Deliverology in Practice

How Education Leaders Are Improving Student Outcomes

Michael Barber, Nick Rodriguez, Ellyn Artis

• Publisher: Corwin
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781452257358
• eBook ISBN: 9781483332901
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Administration

Everything you need to implement school change that gets results!

If you've been wondering how to effectively lead and manage results-driven, system-wide implementations, look no further. Internationally recognized education expert Michael Barber explores exactly how to translate policy into practice for long-term, measurable results.

Building on his groundbreaking book, Deliverology 101, Barber provides proven methods and clear steps to achieve successful policy implementation and offer practical solutions for reviving stalled reform efforts. New cases studies and embedded links help you develop a delivery "skillset" for building capacity, effective coalitions, and a coherent, flexible plan for implementation. 

Leaders and staff at both national and local levels will learn to:

• Establish a Delivery Unit to set clear, measureable goals and build a reform coalition 
• Understand delivery through data analysis and strategic progress monitoring 
• Plan for delivery with explicit, day-to-day implementation planning updated with proven methods from years of practice
• Drive delivery with progress monitoring, momentum building, and course corrections
• Create an irreversible delivery culture by identifying and addressing challenges as they occur

Don't leave your education policy implementation to chance. Use this new field guide to get your implementation on the right track today!

Part 1 Develop a Foundation for Delivery

Every strong delivery effort has a few prerequisites that must be put in place before you begin: a clear idea of what your system should deliver, an understanding of where and how delivery must improve, a talented team who will run the delivery effort, and sufficient alignment among key players to get things done. Together, these elements are your foundation for delivery.

This part of the book will help you build these elements out in four chapters:

• Define your aspiration
• Review the current state of delivery
• Build the Delivery Unit
• Establish a guiding coalition

Your foundation for delivery will set the stage for everything that follows.

Chapter 1A Define Your Aspiration

System Leader Summary

Your aspiration helps you answer the first question of delivery: “What are you trying to do?” It defines an outcome connected to your moral purpose, it defines how you’d like to see that outcome move, and it can be broken down into no more than a handful of goals—each with a metric, target, and goal leader who holds primary responsibility for achieving it. An aspiration is most useful when it is widely shared across your system—which is why aspiration-setting is as much an exercise in communication as it is in visionary thinking.

As system leader, you’re the direction-setter in chief. You’ll ultimately be the owner of the aspiration and the chief communicator of it. Even if you designate your delivery leader to facilitate the process outlined in this chapter, your input is vital at every step. Be clear about what you want to accomplish—and then overcommunicate it by a factor of 10.

Is This Really Necessary?

When we first started to write Deliverology 101, this first chapter posed an immediate challenge. A question loomed in the back of our minds: is this chapter really necessary? Don’t education leaders articulate their aspirations already?

In the last few years, we’ve learned that this chapter is not only necessary but critical to everything that follows. An aspiration is like delivery as a whole: our most common mistake is to assume that it is already there, that articulating it is a natural skill that leaders already possess. But without effort and discipline, most systems will not have a clear, well-defined, and widely shared aspiration. Without that, your work is rudderless.

That’s why the first question of delivery is always “What are you trying to do?” What are you trying to achieve for your students? This consistent focus on the ultimate outcome is one of the hallmarks that sets the delivery approach apart from others. Without alignment around the aspiration, your delivery effort is hamstrung from the very beginning.

Nevertheless, this seemingly obvious question has tripped up more than one leadership team we’ve worked with. One K–12 system convened a working group to articulate a long-term vision for their system. They asked a variation on our first question: “What is the purpose of this system?” Surprisingly, the question generated some intense disagreement. Some contended that, because they were so far from the classroom, their purpose must be limited to serving and equipping schools so that they could serve their students.

Others argued the opposite: no matter how far away we are, they said, our purpose must be to improve student achievement. Otherwise, when our schools don’t perform, we’ll be tempted to wash our hands of the outcome, kind of like the teacher who says, “I taught it; the students just didn’t learn it!”

It took several hours and a great deal of discussion, but the team finally agreed on the latter view: the system’s purpose was to serve students and improve their achievement.

Why was this conversation so difficult? The farther a person gets from the front line, the more difficult it is to make the connection between the cubicle and the classroom. So it’s not surprising that some people plead powerlessness to influence outcomes and feel little or no responsibility for student success.

The delivery approach prevents this from happening. If a focus on outcomes is good enough for those at the front lines of education, it’s good enough for those who lead them. In fact, leaders bear a special moral burden: we must hold ourselves just as accountable for how students perform as the teachers and faculty who work with them every day. Otherwise, what are we trying to do?

Core Principles

An aspiration is a system’s answer to three questions:

1. What do we care about?
2. What are we going to do about it?
3. How do we measure success?

In practical terms, this means that an aspiration defines an outcome connected to a moral purpose, broadly defines how we would like to see that outcome move, and can be broken down into no more than a handful of goals with specific goal metrics and targets.

