There is a new report on productivity in education released today by the Consortium on Productivity in the Schools. I thought the people here would be interested. Basically the Consortium examined how businesses improved their productivity and efficiency and then sought a model that would perform similarly in the schools. They found that it was necessary to look at the school system as a system, not just individual schools or even districts. Take a look at the recommendations too, there is a lot of interesting thought here. Press release follows: HOLD FOR RELEASE For More Information Contact: August 29, 1995 Shep Ranbom/Ryan McDay 10 A.M. 202-667-0901 (202) 667-0901 Better Schools on $1.5 Billion Per School Day? Productivity Panel’s Final Report To Recommend How K-12 Education Can Improve Student Performance Without Increasing Spending Report Indicates Structure of System Causes Misuse of Time, Effort, and Resources WASHINGTON, D.C.--August 29, 1995--American schools are not getting enough return on the nearly $300 billion spent on them every year and need to undergo major structural changes in order to increase their efficiency and productivity, according to a new report from Teachers College of Columbia University. The study, entitled “Using What We Have To Get The Schools We Need: A Productivity Focus for American Education,” was released today by the Consortium on Productivity in the Schools. It cites unstable governance, lack of incentives to leverage productivity improvement, schools structured to reinforce continuity rather than continuous improvement, and lack of quality controls on innovations as among the reasons that American schools are not getting greater learning gains from a broader range of students with the $1.5 billion spent per school day on K-12 education. "The costs to Americans of having such inefficient school structures is staggering," said G. Carl Ball, co-chair of the Consortium’s advisory board. “Taxpayers are not getting their money’s worth, because schools have not adopted the best and most efficient practices in everything from management and finance to teaching and learning.” The Consortium on Productivity in the Schools was launched in 1992 by the Institute on Education and the Economy at Teachers College of Columbia University. Its mandate was to examine the productivity of American primary and secondary schools and to determine whether schools could benefit from the experience of other industries. The presumption of the project was that American primary and secondary schools are being called upon to increase the level of student learning even though additional funds will most likely not be available. “The only way that schools can escape from this bind of higher expectations and decreasing financial support is to make more efficient use of the resources they have,” said Mr. Ball, who is chairman of Geo. J. Ball, Inc., a leading horticultural product producer based in Chicago. “We think that is possible.” The Consortium consisted of a dozen experts on productivity and systems analysis from the fields of industry, health, finance, government and education. It was chaired by Sue E. Berryman, former director of the Institute on Education and the Economy at Columbia University and currently senior education specialist at the World Bank, and was supervised by an advisory board headed by Mr. Ball and Michael Timpane, president emeritus of Teachers’ College. The Consortium adopted a “systems analysis” approach to its analysis of primary and secondary education. It described the nation's 84,000 public schools in 15,000 school districts as part of a complex system that lacks clearly defined goals at all levels as well as basic mechanisms for monitoring and encouraging improvement. Past attempts to improve education have failed, the report asserts, because they addressed only part of the complete education system, instead of using a systemic analysis to create significant increases in overall productivity by addressing the powerful--yet often hidden--root causes of systems problems. EDUCATION’S KEY “SUBSYSTEMS” The report analyzes the root causes that explain why schools fail to make significant improvement. The Consortium looked for these features of an effective education system: focus, alignment of functions around the focus, internal adaptation (monitoring and correcting performance), external adaptation (monitoring what customers of the system want) incentives, and continuous improvement processes. It identified problems in each of the eight key subsystems: Governance: School leadership at all levels is highly politicized, political conflicts being resolved by rapid shifts in goals and adding new regulatons, goals, and mandates. These actions make it impossible for the system to achieve any goal well and fuel declining customer expectations for schools, endangering the political and financial support the system needs to survive. They also undermine the conditions needed for holding schools accountable for results. Management Unstable goals and rapid proliferation of goals and mandates make it impossible to align all the functions of schooling around the achievement of goals, thus wasting resources. They expand middle management and support staffs required to implement multiple regulations and procedures. Relative to other industrialized countries, American education has a remarkably low ratio of teachers to non-teaching staff. If the United States assigned the same proportion of employees to classrooms as Denmark or France, the number of teachers would increase by 265,000 (or about 3 additional teachers per school.) If the proportion were the same as Japan or Belgium, the American teaching force would increase