Posts tagged traditional public schools
The Power of Profound Knowledge

How many of you have pursued the school improvement “magic elixir''?

The “magic elixir” has come in many forms across my more than two-decade career in education, and I suspect you’ll recognize its siren song even if you haven’t fallen prey yourself. It may have reared its head as a reading curriculum, an online tutoring platform, a revised organizational structure, or a new five-year strategic plan. You may have dabbled in all four of these areas—curriculum, online programs, human capital planning, and strategic initiatives—among many others. The attraction to these “magic elixirs” doesn’t seem to weaken, even when you recognize that there is no such thing.

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Learning to ImproveJohn DuesContinual Improvement, Deming, school improvement, charter schools, traditional public schools
Goal Setting is Often an Act of Desperation, Part III

For the past three months, I’ve been writing about organizational goal-setting. In Part I of the series, I proposed four conditions that organizations should understand prior to setting a goal. In Part II, I introduced the idea of “arbitrary and capricious” education goals and key data analysis lessons 1-5 . In this installment, I’ll outline key lessons 6-10 and then tie up the series in Part IV with an applied example from United Schools Network.

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Learning to ImproveJohn Duesunited schools network, school improvement, understanding variation, charter schools, traditional public schools, process behavior chart, continual improvement
Should we be rating and ranking schools?
Should we be rating and ranking schools?

School and district report cards were released in mid-September to little fanfare because they lacked state test scores. These scores form the heart of the report cards, but were missing from this year’s reports because the coronavirus pandemic shut down schools and prevented spring testing. Maybe this year provides an opportunity to stop and think about a couple of questions related to the report cards. Questions such as, what do the report cards tell us about schools? And, should we be rating and ranking schools?

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Learning to ImproveJohn Duescharter schools, educational accountability, systems thinking, traditional public schools, state testing