Arne Duncan Makes Me Want To Punch Myself In The Brain

Arne Duncan still has a gift. I'm not talking about his ability to continually get bookings as an education, though that certainly counts as a gift in the sense that he has done nothing to earn it. No, I'm talking about his preternatural ability to raise my blood pressure.

He still hasn't gone away.

This morning, as the Board of Directors naps, I am scanning through a batch of edu-reporting that comes across my screen. I am looking at a summary of various stories from the balonyfest that is ASUGSV, when I get to a summary of a discussion of the "real" lessons of the college admissions scandal, and there I find this:

Arne Duncan, managing partner at Emerson Collective and former U.S. secretary of education, pointed out that students from wealthy families who score low on college readiness exams still have a better chance of graduating college than high-scoring students from lower-income families.

Well, duh. You might imagine that the very next sentence would be something like, "That's one more piece of proof that my policy of basing all district, school, and teacher accountability on scores from standardized tests based on allegedly college and career ready standards was a bunch of bunk, completely misguided, and a huge mistake that I now deeply regret." Ha, just kidding. Nobody familiar with Duncan would imagine that because another of Duncan's gift was a complete disconnect between the words that came out of his mouth and the policies that came out of his office. Duncan could-- and did-- wax rhapsodic about the importance of caring teachers building relationships with students in making a difference, and then go right back to demanding that those teachers be judged on their standardized test scores. He could talk about the importance of evidence and then go back to pushing policies for which there was no evidence-- or, as is the case here, pushing policies for which there was contrary evidence. Maybe the reportage here just cut out the moment of self-revelation and contrition, but history suggests not.

I mean, dammit, Arne-- you just admitted that test scores don't really tell us anything about college prospects, but here we all sit, saddled with test-centered policies that you set in cement for the whole country.

Duncan is reportedly a nice guy, but he is probably Trumpian in his ability to talk out of all sides of his mouth without a single apparent moment of reflection or self-examination.

And Lord knows there's a lot to examine. For my money, while Betsy DeVos is a truly awful and unqualified Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan inflicted far more actual damage on the US public education system. Duncan owes the students, teachers, and parents of the US a huge apology. But we're never going to get it; he'll just keep saying things that we used to say to him in an attempt to get him to realize the wrongness of his policies, only he's never going to connect the dots. He'll just smile that derpy grin, head off to his next cushy edu-guru gig, cash some more checks, and never actually see all the destruction he caused. All that and periodically raising my blood pressure.

ICYMI: Finish Those Taxes Edition (4/14)

Personally, mine are already mailed in. My circumstances changed so much this year I have no idea whether I took a bigger hit or not. But regardless of your tax status, here are some pieces from the week for your edification. Take a read, and support these writers by passing on their stuff. Remember-- when you amplify a news media piece about education and it garners more hits, you help convince editors that it's worth their time to cover education.

Most Vouchers Go To Students From Wealthier Districts

This is not a new piece, but it's a reminder that in Arizona, where vouchers have bloomed, they are rarely used by poor students to "escape" terrible schools. Good to keep in mind as vouchers enjoy a new push across the country.

The Plot Against America: Inside the Christian plan to "remodel" the nation.

A deeper dig into the UDSA Today piece about copy-paste bills. And it does get to education and vouchers.

If We Don't Work On Pedagogy, Nothing Else Matters   

Not sure I agree with every single word of this essay from Robin Pendoley, but it's at the very least a place to start a discussion.

Betsy DeVos Can't Be Bothered 

Mary Sanchez at the Orlando Sentinel has kind of had it with the typical Betsy DeVos Congressional hearing performance.

The Toll College and Career Ready Education Has Taken On Students

Nancy Bailey talks about the damage done by this policy obsession.

LeBron James Opened a School That Was Considered an Experiment

Remember how King James was going to throw his weight and money behind a public school? Erica Green takes a measured, thoughtful look at how that's going. Worth reading not just for the work of the school, but to remember what journalism that is neither puffing up a miracle school nore tearing down an edu-disaster looks like.

DeVos's Staff Blocked Researchers

Jan Resseger looks a little more closely at how the department tried to thwart research about their spending on charter schools.

Beverly Cleary's Birthday

Not strictly an education story, but the woman turned 103 this week. Damn! Here are some nice birthday pieces from Oprah, Southern Living, and Scary Mommy.  

