The Nexus: How Best Practices Provide an Answer to the Student Achievement Conundrum

By Janis Jablecki and Dr. D. Edgar Guthrie

The nexus between best practices and student achievement is demonstrated from the GRASP Project, discovering how some California charter schools with higher academic achievement showed evidence of a greater number of best practices as measured by performance, governance, education program, human resources, business practices, and facilitiesthe education program infrastructure. Surprisingly, technology did not show a correlation for reasons explained in the nexus. Moreover, the nexus is bolstered by administrative, innovation, and competition theory serving as foundations for The Nexus. The Nexus also introduces strategies to implement best practices and process improvements through Lean Six Sigma methods and strategic and action planning.
The search for the next practice designed to improve education programs is perpetual. The significance to accreditation is profound as student achievement measures will require metrics paced to reform movements such as Common Core Standards derived from international settings. By the same token, quality education will become clearer as edification through international benchmarks such as ISO 9000 will promote higher standards of excellence.
The Nexus conclusions have relevance to all school systems since implementing best practices can elevate student achievement. The reason is clear: the more a school system operates efficiently through best practices and process improvements, the more time is available to the school leadership to devote attention to academic achievement as the ultimate product of education. And for those invested in school improvement, a higher value-added education with a higher return on investment.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 31, 2013
• ISBN: 9781483640136

Janis Jablecki

About the Authors Dr. D(avid). Edgar Guthrie has worked in government, nonprofit, and private sectors for over thirty years with a doctorate in public policy and administration from the University of Southern California. Dr. Guthrie’s association and experience in the school and nonprofit governance leadership fields has led him to conclude that if organizations employ best practices, it will naturally result in higher productivity, efficiency, and effective firms. When best practices are integrated into the strategic planning process, it engenders an enhanced service delivery venue as the GRASP Project revealed with implications for school systems. Janis Jablecki has been in the field of education for the last twenty-five years. Initially a teacher, she has worked in charter schools since 1993 and as an administrator since 1997. In 1998, she became the head administrator of Camptonville Academy, a personalized learning charter school with its roots in home school and independent study. She was instrumental in opening two other personalized learning charter schools and currently is the executive director of all three schools. She received her bachelor of fine arts from the University of Rhode Island, teaching certificate from National University, and administrative leadership credential form California State University, Sacramento. She has presented extensively at charter school conferences in California and abroad and has received the California Department of Education Independent Study Field Expert award twice, 2007 and 2008. She became team leader for a Pubic Charter School Dissemination Grant in 2009, leading the Governance, Renewal, Assessment, and Strategic Planning (GRASP) Project.

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Copyright © 2013 by Dr. D. Edgar Guthrie and Janis Jablecki.

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CONTENTS

About the Authors

Acknowledgments

Foreword

Chapter I   The Innovative Administrator

Chapter II   Innovation and Qualitative Change

Chapter III   The Competitive Impulse and Best Practices for Process Improvement

Chapter IV   Quality Metrics and Transformation through Best Practices and Process Improvement

Chapter V   Student Achievement Realized—Adaptation, Adoption, and Diffusion

Chapter VI   Implications for the Futurist Administrator

Chapter VII   Next Practices

Conclusion   The Accreditation Future: Standards, Best Practices, and Process Improvements from an International Perspective

Appendix I   RETURN ON INVESTMENT (RoI)

Appendix II   BEST PRACTICES ASSESSMENTS

Appendix III   ISO’s Quality Management Principles*

Endnotes

dedication.jpg

In Memoriam to Jan Jablecki, author and educator, who was committed to excellence, quality, and nurturing her students’ love of learning. We dedicate this book to our beloved spouses, Sherry and Ron, partners who joined us on our quest to better the academic lives of students stifled by ineffective school systems.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Dr. D(avid). Edgar Guthrie has worked in government, nonprofit, and private sectors for over thirty years with a doctorate in public policy and administration from the University of Southern California. Dr. Guthrie’s association and experience in the school and nonprofit governance leadership fields has led him to conclude that if organizations employ best practices, it will naturally result in higher productivity, efficiency, and effective firms. When best practices are integrated into the strategic planning process, it engenders an enhanced service delivery venue as the GRASP Project revealed with implications for school systems.

