Positive deviance in New York City schools goes unrecognized

This is reprinted from 12/2006. Organizational improvement is about management most of all. Management isn't necessarily a "for profit" concept, which is forgotten in the movement in favor of privatization. It is possible to have sound management in government and other nonprofit organizations.

Today's Washington Post has an article about Patty Stonesifer ("Stonesifer Will Shake Things Up at Smithsonian"), former Microsoft manager, formerly director of the Gates Foundation, and now the leader of the Smithsonian Institution's Board of Regents. One of the people quoted in the article recounts a frequent saying of Ms. Stonesifer's:

If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.

It's relevant to the DC schools issue.

There is an article about education in the New York Times, "Bucking School Reform, a Leader Gets Results," which illustrates the concept of "positive deviance" that I have previously discussed.

Positive deviance is an approach based on the fact that most dysfunctional organizations have pockets of excellence, and the trick is to identify the factors that support excellence there and replicate them. They make the point that this is important because most "best practices" examples are rejected by the "body" because they are practices "not from here" and people come up with all kinds of excuses to not make the change.

From the article:

Kathleen M. Cashin is responsible for some of the roughest territory in the New York City school system — vast stretches of poverty and desolation from Ocean Hill-Brownsville and East New York in Brooklyn to Far Rockaway in Queens, all part of Region 5, where she is superintendent. Already this school year, two of her students have been shot dead, including a 16-year-old killed last week. The area has more homeless shelters than any other part of the city. For generations, the local school districts she now runs were marred by racial strife and corruption.

Andrea Mohin/The New York Times. Kathleen M. Cashin visiting pupils in the Rockaways, Queens.

Yet in the last three years, Dr. Cashin has produced one of the school system’s most unlikely success stories. Since 2003, her elementary and middle schools have consistently posted the best total gains on annual reading and math tests, outpacing other regions with similar legacies of low achievement. ...Dr. Cashin’s results should be an easy reason for Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein to gloat, a triumph in their takeover of the nation’s largest school system. But in many ways, her success raises questions about the thrust of their recent efforts to reshape the school bureaucracy.

While Mr. Klein has derided the “status quo crowd” and sought to bring outsiders into the administration, Dr. Cashin is a lifelong city educator. While Mr. Klein wants to free principals from the control of superintendents like her, Dr. Cashin believes even the best principals need an experienced supervisor.

Where Mr. Klein insists that school administration must be reinvented to reverse generations of failure by generations of educators, Dr. Cashin, a product of the old system, insists she can get results with a clear instructional mission, careful organization and a simple strategy of every educator’s being supported by an educator with more experience. (emphasis added).

The NYC example of Superintendent Cashin is classic example of excellence amidst mediocrity. It's too bad that the powers-that-be are ignoring the lesson that is right in front of them.
For references on positive deviance, check out the 5/2005 issue of Harvard Business Review as well as Amplifying positive deviance in schools.

Setting high expectations and demanding accountability is the root of excellence in all institutions. The op-ed by the director of the KIPP charter school in Sunday's Post belabored the obvious. See "Three Tips From KIPP" subtitled "D.C. Should Empower Principals, Seek Top Teachers, Extend School Day."

This leaves too much to the power of charasmatic leadership, and doesn't fix the system.

If we had a public school system that is accountable, and if families were far better connected and committed to the educational process, then we wouldn't be in the state that we're in today. But this is a 40 year old process, and it'll take acknowledging it before we can change it. I'm not sure we're there even yet.

Judging from the nature of the current discourse, I'm not sure people really understand the state to which most of the municipal institutions have fallen--K-12 education is only one such agency. cf. "Report Cites 'Pervasive' Mismanagement" in DC Government contracting.