Ron Desantis Has Big Hairy Audacious Goals For Florida Education

An excellent overview of just how very much trouble public education is in in Florida.

Betsy DeVos Quietly Making It Easier for Dying For-profits To Stick It To Students  

DeVos remains a fan of business; of students bilked by business, not so much. Here's one small, quiet way she's looking out for the former by sticking it to the latter.

Benchmark Assessments Don't Actually Do Any Good

Some thoughts about repeatedly weighing the pig.

Softly Killing Public Education

Add the St. Louis Dispatch to the list of newspaper editorial boards that have figured out that the push for vouchers is a push to kill and replace public education.

Bad Ideas and Educational Scripture  

Should we listen to the experts or to teachers (trick question).

Putting The Pieces Together   

The Momma Bears connect the voucher push of guys like Governor Lee to the drive to kill public education.

Obstacles To Building Better Writers

Writing well is one of the great uber-skills, a quality that will open an infinite number of doors in a student's life. Unfortunately, we are living through a golden age of bad writing instruction, driven by high stakes testing and shrunken, meager ideas about the very purpose of education.

In 39 years, I had some success in teaching students to be better writers. If you are a teacher intent on building better writers in your classroom, there are several positive steps to take, but we'll get back to those another day. The first step is to avoid several major obstacles that will thwart your progress and send you down paths that do not lead to your desired destination.

There Is Little Useful Research Base To Help You

These days we call for research and evidence to support instructional approaches in the classroom, but there is no meaningful research to speak of when it comes to writing. The available research is based primarily on the one question--does this technique raise test scores. That's generally problematic, but it's particularly problematic because there is no good standardized test of writing, because there is no good simple objective standardized measure of good writing. The closest we come are tests that run writing samples past experienced human readers (not tests that run writing samples past scorers who are briefly trained and given simple instructions to follow), and then we will still deal with some bias.

Look, we know there are no universally agreed-upon objective measures of writing. Pick any writer, no matter how revered and successful, from Shakespeare to Hemmingway, and I will find you experts who can explain why that beloved scribe is really a hack. The canon is full of writers who cannot manage both content and technique. And of course the canon itself is regularly rotated as our ideas about great writing shift and change.

So if someone tells you they have come up with an objective, standardized test that shows how well someone writes, they are full of baloney. And if they say they want to show you some useful research based on the results of that test, they have taken their baloney, ground it up and fried it--but it's still baloney.

There Is Only One Shortcut, And You Won't Feel Good About Using It

Over the years, many teachers have developed their own little shortcuts for dealing with that giant stack of papers. Some are ridiculously reductive, like the content area teachers who scan the essay to find certain key terms. The unfortunate truth is that if you assign 150 essays, you will have to read and respond to 150 essays. There is one corner you can cut. Students get better at writing by repeatedly writing, week after week. Frequent writing is far more effective than assigning one large writing project every nine or twelve weeks. But that creates a mountain of paperwork. The shortcut is for some assignments to only be read without a teacher response on the paper. You won't feel good about it, but the alternative is to imitate a former colleague of mine who used to take a personal day each quarter to sit at home and grade papers for twenty straight hours.

There Is No Substitute For Being A Writer Yourself

Band directors need to play instruments. Coaches need some athletic background. Great teachers of literature have read the works they teach. There may be exceptions, but they are few and far between. If you do not do some sort of writing yourself, your instruction is going to be empty second- and third-hand hints borrowed from other sources. There is no larger roadblock than trying to teach students to write when the last thing you wrote yourself was a college paper 20 years ago. When you stand up in front of your class or make marks on a student paper, you literally do not know what you are talking about.

There Are Traditions That Need To Be Discarded

If you are of a certain age, you were taught that first you must know the parts of speech so that you could build a sentence, and that you must build sentences before you could build a paragraph, and then build paragraphs so that you could build an essay. Today, there are still teaching methods built on the notion that the basic building block of a piece of writing is the sentence.

I disagree. The basic foundation of a piece of writing is not a sentence--it's an idea. Before you can write anything, you have to have an idea to write about. The traditional technical approach is helpful in learning how to write essays strictly for school (and for teachers whose writing instruction is based on this technical approach), but not for real writing for the actual world. The majority of writing problems are not technical problems--they are thinking problems. Should students still learn nouns and verbs and sentences and paragraphs? Absolutely. When there's a knock in the engine and the car won't run right, you need the knowledge to tear it down and fix the issue. But if you have no destination in mind, being able to build a car from scratch can't help you.

