Lost in Translation

Posted on August 4, 2011 by

The confusion lies in semantics.

Working for a non-profit in education made the social divide between individuals in education and traditional business fields more apparent. I believe the key to addressing this disconnect is for educators to learn business speak and business people to learn Edish. We both can learn so much from one another to our collective benefit.

Below is my take on a few words and phrases to help bridge the gap.

Products & Services – Teaching is a service the same as lawyers, consultants, and doctors provide. Specific types of services in education may be a lecture, a group activity, and a test facilitation. Viewing each as an independent service may help draw parallels to other types of services outside education. Products refer to physical goods such as a textbook.

Consumer – The student. The student experiences, ‘consumes’, the service.

Customer – The parent (usually). The buyer of the product or service. In most cases with elementary through high school, the parent is the ultimate decision maker (buyer) even though the government is footing the bill.

Professional Development – Training to enhance skills or competencies; activities that help teachers ‘improve their craft’. The goal of these activities in education are for employees to provide higher quality service to customers (students).

Market - The population of students or ‘consumers that are being serviced’. Customers are can be grouped by demographic category such as age, sex, and grade. Thinking about consumers in this manner is useful in understanding differences between groups and developing specific services to meet each market segment (sub-group).

Strategy - Pedagogy. ‘Teaching (or Instruction) strategy’ is the same as ‘pedagogy’. A strategy is the the method and plan of action to meet your goal(s).

Investment – Money. Some will say staff, materials, equipment, ect., but all those things cost money and can be converted into dollars. Educators typically refer to investment as the level of student commitment in the classroom. Investment in business is committing dollars with the intention of getting a return. Cost per student per year would be a way to measure investment at a school.

Return on Investment (ROI) – Number of advancing or graduating students. ROI is the result, or what an investor gets, for making an investment. The return usually is, but does not have to be, money. In a non-profit your return is progress towards the mission, ideally in a measurable way.  Example: Lets say $1 million dollar investment was made in a high school for one year. The commitment is $1000 per year per student and there are 1000 students across 4 grades.  The desired ROI may be 750 students advancing one grade level and 250 students graduating (assuming 250 students per grade).  So the ROI for a $1 million investment will be two fold, (1) the number of students that actually advance a grade and (2) the number of students that graduate.

For more on business speak in education see tomorrow’s post…

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Panels, Parties, Projects…Oh My!

Posted on August 3, 2011 by

We have less than three weeks left, and there are multiple events almost every day of the week, and some on weekends too!  Last week, I attended two different panels put on by other fellows in my cohort:

  • A School Choice Funder Panel
  • Technology in the Classroom Panel

Last Tuesday was the school choice funder panel.  The panelists represented three different funders:

  • Rebecca Wolf DiBiase from the Broad Foundation,
  • Jim Blew from the Walton Foundation, and
  • Peter Rivera from the California Community Foundation.

Each panelist talked about their respective foundation’s goals involving school choice.  I found it really useful to understand why and how these funders are involved with improving school choice across the country, and particularly in California.

The Technology in the Classroom panel was another fascinating night of hearing from education professionals.  The panelists were:

  • Dr. Michelle (Mickie) Tubbs, Principal, Alliance Technology and Math Science High School;
  • Joe Oliver, Director of Instructional Technology, Los Angeles Unified School District;
  • Jake Neuburg, Founder, Revolution Prep; and
  • David Dwyer, Founder, USC Hybrid High School.

Each panelist had amazing stories to tell about their experiences with using technology in the classroom. Implementation is clearly key, and all panelists stressed that teachers are the most important resource, and integral in making technology useful in the classroom.

Last night, I attended yet another panel with Superintendents.  More to come…


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First Day at the District

Posted on August 3, 2011 by

It’s day 1 of my internship. It’s my first time working in a school district – the San Francisco Unified School District, in the Early Education department. I’d been told to expect bureaucracy and frustration. I am more optimistic, but still nervous. I debate what to wear and finally decide on a suit. I get on my bus half an hour earlier than I need to.