Janis Jablecki has been in the field of education for the last twenty-five years. Initially a teacher, she has worked in charter schools since 1993 and as an administrator since 1997. In 1998, she became the head administrator of Camptonville Academy, a personalized learning charter school with its roots in home school and independent study. She was instrumental in opening two other personalized learning charter schools and currently is the executive director of all three schools. She received her bachelor of fine arts from the University of Rhode Island, teaching certificate from National University, and administrative leadership credential form California State University, Sacramento. She has presented extensively at charter school conferences in California and abroad and has received the California Department of Education Independent Study Field Expert award twice, 2007 and 2008. She became team leader for a Pubic Charter School Dissemination Grant in 2009, leading the Governance, Renewal, Assessment, and Strategic Planning (GRASP) Project.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The development of this book evolved from a dedication to tell a story about the authors’ desire to understand why so many schools are having difficulty elevating student achievement and discovering how best practices and methods could improve charter schools and, by extension, transform school systems. The journey of discovery could not have been fulfilled without those who contributed to our work product that follows.

We want to acknowledge the Florida Office of Program Policy Analysis and Government Accountability (OPPGA) for granting us permission to adapt the best practices and indicators survey battery adapted to charter schools supplemented by California Department of Education’s Self-Assessment Guides for Schools.

We want to acknowledge CORE@TCA staff, Dehesa School District and Terri Novacek from Dehesa Charter School, Santa Rosa Academy’s Laura Badillo, and Kathleen Hermsmeyer from Eagles Peak Charter School who participated in the formative study that served as the foundation for the Governance, Renewal, Assessment, and Strategic Planning (GRASP) Project hinting at the best practices and academic achievement linkage.

We want to acknowledge the charter schools that participated in the GRASP Project, willing to test and validate our conclusion that there was a correlation of best practices and academic achievement. Honorable mention goes to Dr. Lorraine McCall who critiqued our statistical methods and conclusions.

We want to acknowledge the GRASP Project team members from MY&C, Jim Young and Lisa Corr, Jeff Rice from APLUS+ personalized learning school network, and Reid Luhman, grant writer, who also provided technical support.

And we want to acknowledge all those who have been receptive to our ideas and offered suggestions along the way. All have contributed, in some measure, to improve schools and education quality.

San Diego, California Dr. D. Edgar Guthrie

March 2013 Jan Jablecki

FOREWORD

Schools are ostensibly organized for student achievement. If student achievement is the measure of school performance, then the current state of the school organization systems are underperforming. The federal and states’ education policy struggling to elevate student achievement have focused solely on pedagogy over the last half century. These policies have delimited inquiry that should have included a fuller consideration about the school organization’s scope and functions and their importance to learning and influence on student achievement: the product of the education system. If, as in the private sector experience, higher productivity will increase returns on investment, is it possible to adapt the processes that lead to higher productivity to increase student achievement?

This book explores how innovation and competition influences administrator behavior through the experiences of a few charter schools in California and their journey of discovery through best practices and process improvements. The improvements set the stage for incorporating systems that became a model for other school systems to emulate as the result was higher student achievement.

The findings from an initial study (beta) showing a linkage between best practices and academic achievement, the product of education, was promising and replicated in a subsequent study known as Governance, Renewal, Assessment, and Strategic Planning (GRASP), involving more schools that validated our theory that there was linkage. The discovery protocol included surveys, interviews, and strategic and action planning in an effort to employ and diffuse best practices and benchmarking. Moreover, GRASP success has implications for other school systems, both public and private.