Once you get past these obstacles, you are ready to take some positive steps toward building better writers. In other words, once you climb this small mountain, the ascent to the far higher summit can begin

Originally posted at Forbes    

DeVos Pushes Questionable Charter Research

The New York Post headline is pretty definitive: "Case Closed: Charter schools deliver more education 'bang' for the buck." Writers Patrick Wolf and Corey DeAngelis are plugging their new paper, and Betsy DeVos is on Facebook plugging it some more.

DeAngelis we've met before. He's a Fellow for the Cato Institute, policy adviser for the Heartland Institute, and a Distinguished Working-on-his-PhD Fellow at the University of Arkansas, all of this built on a foundation of a BBA (2012) and MA (2015) in economics from the University of Texas in San Antonio (because nobody understands education like economists). And while plugging away on that Masters, he worked first as the Risk Management Operations Coordinator and then the Fraud Coordinator for Kohl's. Patrick Wolf has several degrees in political science and has worked as an academic for most of his career.

And then they showed me directions to the unicorn farm.

Their research here comes from the University of Arkansas's Department of Education Reform, which is always a bit of a red flag. The department was set up about fifteen years ago, with about $20 million provided in part by the Walton family; some speculate the department was also a stipulation attached to a $300 million Walton gift to the University shortly before the launch. The University brought in Jay Greene (no relation), an ed reform advocate from the Manhattan Institute, to run the department, which in many ways resembles an advocacy think tank more than a real university department. Over the years it has been a reliable Walton-funded source of academic-flavored PR for ed reform and the charter industry.

This particular paper comes out of something called the School Choice Demonstration Project, which studies the effects of school choice.

A Good Investment: The Updated Productivity of Public Charter Schools in Eight U.S. Cities pretends to measure school productivity, focusing on eight cities- Houston, San Antonio, New York City, Washington DC, Atlanta, Indianapolis, Boston, and Denver. In fact, the paper actually uses the corporate term ROI-- return on investment.

We could dig down to the details here, look at details of methodology, break down the eight cities, examine the grade levels represented, consider their use of Investopedia for a definition of ROI. But that's not really necessary, because they use two methods for computing ROI-- one is rather ridiculous, and the other is exceptionally ridiculous.

Method One: Ridiculous

The one thing you can say for this method of computing ROI is that it's simple. Here's the formula, plucked directly from their paper so that you won't think I'm making up crazy shit:

The achievement scores here are the results from the NAEP reading and math, and I suppose we could say that's better than the PARCC or state-bought Big Standardized Test, but it really doesn't matter because the whole idea is nuts.

It assumes that the only return we should look for on an investment in schools is an NAEP score. Is that a good assumption? When someone says, "I want my education tax dollars to be well spent," do we understand them to mean that they want to see high standardized test scores-- and nothing else?? Bot even a measure of students improving on that test. The paper literally breaks this down into NAEP points per $1,000. Is that the whole point of a school?

We can further see the ridiculousness of this by taking the next step-- if I want to make my school more cost-effective, as defined by this paper, what could I do? Well, I could cut every expense that isn't directly involved in preparing students to take the standardized math and reading test-- programs, staff, teachers, the works. And I would make sure that my school was filled with students who are good test-takers, with a minimum of ELL students and students with special needs.

Is it any wonder that this paper finds charter schools more "cost-effective" than public schools-- the "more bang for the buck" that the Post praised?

Method Two: More Ridiculous

Since ROI really should focus on the amount of money you get out compared to what you put in, the authors decided to take this exercise one step further.

To monetize this measure, we convert the average learning gains produced by each public school sector to the economic return of lifetime earnings.

The income return to investment is the net present value of additional lifetime earnings accrued through higher cognitive ability as measured by test scores.

Does the standardized math and reading test measure cognitive ability? And if you get your score to go up, does that mean your cognitive ability goes up, too? And most of all, what magical piece of unicorn-fueled research tells us that higher test scores lead to more income over a lifetime? Well, if you've been at this for a while, you know one of two names is about to appear, and sure enough...

