In her book, After the Education Wars: How Smart Schools Upend the Business of Reform, Andrea Gabor identified school districts and educators who exemplified a truly forward-thinking, innovative path out of our current political stalemate. One of those districts was Leander, Texas, which was applying the principles of management guru W. Edwards Deming, thanks to a waiver from repressive state mandates.
Now Leander is looking for a new superintendent, and Gabor describes the innovative ideas that made the district remarkable.
Deming, a statistician who died in 1993, based his quality management philosophy on two seemingly disparate ideas: The use of statistical tools to measure and improve systems and the conviction that those closest to any given process are best equipped to identify problems and opportunities for improvement. What made Deming’s ideas controversial was his insistence that meaningful employee input only works if it is based on trust. Deming opposed punitive employee evaluations and individual bonus systems on the grounds that they foster fear and undermine teamwork.
Deming’s ideas about process measurement were embraced throughout industry, but his exhortations on the importance of building a culture of trust were not.
That’s what makes Leander special. The school district adopted Deming’s ideas about using statistical analysis and teamwork to improve classroom pedagogy and school design, and even to jumpstart a student-led anti-bullying campaign. But to sustain its strategy and build a trust-based culture of the kind Deming advocated, Leander won a waiver from the state’s teacher-evaluation system.
As Gabor shows, wonderful things happen when teachers, students, and school administrators are trusted to make decisions.
She wonders whether this bright spot in American education, which should be a beacon for other districts, will survive a change in leadership. Stay tuned.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Whether the school district continues on its current path depends on who serves on the hiring committee. This committee should include teachers, administrators, and parents if the district values continuing performance evaluation. If a group of outsiders from the business community dominate the committee, the outcome will be very different.
The list of schools in NYC that embrace performance evaluation is impressive. They should share their insights with other school districts as perhaps other districts would be more willing to take the plunge.
It’s impossible to overestimate the importance of the arguments that Andrea Gabor is making. Unlike Ed Deformers, Deming understood that businesses and other organizations are made up of people, and he understood how people work–what makes them tick, what makes them enthusiastic and productive agents of positive change. The key is intrinsic motivation, which comes from active engagement, which comes from autonomy coupled with structural mechanisms enabling bottom-up continuous improvement. Extrinsic rewards and punishments (“The beating will continue until morale improves”) like those that are FOUNDATIONAL for Ed Deform prove to be not only useless but actually counterproductive for cognitive tasks. Here’s how to improve US education:
Get rid of the top-down punishments and rewards–the high-stakes standardized tests and the inane “standards” bullet lists. Replace these with a national wiki of suggested, COMPETING curriculum maps, frameworks, model lessons and assessments (in particular, formative and diagnostic assessments), reading lists, and other such materials developed and added to continually by researchers, subject-matter experts, and classroom practitioners, from which free teachers can pick and choose, with adaptation.
Return power and authority to local schools and, in particular, to teachers in those schools. Leave districts to worry solely about matters like facilities and safety and legal compliance.
Reduce teacher work loads so that teachers have a significant amount of time to devote to weekly Japanese-style Lesson Study in which they meet with colleagues to discuss what is and isn’t working, to compare lessons and assessments, to review materials for adoption, to plan lessons and courses, and to swap war stories. In other words, institute Deming-style bottom-up continuous improvement.
Do this, and people will rise to the occasion and tailor what they are doing to the needs and propensities of their particular student populations. This is what brought about the astonishing transformation of Japanese industrial manufacturing industry in the latter part of the 20th century. Deming was a genius AND a fine human being who actually understood people. Our Ed Deformers, well, . . . the comparison is instructive. LOL.
If this sounds like a radical idea, bear in mind that it’s simply a return to and improvement upon the way things worked, before Ed Deform, in US public schools–schools that made the US the economic envy of the world. Yes, democracy is messy and complex and pluralistic. But it’s far, far better than the alternative.
Interestingly, when you have such a bottom-up approach, the results tend to be fairly conservative, changing slowly, for the better, over time, but hewing to emergent general principles. This is demonstrable from historical study of the development of K-12 ELA curricula and pedagogy pre-Deform. The bottom-up approach is akin to the Common Law, as opposed to Statutory Law, in this respect. Why is this so? Well, when people are free to experiment, they see what’s working for the other guy AND people are creatures of social sanction–they tend to approve what everyone else is doing. But here’s the key: they are also empowered to make positive change and intrinsically motivated to do this. So, what one gets from such a system is stability with occasional innovation leading to positive change over time. The Common Law also works like this. There’s the stare decisis rule, which works to keep things stable, but there is also the ability, built into the system, to make incremental improvement and change in response to changing circumstance. The top-down approach basically kills motivation and innovation. It’s the equivalent of the planned economy. It doesn’t work because no one (Gates, Coleman) is as smart as everyone is,
Love W. Edward Deming … bottom up, not top down.
If administrators really wanted to make a difference, they would ask the teachers, “What can I do to help you?” Teachers KNOW.
People like Gates is TOP-DOWN and his products are shabby … he’s has NO CLUE and neither do the rest of the DEFORMERS.
They should frankly stay away from anyone from the fake reform movement. They should avoid anyone from any other the reform think tanks, and TFA, Kipp, Relay etc. They should look for someone with legitimate credentials with degrees from real schools of education.
Top Down “Savior” complex: so much money pushed adamantly at schools, so little money actually helping schools
“Waivers are an important way to balance state and federal education mandates against the kind of innovation that can only happen at the local level.” I like this because it starts where we are, already stuck in the tarbaby— only going to get out carefully.
According to the article, the stats/ accountability piece of state reqts was met by substituting a Deming-based measurement system. Presumably that works at the bldg level because its particulars are designed jointly by admin/ teachers. But the only way to accommodate Deming’s other piece—trust/ teacher-student buy-in—was waiver of state regs on teacher evaluation. In other words, returning teacher evaln resp to admin where it belongs (most likely, again, system designed w/participation of teachers).
Sounds like a plan that could easily be scaled up. Leander should archive the measurement system that served it so well for decades– just in case it gets scuttled– & make it available to interested districts nationwide.