by about 1.3 million, or about 15 additional teachers per school. Although our education system is presumably decentralized, the United States ranks next to last among 13 industrialized nations in the number of decisions delegated to the school level and has by far the largest percent delegated to the district level. American teachers, who are held accountable for their students’ learning performance, lack authority over decisions, such as textbooks, key to meeting their responsibilities. Finance In other industries, money is used as an incentive to produce continuous improvement. The education system, however, rarely uses funding to create incentives to increase productivity. The current system for raising and allocating resources creates serious inequities in the resources available at the school level. Meanwhile, unfunded mandates, such as for special education, drain resources from schools. New York City, for example, must pay nearly three times the cost of educating a special education student as for a child in the regular education program. Teaching and Learning The report found that multiple factors come together to reinforce continuity rather than continuous improvement. Confusion and chaos surrounding the establishment of goals for the system encourages teachers to ignore multiple mandates in order to get their job done; the web of top-down restrictions gives little leeway for innovation; conventional, fact-oriented, and fragmented curricula affect not just students but also the habits of thought and creativity that teachers need to improve the school. In addition, poor feedback mechanism undermine teachers’ opportunities to benchmark their teaching performance; the lack of quality controls on practices marketed as “better” reduces teachers’ demands for innovations; technically weak pre-service training means that many teachers lack the technical knowledge they need to make improvements; and the organization of teaching and heavy working and instructional hours virtually preclude the levels of daily preparation and professional learning needed to improve. Adaptation and Innovation Relative to other industries, this subsystem is poorly developed, which helps explain the system’s productivity performance. Except for student learning, there is little measurement of system performance. Incentives to supply and demand knowledge about better practice are missing. The virtual absence of quality controls on innovations undermines demand for and thus supply of innovations. Education does a poor job of assessing why, when, and how it needs to change. Unlike business, where research leads to new products to sell, the education system lacks incentives for better practices and has virtually no standards for innovation. Limited supply, low quality standards, and low investment in R&D dramatically slow the development of technical knowledge base in education.. Whereas the average investment in all U.S. companies on research is three percent of their budget and the military spends 13 percent of its budget on research, federal research and development in education amounts to a minuscule 0.1 percent of spending on education. Outplacement Except for higher education, schools have virtually no dialogue with -- or feedback from -- their customers, such as employers. Parents, communities, and taxpayers have a bewildering array of contradictory requirements that the governors of the education system have failed to resolve. Hiring and Purchasing Hiring and purchasing decisions are based on mechanical criteria and low standards, the minimal credentialing standards for new teachers imposing the most extensive damage on the system. Poor teacher preparation results from the system's low standards; it is hard for schools of education to require more than the labor market seeks. Maintenance The professional development of teachers is not aligned with evidence of improved teaching performance. The system also relies heavily on regulations and pay to motivate the adults in the system, incentives that are much less effective than intrinsic ones. PRODUCTIVITY NOT DECLINING In spite of these problems, the report challenges the belief that the performance of American students has declined. Rather it argues that evidence over two decades shows student performance is stable, higher scores on standardized tests for basic skills being counterbalanced by lower scores on items that measure reasoning abilities. The basic problem is that schools and their students are confronting new and higher demands, and one key measure supporting schools--new revenues--are not likely to be forthcoming. During the past 20 years, per pupil spending has nearly doubled (rising from $2,985 per student in 1970 to $5,401 in 1990 in constant dollars) at the same time that average test scores of students are stable. Some observers have interpreted these trends as evidence of declining productivity in the provision of K-12 education. However, the Consortium reached a different conclusion. The growth in spending is partially attributable to cost pressures that affect the sector and by the allocation of increasing amounts of funds to meet the mandated needs of students with special needs. In addition, schools are maintaining student performance when a much larger population of students are coming from families ineffective in supporting their children’s learning. CORE RECOMMENDATIONS The Consortium believes that American schools can achieve continuous improvement through techniques that have been successfully employed in other fields and urges a series of “systemic” reforms of schools aimed at increasing the amount of teaching and learning without the need for additional funds. Among the reforms