Stanford University economist Eric Hanushek has estimated that a one standard deviation increase in cognitive ability leads to a 13 percent increase in lifetime earnings.

"Estimated" would be the key word here, because this whole mini-field of research has yet to produce convincing evidence since the OG of predictive standardized test economics, Raj Chetty, first started this gravy-soaked baloney train. The tortured methods used here to show how much money students will benefit from the test scores is inspired baloney. I show it here for your edification:

Only 70 percent of gains in learning persist each year. If we multiply these two estimates together, we find the learning gains relative to the average worker in the state. by comparing the learning gains relative to the average worker in the state, we estimate the returns to the schooling investment in terms of yearly income while accounting for contextual features of the local markets. We use 2017 data from the United states bureau of labor statistics to find state-level average annual earnings and assume that current students will work for 46 years between the ages of 25 and 70. When calculating the net present value of lifetime earnings, we assume a one percent yearly growth in average salaries and a three percent annual discount rate.

They use learning effect figures from a study conducted by the pro-charter CREDO that I cannot access on line. They assume that a student will spend thirteen years in a charter, though many charters do not offer all thirteen years. And they assume they have a legit formula for computing dollars of future earnings based on standardized test scores.

What else could be wrong? Argument from unexpected quarter.

Atlanta charters score high in this study because Atlanta has a big old cyber school, and if a cyber school is funded at a sensible level rather than the full level of a bricks and mortar school (as is the case in Atlanta) that makes them super-efficient. Except, of course, that study after study shows that virtual schools do a terrible job of actually educating students. But hey-- they're efficient.

But the efficiency study, particularly the second portion, suffers from one other major issue. There is likely to be a correlation between high test scores and later success in life, because both of those correlate heavily with socio-economic status of the family of the student. The real question is-- if we get a student to raise her standardized test score, will that improve her future. Are test results a good proxy for her future, and is improvement in those scores an indicator that her future has been improved? In other words, maybe we can get a student to raise her score-- but so what? Here's one person's thoughts:

If increasing test scores is a good indicator of improving later life outcomes, we should see roughly the same direction and magnitude in changes of scores and later outcomes in most rigorously identified studies. We do not. I’m not saying we never see a connection between changing test scores and changing later life outcomes; I’m just saying that we do not regularly see that relationship. For an indicator to be reliable, it should yield accurate predictions nearly all, or at least most, of the time.

That's Jay Greene, head honcho of the University of Arkansas Department of Education Reform.  A couple of years ago he started casting some serious doubts at the idea that the BS Test was a good tool for accountability, mostly because there's no evidence that improved scores have any connection to improved life outcomes.

Or, in the terms of this new study, there's no reason to believe that what they are calling "returns" on investment are returns at all. Not only are test scores and barely-supportable score-based fairy tales about the future the wrong returns to focus on in education, they aren't even real returns at all. DeAngelis and Wolf haven't just focused on the wrong thing-- they've focused on a nothing. This isn't just zooming in on toenails-- it's zooming in on unicorn toenails.

Sigh. And yet Betsy DeVos and other reformsters are going to push this because the short headline form-- charters give more bang for your buck than public schools-- helps promote charters.

AZ: Kelly Townsend Wants To Shut Teachers Up

Arizona's #RedForEd movement was long overdue. The state has been one of the nation's top playgrounds for charter profiteers, but at the same time, they have starved public schools for resources, with low and stagnant teacher pay along with the worst level of per pupil spending in the country.

The state was lucky that its teachers walked out en masse last year, because they were already walking out one at a time and not coming back. In 2017, 74% of Arizona's superintendents reported unfilled teaching positions. Arizona's leaders seem determined to destroy their public education system; the state's teachers were doing the families of the state a favor by pushing the state to take even the tiniest steps toward saving its public education system.

Two out of three isn't bad.

Of course, not all the members of the legislature saw it that way. There's this dipstick-- GOP House Leader John Allen who theorized that teachers were working two jobs because they wanted boats and bigger houses.

But perhaps no legislator has been more angry with teachers than Kelly Townsend. After a stint as in the Navy, Townsend became a small business operator and a doula. Townsend landed in the House in 2013 and has now risen to position of majority whip.