The endeavor began as a response to Keehley and Abercrombie’s entreaty to add to the benchmarking taxonomy with focused research and sector analysis by application and demonstrating the value of best practices and benchmarking. Questions they pose are apropos: Can best practices be categorized or analyzed according to unique characteristics involving complexity, implementation, or the number of organizations involved in implementation? What evidence demonstrates a cause-and-effect relationship between benchmarking and improved performance?¹

The decision to pursue school system best practices is a function of charter school administrative practice well suited to introducing innovation and the derivative best practices. The evidence-based practice (EBP) process requires expertise that relies on evidence to shape decisions… and must possess other requisite application skills.² These decision-making skills include: (a) the ability to access, evaluate, and use information in a timely manner; (b) a commitment to rely on multiple sources of evidence; and (c) a commitment to evaluate outcomes objectively.³ Cordell and Chisholm have described EBP, active in the medical field and applicable to school systems, as a four-stage diagnostic process:

1.   Formulating answerable questions.

2.   Rapidly searching for best evidence to answer these questions.

3.   Critically appraising the evidence for validity and applicability.

4.   Integrating this appraisal with clinical expertise and patients’ values and applying it to the individual patient.

A fifth stage is evaluation of outcomes rounding out the process. The following diagram depicts the EBP process that the best practices model frames for successful adaptation and diffusion:

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The best practices process for schools employing the EBP framework in response to reform means adapting administrative best practices to the organizational context. In other words, as Heifetz states, Educators are more likely to accept EBP if they came to see school reform as a process of solving adaptive problems.⁵

In the same vein, we began by asking several questions. If we were to develop a quality school, what would that entail? Do best practices and process improvements increase the school’s efficiency and become more effective? Finally, is there a link between best practices and benchmarking to academic achievement and quality programs?

The search for school quality is a search for the ideal of quality producing an environment conducive to student learning and highest achievement possible. From an education organization perspective, the efficiency/effectiveness nexus enabled by a coherent vision and mission guiding the school’s future has defined quality. But quality measures in education go beyond indices that are objective to more subjective measures guided by the attractors to parents and students. Best practices and process improvements widens the scale to consider quality measures that transcends the current paradigm. Being alert to the next practice will become a school administrator’s skill set. The interplay of innovation and competition can create the incentive to search for the next one best way to enhance education program quality revealed from scanning the literature and the GRASP action research methodology.

The nexus between student achievement and organizational efficiency and effectiveness can be activated through best practices and benchmarking. Rather than a narrow focus on the classroom setting, a broader perspective was necessary including other factors that influence student learning such as the infrastructure supporting instruction. The school’s leadership team including the board of directors, school’s chief administrator, and support staff represent the many roles within the education program infrastructure that supports instruction. Reasonably, the better a school’s organization system operates, the better the school performs. It does so by liberating a school’s administration that is often bogged down by concerns arising from an inefficient organization diverting from the focus on student learning and achievement. Moreover, the return on investment from the application of best practices and process improvement is profound. Through innovative best practices and benchmarking, the school system is able to develop value-added education and elevate program quality, demonstrating a marginally better school system in a competitive environment. Quality education is defined by the learning environment context and emanates from process improvement. The metric for process improvements is benchmarks that measure the degree of accomplishment. As Bogan and Hart observe,

Benchmarking validates and adds credibility to the goal-setting process by its concentration on best practices. Benchmarking obliterates divisive internal debate on targets. A company can undertake a major change because our competitor, or someone else, is already doing it. With no benchmarking data, that kind of change would be unimaginable.⁶

Best practices and benchmarking establish the quality metric framework to determine the marginal value added comparing their school system to others in the education sector. The results answer the questions, how do we measure up and become more competitive? Alternatively, and more importantly, how can the school system be one of the best among the best or even superior to the best? The search for quality through benchmarking can be enhanced by cross-sector scanning, for example, other public and private entities skilled in adaptable marketing and customer service practices.

Best practices and benchmarking is an innovating process following a sequence of introduction, adaptation, adoption, and diffusion. Peter F. Drucker defined innovation as change that creates a new dimension of performance.⁷ Innovating challenges school leadership to institutionalize a continuous process for improvement that necessarily requires the organization to adapt to change while ensuring the organization’s integrity articulated by its vision and mission. Innovating can also derive from copying the innovation of others rather than being innovative.⁸ In the education sector, highly innovative enterprises reside in charter schools.