On the way up the stairs of my building, I look at the artwork on the walls. Clearly, this is a converted school. I had been expecting an office building.

“Hi, I’m the new summer intern,” I tell the lone receptionist brightly. He stares at me blankly, and leads me to a conference room (a converted classroom). I sit there for fifteen minutes, waiting, until German, my fellow Ed Pioneers intern shows up.

My new supervisor, the Executive Director (ED) of the Early Education Department walks in with a concerned look on his face.“We weren’t expecting you yet,” he says. They have a meeting until 3pm – didn’t anyone tell us?

He then informs us that they’d decided to change our summer projects. “No one told you?” he asks. I feel my stomach sinking. Maybe I should have prepared myself for more frustration.

We all start talking about the background of the Early Education department. I feel my spirits rise – we are entering at an exciting time. There is new leadership, and a new district strategic plan focusing on change. And the Early Education department, often overlooked in the past, is an important component of the plan.

An hour later, my second supervisor, the Assistant Superintendent of the Early Education department, walks in. She is the “new leadership.” I can feel the room fill with optimism and energy as she walks in.

She has created a PowerPoint presentation to introduce us to our projects. My new project is to create a plan to centralize enrollment for the department. German’s is to create a marketing plan. Both, she explains, are critical to improving the growing budget deficit in the department. I am excited by the amount of responsibility we are given. By the end of the day, we are eager to begin.

Seven weeks in, I now see that my first day was a good predictor of the rest of my internship. At some points, I’ve felt overwhelmed with bureaucracy and pessimism. At other times, I’ve felt excited and optimistic by the amount of impact I can have within a district. The challenge, I’ve found, is finding a way to hold on to the optimism.

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Project Status: Green

Posted on July 31, 2011 by

Project Status: Green

After 7 weeks the pieces are coming together. The research data is coming in and the initial analysis is yielding insightful results. A recap on my project:

As Teach For America prepares thousands of Corps Members for the classroom each summer, they continuously seek to improve their training program. Over ten weeks my task is to evaluate two new teaching methods being piloted at TFA’s summer institutes.

Pilot 1, Real-time Coaching (RTC), involves management coaches providing immediate and actionable feedback to core members via an ear piece while they are facilitating a class. (Talk about professional development!)

Pilot 2, Institutional Leader (IL), replaces the curriculum specialists, facilitators that train the core members at institute (the teachers of the teachers), with content specialists by topic.

Working with a national team across five locations, I have been managing the pilot project plans, analyzing research data, and synthesizing the final recommendations. My third objective, beyond evaluating the two projects simultaneously, is to establish a template for future pilot evaluations.

Initially, I did not realize the significance of both pilots. I assumed since my professional experience was in business and engineering, and not education, my assignment would not be a critical project….Was I wrong.

Speaking with Corps Members and staff, they expressed overwhelming interest in my findings. The pilot designer this week described the excitement and effort to immediately integrate elements of the pilot into continuing professional development for core members. Realizing my results would impact decisions on whether to expand the practices nationally was daunting, but exciting.

Coming to the final stretch, I am on target to meet my deadlines and have received positive feedback from the initial evaluation reviews. This is the experience I was looking for; an opportunity to establish a base of knowledge and network in education while utilizing my background and skills to make a significant impact.

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Temporary Fix, Sustinable Problem

Posted on July 29, 2011 by

A few weeks ago we had a workshop where a principal posed the question, “How do you make something new happen when you have the same people and the same resources?” He had been talking about this idea in regards his school, the staff, and the small community of families that they served in South Boston. I’ve spent quite a bit of time thinking about this in terms of building capacity within school systems and educator support. As if full circle, this week we had a workshop that focused primarily on Human Capital and the high impact organizations that facilitate this work. Most of what we discussed revolved around teacher quality, effectiveness, and evaluation. In light of my current project on human resource systems at ESE, I couldn’t help but wonder why no one ever seemed to bring up the administration support piece. I know that research identifies teachers as the key component in student achievement, but is that really it? Is that really all we’re going to tie student achievement to? One person? Where did that whole idea of “it takes a village” go?