Right on the front page of her election website, she weighs in on #RedForEd:

Since elected in 2012, I have been advocating for more dollars in the classroom, and have been consistently supportive of teachers. was not able to vote for the Governor's plan in the end, however. It was adding too much to the budget without assurance that in an economic downturn we wouldn't face a serious deficit. The taxpayers would ultimately be on the hook for that deficit, which I believe is the ultimate goal of the RedForEd movement. I came to the Capitol to represent the taxpayer, not sell them out in order to please the loud minority. You can count on me to do the right thing in the end.

Additionally, I cannot support or negotiate with the RedForEd leaders who are openly espousing Socialist ideas, exposing students to those ideas, encouraging other teachers to read socialist material, and inserting politics into the movement. 

She can't support a raise in education spending because it might lead to a deficit, someday, which means she can't support any such increase ever. She thinks the goal of #RedForEd is to soak the taxpayers which makes perfect sense because they are SOCIALISTS!! And are trying to indoctrinate our children.

Townsend did not take last year's strike well. When a constituent reached out to encourage here to find a way to fund necessary raises for teachers, Townsend's response was...well...

I'm sure we can take it from the correctional officers pay who make minimum wage in some cases, release some of the prison population, take it from the developmentally disabled and close adult homes from the disabled, freeze Alzheimer's research, take it from Veteran's services, dental services for the underserved, desperately needed road funds, the university funding, and put another freeze on Kids Care health insurance. We'll find it somehow.

Townsend reached out on social media to ask teachers who didn't support the walkout but felt intimidated to contact her, apparently to help bolster department of education action against striking teachers (striking is illegal in Arizona). And then Townsend decided that somebody should sue the teachers. Townsend envisioned a class action lawsuit on behalf of everyone affected by the strike. She announced that she was consulting a law firm, and liked the idea of being plaintiff herself, since her son was a high school senior. And she continued to hammer the notion that this was all some sort of Socialist plot.

The lawsuit was never filed, but Townsend certainly hasn't forgotten about all those naughty teachers and their improper behavior.

Another representative proposed a teacher gag law based on a template being circulated nationally. Townsend has followed that up with more legislation aimed at putting those uppity teachers back in their place. Last year's walkout was not technically a strike-- teachers called in sick and many schools closed either or necessity or in sympathy with the #RedForEd movement. Townsend's proposed bill would forbid schools to close on a scheduled school day and fine the responsible individuals $5,000 per person. While the bill was aimed at the teachers, Townsend later said she'd be game to fine the school district, too. The bill also empowers pretty much anybody to file suit against an alleged violation. It does allow exceptions for things like natural disasters or invasions, and it also applies to charter schools.

The bill--HB 2017-- was paired with three others-- one (HB 2016) that directs the state's attorney general to investigate any school board member or district employee that breaks the law, and another (HB 2018) that forbids teachers from "harassing" any parents, students, or fellow teachers.

There's also HB 2015. Much like the other proposed gag law, HB 2015 forbids anyone employed by the school district to "espouse a political ideology or religious belief, unless it is germane to the subject matter of the class or activity." It's already illegal in Arizona to advocate for one side of a legislative issue in the classroom; this bill simply clamps the gag a bit tighter. Townsend says she doesn't want teachers indoctrinating students with their beliefs; once again, this sort of naughtiness could result in an up-to-$5K fine. This bill (now tagged SB 2032) was stalled, but is now out and up for consideration by the full Senate.

If you're wondering if this is supposed to be retaliation for the strike, well, Townsend has not been coy:  

“People are saying, ‘Oh, you know, this is just a response to Red for Ed.’ Who’s saying it isn’t?” Townsend told the Arizona Capitol Times. “So many parents were inconvenienced. The students were inconvenienced and scared of what was going to happen if they had to stay beyond graduation day. Absolutely – and I don’t apologize – it is a response to Red for Ed.”

How stifling would this be? Well, here's a supporter explaining:

"When everybody wore red last year in the classroom, that was not a left or a right — that was political action," GOP Sen. Vince Leach said while explaining his backing of the proposal.

So wearing a red shirt to school would open a teacher to a $5,000 fine.