proposed are: Renegotiate the Governance and Management Contract The governors and managers of the public K-12 system should exchange autonomy for accountability. Suppliers have autonomy to start schools, subject to state licensing requirements consistent with the U.S. Constitution and possibly to performance contracts with the community’s school board. Suppliers also have the autonomy to manage schools, except for issues such as conflicts of interest, equity, or economies of scale that are better managed at levels above the individual school. Families have the autonomy to choose schools. In exchange for autonomy, the school assumes the responsibility to meet established performance criteria that reflect the interests of the three levels of the society: the community, the state, and the nation. Failing to meet its performance responsibilities should have consequences in the form of the revocation of its state license, and, if it is operating under a performance contract with a local school board, in the cancellation of its contract. Extend Accountability for Schools to Accountability for All Functions of the System The principle of accountability should be extended to all major functions of the system, not merely teaching and learning. Each level of governance should set performance criteria for each important function and ways of measuring performance that are cheap enough to allow frequent measurement and useful feedback that can result in productivity improvements. Use the Education Financing System to Improve Educational Productivity Money is a powerful tool that can encourage schools and subsystems to improve their performance. Three types of incentives can help spark continual improvements: · incentives for school districts to keep their books in ways that show the full costs of various activities; · incentives to use pooled R&D funds from states and the federal government to improve the technical knowledge about productivity, including relationships between resources and outputs and where productivity payoffs are greatest, the results being used in the design of school funding formulas; and · incentives for schools to improve that would reward schools with good performance, as judged by value-added measures of learning. Create the Conditions That Let Schools Learn The report calls for reorganizing work within the school to multiply professional interactions around improvement. Creating schools that learn may well require reducing teachers’ instructional time. States must institute high credentialing standards for new teachers and encourage experienced teachers to become board certified. Set up Quality Controls for Innovations The Consortium urges the nation to establish institutions that set and enforce standards for judging when new knowledge and practices can be trusted and under what conditions. These institutions also should have the means of reaching consensus within the professional community about best practices under particular conditions. Analogues in health are the Federal Food & Drug Administration, the New England Journal of Medicine, and the consensus development process of the National Institutes of Health. Make a Contract among Ourselves for the Next Generation The report says that each of us, in one role or another, is a stakeholder of the U.S. education system. In our role as citizens we set the basic constraints for education. As a result, we take on responsibility with educators and policymakers for establishing the conditions that let schools improve and students learn. As community members, keep eight principles in mind in any effort to change the schools: evaluate reforms using a systems perspective; resist attempts to use the schools to solve the community’s social problems; remember that there are no quick fixes; focus on a few key academic goals; move from shifting blame to sharing responsibility; let change happen; insist on productivity improvement; and help expand the role of students as co-producers of their own learning. These measures will enable schools and districts to raise their productivity and improve the academic progress of their students," says Dr.. Berryman. "They take the best ideas developed by other industries and adapt them to meet the productivity challenge raised by the problems in our schools." Funding for the Consortium comes from the Ball Foundation, Citicorp, G. Victor and Margaret D. Ball, and the Robert and Terri Cohn Family Foundation. The Ball Foundation, which was the major funder, was established in 1975 and is dedicated to helping people make informed academic or career decisions based on knowledge of aptitudes, interests, and personality styles. Research on aptitude and aptitude measurement is the core of the Foundation’s activities. The Consortium was managed by The Institute on Education and the Economy, which was established in 1986 and conducts interdisciplinary and policy research on the relationship of education, employment, productivity, and economic growth in the United States. Teachers College, a graduate school devoted to the educational, psychological, and health service professions, is an affiliate of Columbia University but retains its legal and financial independence. Located in New York City, the College has more than 4,000 students and some 130 full-time faculty. The College was founded in 1887 and became part of the Columbia University constellation in 1898. Copies of this report can be obtained from The Institute on Education and the Economy at 212- 678-3091, or from the Ball Foundation at 708-469-6270. ----------------- Saml@widmeyer.com "When one stops learning, one stops living." & "There are always new books to read." http://www.widmeyer.com/sam1.htm