BURKEonBOARD

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

“What, then, is the true Gospel of consistency? Change. Who is the really consistent man? The man who changes. Since change is the law of his being, he cannot be consistent if he stick in a rut.” – Mark Twain

“There must be consistency in direction.” – W. Edwards Deming

(Oct. 10, 2008) – Recently, a friend sent me an audio recording and book by William Ouchi. He is a UCLA management professor who has focused much of his energy in the past two decades on how we manage our school.

Ouchi is a devotee of what is called the Edmonton Approach, a decentralized style of school management that puts all manner of decision making at the school building level, from how to teach to who plows the school parking lots. It gives students and parents the right to attend any school within a district. It has been amazingly successful in the places where Ouchi has studied it, including Edmonton, Alberta where the “approach” evolved starting in the late 1970s.

My friend sent me Ouchi’s book (Making Schools Work) and the recording (broadcast on MPR in Feb. 2004) because I had talked about consistency and variability in how curriculum was being delivered in our school district.

He sensed, not altogether inaccurately, that I might be a top-down kind of management advocate, not as a control tool, but as a method of delivering the best product to the most customers (students) in the best way.

Ouchi observes that whatever the motive, an educational system that reserves most academic and budget decisions to the central office ignores the inevitable variability from building to building, even in a relatively small district, that requires different solutions. It saps teachers and principles of motivation when they have little say in how they teach.

I know that this scenario does not describe our district precisely and that there are efforts being made here and now to involve teachers at the building level in more academic decision making. But we also have a strong, centralized academic structure at the district level and among at least some teachers and building principles, it is felt the central office dictates policy and procedure more than is needed.

So, I will be interested to learn more about how we do things in Farmington and how things are done elsewhere, and to what end.

If you have thoughts about how we manage the nuts and bolts of education in Farmington, I’m interested to know your opinions. Always happy to receive your thoughts at tim@burke4board.com.

P.S. Someone who read a draft of this thought the title might be a slight directed toward district leadership. I was actually referring to myself. (Oct. 11, 2008)