Teachers are supposed to be quiet and compliant and not speak up if the public education system is under attack. But a law like this has many consequences. Is it now a $5,000 fine for a school employee to pray in school? Is it a $5,000 fine to have a Christmas party for the class? Is a fund drive to collect money for, say, a child who lost their home to a fire-- is that a socialist activity that's now illegal? Are school fundraisers an implicit endorsement of capitalism, and therefor illegal? If a politician takes a stance on any issue at all-- like, for instance, claiming that schools do not need an infusion of money to upgrade and maintain buildings-- is a teacher now a lawbreaker if she points at a hole in the roof? Given today's charged climate, is the school engaged in an illegal activity if it requires vaccinations for students? And just how heavily will teachers have to suppress all student discussion of controversial issues to avoid liability?

The answers to some of these questions is, of course, that Townsend and her supporters don't want to suppress all viewpoints-- just the ones they disagree with.

How do you raise good citizens when they never encounter a discussion of a controversial topic? Of more immediate importance in Arizona-- how do you recruit teachers to fix your teacher shortage when your pay is poor, your schools are starved for resources, and your recruitment motto is "Come to Arizona! We'll fine you 15% of your annual take home pay if you say or do anything we don't approve of!"

Last year's wave of strikes were an opportunity for legislators in several states to learn something important about the condition of education. Some did. But some have learned all the wrong lessons and somehow come to the conclusion that when thousands of teachers take to the streets, the problem must be that teachers haven't been beaten down hard enough yet. It appears that some of Arizona's elected leaders still have more lessons to learn.

IN: Go Ahead And Shoot Teachers

When the story first broke that teachers at Meadowlawn Elementary School in Monticello, Indiana had been shot with pellets--execution style--as part of an active shooter drill, I decided not to get in to it here. The sheriff's department had agreed to knock it the hell off, the legislature had already moved to ban the practice, and the whole business was so clearly over the line, so obviously unnecessarily abusive of teachers, so clearly just a stupid thing to do-- well, I figured we'd heard the last of it.

I should have known better.

Some Indiana legislators have decided to change their minds. Maybe, they figure, it's actually a good idea to shoot teachers.

"It's got to do with reality and making sure they experience the emotions and adrenaline," said Sen. Jeff Raatz, chair of the Senate's education committee and author of the new amendment to allow for the use of pellets.

This frickin' guy.

Raatz is an ordained minister who served as principal of Richmond Academy, a private Christian school that recently closed due to low enrollment. None of which would lead you expect him to lead the charge to make sure that teachers get shot, but here we are.

The good news-- is there good news-- is that the bill still prohibits shooting students. And teachers have to give consent before the training. I do not even want to start imagining what kind of pressure a really crappy administrator could bring to bear if he decided that his teachers should volunteer to be shot. Nor am I sure exactly how that would work-- would teachers who volunteered to be shot wear big targets on their backs, or "shoot me" t-shirts? What would be the process for handling a little "oopsie"? Since Indiana wants to arm teachers, will the armed teachers get to shoot back?

I don't know the answer to any of these questions, but I do know that active shooter training is harrowing and the addition of actual pellets--particularly delivered execution style--is a level of trauma that I can't imagine providing any useful benefits to anybody. This is a dumb idea.

Of course, several wags have suggested that legislators should get to experience the same sort of training. That's a fine idea, but since the legislature controls so many aspects of Hoosier life, I don't think it goes far enough. I think they could better understand the implications of automotive regulation if they participated in crash tests. Fire regulations might carry more "reality and adrenaline" for them if they were left inside some burning buildings. If they're going to make laws about what poor folks are or are not entitled to, maybe legislators should get to experience living in extreme poverty. And since Indiana legislators have cooked up some of most restrictive abortion laws in the country, perhaps they should spend some time experiencing the reality and adrenaline of a difficult pregnancy, or maybe experience someone else having control of their reproductive organs.

And for myself, I pledge to never again assume that an idea is too dumb for a bunch of legislators to even consider it.

Five Reasons Your District's Strategic Plan Failed

Somewhere in school district offices all across the country, there are beautiful strategic planning documents, carefully bound, sitting on a shelf, gathering dust and having absolutely no effect on how the school district functions from day to day. They have utterly failed.

Honest. I am absolutely a horse.

It doesn’t have to be that way (read Andrea Gabor’s After the Education Wars for examples of districts like Leander, Texas, where having a plan and a vision has made a tremendous difference). Most states require school districts to do some sort of strategic planning on a regular cycle—well, to be accurate, most states require school districts to submit some sort of paperwork that indicates that strategic planning has occurred.

