This part of the book will help you build these elements out in four
chapters:
Your foundation for delivery will set the stage for everything that follows.
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? Donât education leaders articulate their aspirations already?
In the last few years, weâve 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.
Thatâs why the first question of delivery is always âWhat are you trying to do?â 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 weâve worked with. One Kâ12 system convened a working group to articulate a long-term vision for their system. They asked a variation on our first question: âWhat is the purpose of this system?â 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 donât perform, weâll be tempted to wash our hands of the outcome, kind of like the teacher who says, âI taught it; the students just didnât learn it!â
It took several hours and a great deal of discussion, but the team finally agreed on the latter view: the systemâs 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 itâs 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, itâs 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 systemâs answer to three questions:
- What do we care about?
- What are we going to do about it?
- 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 doesnât 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:
- Are more Kentuckians ready for postsecondary education?
- Is Kentucky postsecondary education affordable for its citizens?
- Do more Kentuckians have certificates and degrees?
- Are college graduates prepared for life and work in Kentucky?
- Are Kentuckyâs 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 Louisianaâs 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 Ministerâs Delivery Unit, the staff referred to them as the âsingle named officialsâ who would be responsible for the delivery of each priority: âThis should be the person who spends most of his/her time on the priority and has sleepless nights, worrying about hitting the targets.â1
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 managedâbut 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 soâeither 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 Kâ12 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 isnât perfect. Many of these same systems also have goals for college and career readinessâusually 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 systemâs aspiration? There are three steps:
- Identify existing aspirations and goals;
- Prioritize and refine the aspiration; and
- 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. Itâs 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 ...