Target-setting doesn’t necessarily happen at this stage. As long as you have a metric for each goal, you can set targets later on (for more on this, see Chapter 3B). On the other hand, sometimes the aspiration will be expressed as a series of targets from the start. It all depends on the environment where you operate and the number of external factors that influence your choices. For example, when the Louisiana Department of Education began their delivery effort in 2009, they expressed their aspiration as a continuum of student outcome targets that begins in preschool and culminates with postsecondary success, either in college or via an Industry Based Credential (see Figure 1A.1).

For many years now, the Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education has expressed their aspiration in terms of 5 questions:

1. Are more Kentuckians ready for postsecondary education?
2. Is Kentucky postsecondary education affordable for its citizens?
3. Do more Kentuckians have certificates and degrees?
4. Are college graduates prepared for life and work in Kentucky?
5. Are Kentucky’s people, communities, and economy benefiting?

Their assessment of progress always comes back to metrics and measures related to these five questions.

Notice something here that both Kentucky and Louisiana have in common: their aspirations lend themselves to clear measurement, but they also lend themselves to clear communication of the vision for students (more on this later).

Figure 1A.1 Louisiana’s Aspiration in 2009

There is one more quality that makes a strong aspiration: it must consist of goals we can assign to specific people. In many systems, these people are known as goal leaders. In the original Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit, the staff referred to them as the “single named officials” who would be responsible for the delivery of each priority: “This should be the person who spends most of his/her time on the priority and has sleepless nights, worrying about hitting the targets.”¹

This implies a big shift in the way we think about organizations and how they operate. People are not normally responsible for goals; they are responsible for programs, projects, initiatives, or other inputs. The result is that programs, projects, and initiatives get managed—but we have little confidence that the overarching outcomes will change. To appoint people as goal leaders is to declare that we value the results of our work more than work for its own sake.

Being a goal leader is difficult. It requires a person to exert influence over anyone and everyone who could have a significant impact on the goal they manage. This inevitably means influencing others without explicit authority to do so—either peer to peer or often with someone higher up on the organization chart. The best goal leaders are:

• Senior enough to be respected throughout a system (they are usually members of the leadership team);
• Flexible enough to wear two hats (managing their goal while continuing to manage a division of the office); and
• Willing and able to build the necessary relationships across divisions to break down siloes and exercise influence without authority.

The most common model for goal leadership is to find a qualified senior team member and assign to them the goal whose center of gravity is in the division that they manage. So, for example, in many K–12 systems that have goals to increase student proficiency, the goal leader is the person who heads the curriculum and instruction office. This reflects the fact that instructional reforms (especially in the era of Common Core Standards) are a major strategy for achieving this goal.

But the fit isn’t perfect. Many of these same systems also have goals for college and career readiness—usually defined by high school success measures but closely related to proficiency at all grade levels. And educator effectiveness can be both a goal (increasing the number of effective teachers and leaders) and a strategy to achieve proficiency and college and career-readiness goals.

You can see the challenge: very few student outcome goals line up cleanly with the work of the functional divisions of an education system. Most goals will draw on the work of multiple offices, which is why goal leadership requires a special skill set.

With these principles in mind, what should we do to define a system’s aspiration? There are three steps:

1. Identify existing aspirations and goals;
2. Prioritize and refine the aspiration; and
3. Communicate the aspiration.

Identify Existing Aspirations and Goals

No system starts from a blank slate, and most have articulated goals in some form or fashion. It’s important to identify these goals to understand our starting point. What kinds of statements of purpose, goals, or objectives has your system defined already? Some ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Acknowledgements
• Acknowledgements
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• About the Authors
• Introduction The American Implementation Problem
• Part 1 Develop a Foundation for Delivery
• Chapter 1A Define Your Aspiration
• Chapter 1B Review the Current State of Delivery
• Chapter 1C Build the Delivery Unit
• Chapter 1D Establish a Guiding Coalition
• Part 2 Understand the Delivery Challenge
• Chapter 2A Evaluate Past and Present Performance
• Chapter 2B Understand Root Causes of Performance
• Part 3 Plan for Delivery
• Chapter 3A Determine Your Reform Strategy
• Chapter 3B Draw the Delivery Chain
• Chapter 3C Set Targets and Establish Trajectories
• Part 4 Drive Delivery
• Chapter 4A Establish Routines to Drive and Monitor Performance
• Chapter 4B Solve Problems Early and Rigorously
• Chapter 4C Sustain and Continually Build Momentum
• Part 5 Create an Irreversible Delivery Culture
• Chapter 5A Build System Capacity All the Time
• Chapter 5B Communicate the Delivery Message
• Chapter 5C Unleash the “Alchemy of Relationships”
• Conclusion Over to You
• Index
• Publisher Note