The Without-A-Doubt / Monthly Top 3 List.
System failures: Barriers to school improvement
The TOP 3 system failures or barriers that school and district leaders must learn quickly to survive and thrive. This monthly post is provided to provoke a little conversation. And, remember, the thoughts presented here are offered up as indisputable facts, not just opinions…😁 So here we go….Our sure-fire, without-a doubt most frustrating barriers that leaders must address.
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1. Mixed Messaging
In nearly every school and district, there are a lot of bosses and a lot of passionate opinions. Worse than that, we tend to move quickly in schools without proper communication and shift quickly from one grand idea to the next. Leaders quickly fall victim to solution overload in trying to tackle too many things at once. What results is a quiet frustration among stakeholders who don’t want to question or disappoint the boss. Everyone knows that this idea or that idea will not work but everyone stays quiet. Though a school or district may have written plans to address many problems, they don’t have the capacity or bandwidth to carry them out successfully. Our most successful leaders are really effective at narrowing the list and aligning the messaging. Leaders should be keenly aware that when the room goes silent, they have a real problem.
2. Mis-Alignment
Focus and alignment are related but they are not the same. Focus is akin to narrowing. “We’re going to have the best teacher PD and instructional coaching of any school district. Period.” or “We’re not taking on that new tutoring program right now because our focus is on Tier 1 instruction and we won’t budge until we get that right!” Alignment is more like strategizing. “We’re going to make sure that our professional learning days are high quality and that they build on each other so our teachers see purpose and meaning in our offerings.” Leaders must learn quickly that offering up solutions within complex systems will fail unless they are aligned to related solutions and actions that are transparent and interconnected. Anything less and we are not functioning as a system. Instead, we are functioning as a bureaucracy.
3. System Credibility
This is hard to admit but oftentimes we fail because we don’t know enough to affect change successfully. In truth, we might want our math scores to increase but nobody really knows why the scores are so low. Even worse, our math instruction and instructional coaching in our school district may not be top quality. Maybe nobody says it, or they don’t even recognize it. We simply don’t know what we don’t know. There is no shortcut in education to knowing great instruction, and we have to have experts in the room when decisions are made. The systems may have plans in place for improving literacy rates, or AP scores, or graduation rates but the ideas are not good enough because the knowledge base is not good enough. This is why our current and aspiring leaders must feel a great duty to stay abreast of instructional best practices. In fact, our best leaders should be in a constant state of teaching, learning, observation, and reflection.