As I listened to the panels and my fellow cohort members, I started to think about the idea of sparking something different with the same school leadership and the same resources. Why hadn’t we applied this thinking to support systems around superintendents and school administrators? I know that unions and networks often exist for leaders in these roles, but to be honest, I’m not quite sure that these leaders are always able to effectively communicate with their staff. It seems as if this breakdown in communication is what lends itself to the stalemates between state agencies, districts, and unions. I’m not entirely sure that there has been adequate support that enables administrators to carry out their intense daily workload and still have the time, patience, and ability to communicate new initiatives and facilitate quality collaboration. While the workload of an average administrator increases daily, effective leadership has to model these qualities for their staff. We can provide teachers with outside support organizations but for those who are left out of these initiatives, wouldn’t it make sense to support them via the administration?

If human capital is about recruitment, selection, and assignment of all roles in the education space then how to we continue to build support systems that are sustainable? Human capital, talent development, and educator management are all of the buzz words that pop up around the field these days. If we have intentionally selected teachers and leadership in the education space, I can’t help but consider it our responsibility to ensure that we build their capacity to remain effective. So is it about human capital, capacity, or both?

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The Hot Topics

Posted on July 27, 2011 by

This summer is flying by so quickly with so many rich experiences, I need to step back two weeks and talk about one of my favorite workshops thus far: Current Issues in Education.  I know, the title is simple, but our workshop was loaded with in-depth content and local experts sharing real-life experiences.

The workshop started a week before the actual day we all met.  We were assigned some homework in our hybrid groups (smaller groups in your cohort who you meet with to share experiences, get advice, etc.)—create a 2 page fact sheet on one of the following issues: Early Childhood Education, Parent Trigger, Foster Care in Education, Education Unions, Arts in Education, Race to the Top, and Equitable Education Funding.

These fact sheets were amazing!  Just imagine, six or seven brilliant people working together to concisely explain a key issue in education.  Then, we spent the workshop morning teaching each other about our different topics.  Next, local leaders joined us to talk about their direct experiences with each of these topics.

The afternoon was spent working on the topic of your choice with a small group, and designing a policy recommendation for your topic.  These recommendations were made into presentations, and the day finished with each group presenting their recommendation to more local leaders who offered insights.

Yes, workshop days are jam-packed with activities and great conversations, but this one in particular I left feeling like I gained a ton of concrete knowledge and diverse insights.  I know that days like this are helping me to shape my own opinions and knowledge of current issues in education.

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The Race Conversation

Posted on July 25, 2011 by

At the end of our third EP workshop, a woman in our cohort stepped forward, clearly upset. She told us, in a shaky voice, that she had noticed a disturbing trend. We’d had a number of panels highlighting leadership across the education reform movement in the Bay Area. In the leaders she saw, she pointed out, there was a troubling lack of black and brown faces.

Not only that, she went on to say, we did have one workshop in which our panelists were primarily African-American. It was a workshop focused on the low-income neighborhood of Bayview, in which local youth, parents, and community leaders were invited to speak. This time, it was the lack of white faces that disturbed her.

She was right. The education reform leaders we had met focused heavily on minority groups in their conversations about closing the opportunity gap. Yet there was very little minority representation in those leaders.

Not only was there a lack of minority leadership, I realized, but also a lack of a conversation about the topic. Until now, no one had brought up the connection between race and leadership.

That day, the cohort left in uncomfortable silence. It took us another entire workshop before we brought up the topic again. This time, we briefly discussed why there were so few minority leaders in the education reform movement.

It’s a difficult problem, but we can’t even begin to address it unless we talk about it. It can be uncomfortable and awkward, but the race conversation is important to start.

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