In 39 years of teaching, I've been through the process about seven times, and shared many tales with fellow teachers who have also joined the strategic plan at their school. None of us have any stories of strategic plans that were actually used. Why does the strategic planning process turn out to be so useless for school districts? Here are some of the most common problems that derail the process and the product.

Boxing Out The Stakeholders

The process is supposed to include all the stakeholders—teachers, parents, stakeholders and in some cases even students. But for a district administration that wants to keep the process under their own control, it’s not that hard to box the other stakeholders out—either deliberately or by mismanagement. Hold long unproductive meetings and folks will quickly draw the conclusion that they’re wasting their time. Break into small groups with each group led by a member of the administrative team, and you can keep those groups from coming up with anything the administration doesn’t welcome. Along with that comes a hundred little moves, from seating arrangements to leadership assignments, to remind stakeholders who is really the boss here. And never forget the simple things, like inconvenient meeting schedules, that can discourage people from attending.

The trick here is to get people to sign up (for the paperwork) but not to actually participate in the process. Then the administration can just write the plan to suit their own priorities and interests (and to ignore what they prefer to ignore). When you’re done, you have a document in which the stakeholders don’t have a stake. More importantly, having been uninvolved in creating the document, they know nothing about its intent or emphasis. They may not even know what it says, as the follow-up to this sort of planning can be a simple emailed link that nobody follows to an online file that nobody reads.

Unbalanced Committee

Because these committees are self-selecting, you get volunteers who are motivated for any number of reasons. Let’s try to get prayers back in school. Let’s get an elementary tidy-winks program going so my child can be in it. Sometimes a particular group is moved to show up and advocate for their cause, and that can be anyone from your local Tea Party chapter to the band parents. There is nothing at all wrong with people acting out of strong motivation about their preferred issues, but their belief that they can alter the district’s course by pushing the strategic plan one way or another is naively hopeless. The problem is that you end up with a committee that does not accurately reflect the concerns of all the stakeholders, which equals zero buy-in, which equals everyone ignoring the strategic plan.

Dishonest Self-Assessment

This is truly the giant killer. A strategic plan needs a clear-ish understanding of where the district is right now. It’s pretty hard for a district to just come right out and say “We’re pretty racist here” or “We consider athletics a higher priority than academics.” And if your administration is your biggest problem but your administration is running your strategic planning process, you’ll waste your time hemming and hawing around the elephant in the room.

If you are not honest about the state of your district, then your strategic plan will be like detailed directions for driving from Harrisburg to Cleveland—except that you’re starting in Omaha. If you are not honest about the state of your district, your district’s culture will eat your plan for breakfast.

The Decision-Making Process

Every district has a real mission statement. It may not be written down, but it is evident in the decision-making process. The unwritten ones are often not very admirable: “Our mission is to do nothing that might prompt an angry parent phone call.” “Our mission is to spend the least amount of money we can get away with.” “Our mission is to raise test scores no matter the cost.” “Our mission is to keep doing as much of what we did last as year while cutting enough corners to let us do it with fewer resources.” Or even “Our mission is to give keep each child safe and secure while we provide them with an awesome education, no matter what.” Not all unwritten mission statements are terrible; only most of them.

If you have an unwritten mission statement and you do not root it out of the decision-making process, all your strategic planning is in vain. This is why a good plan is developed with wide spread stakeholder involvement—so that everyone understands what the decision making process is supposed to involve. Every person in your district should approach every decision with the question, “What does the strategic plan say we should decide?” Note: You cannot get this effect by issuing a decree from the central office. If you operate by decree, then your unwritten mission statement is “Our mission is to follow administrative directives” and your strategic planning was a waste of everyone’s time.

Vagueness Camel

One of the most common outcomes is a plan designed by committee and largely useless. It will be headlined with a mission statement such as, “Camelback Schools will help each student meet their full potential by developing a full set of college and career ready 21st century skills to create lifelong learners.” Pro tip: If your mission statement doesn’t exclude any behavior not already ruled out by common sense, it’s useless.  The body of this horse-by-committee will include action items that wispy enough to provide little direction but still leave leadership able to declare “Mission accomplished” whenever the mood strikes them. But then that’s the beauty of school district strategic plans—the state may require you to hand one in, but they’ll never hold you accountable for actually following it.

Originally posted at Forbes