| Our next Continuous Improvement Planning Committee will be held on August 28, 2013 at 6:00 p.m. Our next Continuous Improvement Planning Committee Meeting will be held on August 28, 2013 at 6:00 p.m. at the District 227 Administrative Center located at 20550 S. Cicero Avenue in Matteson, Illinois 60443. Thanks to the many high performing community participants in this endeavor and for your continuing input, leadership, and support. Since April 2013, we have gone from confusion to fusion, from a dictatorship to democracy and full board and community participation input levels at our school board improvement meetings and in other areas of our public affairs. However, our answer to turning our school district around and better serving our children is still leadership. Everything rises or falls based upon the quality of our leadership. In the coming months the school board must also focus upon selecting a four-year superintendent leader who can transform, instruct, and inspire our staff to be better. We will be looking for a proactive-transformative-visionary-leader who is about working with the school board in improving student achievement and one with a record of leading schools to high student academic performance levels. You see, if school district 227 had been a corporation, whose existence was dependent upon profits, academic progress, and productivity, it would have gone out of business a long time ago. Profits to employees and board in the absence of accountability, productivity, academic regression rather than academic progress, and lack of growth with lack of leadership and insufficient returns on investment would have run it out of business a long time ago. Regardless of what is done now, not much will count in the future in the absence of improving student performance levels. Improving student performance levels requires training, not only of the school board, but of the district's employees and its leadership whom the community and schools must depend upon to implement the vision. Only a new way forward will get us out of the diseased climate, culture, and mentality of the bottomless pit in which we have struggled in with its lack of continuous accountability, leadership, vision, pro-action, planning, unethical behaviors, or unaccountability for over a decade. The results of our lack of proactive thinking has gotten us in the mess that we are in now. Given the same conditions in the absence of addressing targeted teacher and administration staff development in-service needs based upon board-community-staff-consultants-observation-data-driven-feedback in the forms of questionnaires, input, etc., we will have the same failed results. Albert Einstein said it best: "The significant problems that we face today, cannot be solved at the same level of thinking and lack of pro-action and training we were at when we created them over a decade ago." For instance, hiring the best and the brightest is one of the key strategies we must employ in moving forward from the tragedy and defeats of the past. Hiring those who are unqualified and will only continue to contribute to the existing problem is taking steps backwards. Continuous improvement is a deceptively simple concept to grasp. It must begin with a 227 school board. As a school board, we can't teach what we don't know and we can't lead where we don't go. But as with many common sense notions, continuous improvement is easier to understand than it is to practice. Why is this the case? In the KEY WORK OF SCHOOL BOARDS GUIDE, which was given to every district 227 board member for two consecutive years, continuous improvement is described as a "habit of mind." Still hoping that most board members have begun reading and are practicing the message that we bring in school improvement training, it is significant to begin this discussion by returning to that habit. A paradigm is how we see our world. In the absence of new training, new knowledge, a new direction, to make sense of what we are trying to accomplish, we will continue to experience paradigm and school improvement paralysis. Without a paradigm shift, through reading and training in school improvement, we will continue to experience paradigm and school improvement paralysis. That is why having consultant-practitioners who are experts in school improvement to address both data driven decision making and another group to meet regularly with board, superintendent, principals, and staff to address our challenges is so significant. Given the same conditions, the same mind set, and in the absence of targeted school board-school administration-leadership training based upon needs assessments, we will continue to be blinded to new ways of thinking and solving problems. Given the same conditions, the same mind set, in the absence of seeing the world through different lens, we will continue to have the same results. Our greatest accomplishment must be improving student achievement levels. Without it, nothing else is significant. That is why this is the part of our task as a school board that will be the most difficult. The board's job is to recognize both their needs and the staff needs to be better trained, more prepared, and deeply engaged in the work to be done to turn our school district around. It is responsible for putting in place the proper keystones (consultants, school improvement data for review, etc.) for students to learn and achieve at the highest possible levels. The primary agenda of school boards is to raise student performance levels and to engage the school district community to achieve this goal. In the situation that we are in today, the board's job is to follow a regular process to review student achievement data by meeting with the superintendent and administration, make recommendations for going forward to be better, and to ensure continuous improvement. The board's responsibility is to approach issues from a problem-solving perspective. To ask the right questions, to identify the data it needs to measure progress, to respond to recommendations regarding need for consultancy in specific areas of school leadership, including data driven decision-making which the ECRA group is providing, to target actions to be taken and changes to be made to improve student performance levels. It is the board's role to model what it expects and to create a school improvement culture in the school system that values open, honest discussion and focuses on how much better our student performance levels could be. Board work is, well, work! It also requires collaboration, studying the KEY WORK OF SCHOOL BOARDS GUIDEBOOK, and training in Best Practices if we are to move forward in knowledge and skills and make wise decisions. An essential early step on the journey to continuous improvement is to develop a customer focus employing consultants that could help guide both the board, school district leadership, and its employees and that can inform and enlighten decisions of both the board and the staff. David E. Morgan, Ph.D., Educational Leadership School Board Member Rich Township High School District 227 Olympia Fields, Illinois 60461 |
