google was in the end able to retrieve his wife’s missing data due to a recently developed capacity within the Google system.

At this point his story, he makes an exciting observation, and I quote, “In companies like Google, relatively few innovations are the result of top-down orders from executives. More evolve bottom-up, as engineers and product managers become sold on the need to add a new product or feature to the company’s offerings.” Serendipitous to the Fallows’ misfortune, “sometime last year, the Gmail engineers became sold on the value of a recovery system for maliciously deleted e-mail,” and so it was their luck that “hit the debugging cycle just when it did.”

While I am happy that the Fallows found technological justice and institutional good fortune, as an inhabitant of a school bureaucracy I am astounded that “in a company like Google, relatively few innovations are the result of top-down orders.” In the school system I inhabit, virtually no innovations originate from the rank and file; virtually all innovations, some of them good ones, are incubated at administrative levels, virtually never with teacher level involvement, and are commanded in a top-down fashion, even if there is some show of collaboration in the roll out.

It goes without saying that Google is a more successful organization than virtually all school systems, at what it does.

Which of course begs the question, what is it that schools systems can learn from the Googles of the world to invigorate creativity at non administrative levels?

What worldview of leaders/founders in these innovative companies stimulates upward movement of ideas? Are they somehow more democratic? Are they more swash-buckling, and as startup innovators, they have less to lose than the holders of the reins in more established organizations? Is it their relative youth and imbuement with the ethics of the open net, a kind of electronic frontier libertarianism? Do successful charter schools mimic this kind of philosophy somehow?

It is true that the Googles of the world are relatively flush with cash, and even rank and file engineers and programmers are well paid (at least I surmise), and so in effect empowered to act with initiative. Stock options also serve as financial incentives for rank and file to act in a way so as to better the company. Money is nice, no question. Risk taking and creative thinking can reap huge financial rewards for cutting edge companies, and hence their employees, for tilling previously fallow fields. By contrast, there are numerous downward pressures on teacher rank and file salaries that don’t exist in a successful technology sector.

Sidebar:  School systems have been around a long time; whereas new technology organizations build from the bottom up, older organizations have to shift gears from the old as well as innovate with the new. Inertia can be a terrible thing. Microsoft, once a vibrant startup, now seems to struggle with innovative relevance, despite continuing success as a profitable corporation. And despite lots of money.

Numerous experiments exist across the country, charter schools and otherwise, that are run in a private market, for profit context with the same mixed results as many other public sector attempts to innovate. Such initiatives are a favorite in conservative, free market circles. I have long tried in my own mind to follow market principles through the patterns of what I know about schools. While some market mechanisms, or at least incentive systems borrowed from market precepts, seem to apply in the microcosm, I consistently run across limitations as I follow what I think are market applications into the broad strokes of school organization and success. David Brooks offered some useful thoughts in a February 2011 column that I will explore at a later point.

One intriguing template to work from is offered by a private health care company out of California, once again profiled in the pages of the November “Atlantic”, “The Quiet Health Care Revolution”. The company, CareMore, which works largely with elderly Medicare patients, has based its work on a principle long known to be true – that is, preventive care is cheaper than downstream emergency, crisis, and hospital care. The company has saved substantial money on late stream hospital care by setting up systems that intervene with their clientele when warning signs first emerge, and currently turn a healthy profit. They seem to be doing what the federal health care overhaul aims at doing, which is to prioritize not expensive procedures, but the managing of health. The Medicare reimbursement system rewards them for it.

Could school systems be set up in such a manner? In other words, what would happen if resources were heavily loaded into the pre-school and elementary years, where poor health habits, poor nutrition, and lack of appropriate early learning experiences cripple students who by high school lack academic luster and who are prone to failure? Sure, the devil will be in the details, but this one veteran will enjoy the speculation.

Besides various market based incentive systems, there are other promising means to enliven bureaucratic deadwood —

— In other posts I will explore the ability of technology, in the form of wikis and on-line chat systems to flatten bureaucratic patterns

— Why haven’t quality circles and their attendant philosophy not sprouted in schools? Toyota based a good deal of its iconic reputation for quality on American Edward Deming’s ideas about such worker input to corporate improvement. It is ironic that the Japanese corporate world, a maker of money, should respect the thinking of their workers and support that thinking more so than do American schools. Probably because, as with Google, it is good business.

— Could some kind of ombudsman system, or even whistle blower protection, encourage ideas to rise in the hierarchy?

— By what means can an increased professional identity on the parts of teachers create upward pressures so teachers are heard rather than suppressed? How can this be done without injecting more money and bolstering teacher salaries?

— Finally, at least for now, have we experimented thoroughly enough with small schools with flattened structures, including their autonomy from the larger structure supporting them, and which empower the principal and staff to collaborate? I would bet that when and if we find the formula that will work in this culture, it will rely on such models, as necessary but not sufficient to a broad based incline in school improvement.

 

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