Chapter 1 describes what it means to be an innovative administrator and the evolution of administrative theory and practice. The constant search for the one best way invites ingenuity, invention, and innovations that will change the school system for the better, delivering quality services while elevating student achievement. Administrators skilled in recognizing adaptable innovations for the school system enable it to respond to the changing environment more nimbly. We discover these innovation incubators can benefit a receptive, albeit rigid traditional and overly bureaucratic, school system by overcoming barriers through collaboration and reciprocity even in a competitive environment.

Chapter 2 introduces the innovation and quality phenomenon which is the application of new and unique ideas that change and improve the traditional education methods and schools. Innovation creates improvement by deviating from the norms of operation. Moreover, charter schools are the impetus for innovation but adapting innovation from other settings can be challenging to the charter school administrator and, commensurately, their sponsors and institutional school systems.

Chapter 3 explores the evolution of best practices and benchmarking beginning from scientific management thought by its founder, Frederick Winslow Taylor, and the competition phenomenon creating the incentive to seek greater efficiencies and marginal value. Taylor’s seminal work focused on improving the efficiency of firms that would gain higher profits and returns to the mutual interest of management and workers that became the genesis for the performance improvement field emanating from both the private and public sectors. For education, the charter school has become an active competitive instrument, innovation incubator, and process improvement venue. The charter school’s demonstrated ability to perform competitively with the traditional school system is in large measure a function of its entrepreneurial character incented to find the most efficient education delivery system possible transferrable to the traditional school system. Charter schools have become the impetus for education innovations. Best practices as innovations can alter the existing management paradigm focused on efficient organization processes to a broader administrative perspective in search of value-added education. Paradoxically, innovations are more attractive, transferrable, and diffusible through a collaborative and reciprocal regime consistent with public education’s on democratic and equity service values than from a competitive impulse.

Chapter 4 provides examples and applicability of best practices and benchmark quality indicators for the school administrator. ISO 9000 framework for quality organizational development and Lean Six Sigma for process improvement used successfully in the private sector are beginning to emerge in the public sector called upon to establish objective measures of quality in a highly subjective arena. Policy initiatives at the federal and state level are moving toward more accountability that will require school systems to measure their efficiency and effectiveness. Contributors in the field introduce how best practices and benchmarking, used in business, and suggest how best practice innovations are introduced and diffused in the organization from an economic and cultural perspective. Specific practices are discussed with examples that provide the administrator connotations of what quality is in terms of the education organization field. Quality metrics presentation is critical for communication.

Chapter 5 validates the link between best practices and benchmarking to student achievement through the GRASP Project. Elevating student achievement is the primary purpose and product of education. The chapter describes the results from a charter school study that demonstrated a correlation between the extent best practices are present in a school organization and their success evidenced by higher student achievement levels. Lean Six Sigma tools were employed to analyze and present the results in a meaningful way.⁹ Tables and graphs are used to display the results and regression analysis for predictive capability. Patricia Keehley and her team—Neil Abercrombie, Steven Medlin, Sue MacBride, and Laura Longmire—have ventured into the public and nonprofit sectors driven to improve performance apart from the profit motive and more suitable for schools. Each has added to the field’s knowledge and defines the best practices and benchmarking methodology framing this education system study. The lead administrator developed a collaborative team using the guidance of the works of Jim Collins’s Good to Great, Patrick Lancioni’s The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, and John Bryson’s Strategic Planning for Public and Nonprofit Organizations. Best practices will improve an organization’s efficiency and effectiveness through the strategic and action planning process. Policy frames how the administrator and board of directors’ roles in the best practices and benchmarking process, stimulating the organization to become more accountable for results and elevating performance guided by quality standards.

Chapter 6 reveals how best practices and benchmarking are the practice of innovating that has implications for the school administrator requiring certain skills and cooperation from stakeholders to adapt the best practices to the organization culture in the best way possible. These factors determine the time and to what extent the best practice innovation diffuses. The administrator can use best practices as models to frame the process recognizing that best practices are templates molded to the organization culture. The results are improving quality and value to the school’s stakeholders and community served. Further, the chapter delves into the definition and attributes of quality education and how the administrator apprehends and measures quality education programs. The axiology makes a connection between quality and value, stressing the need for metrics by which quality values are enumerated. It becomes a synthesis of qualities and imagination enabling the administrator to envision the possible. The process, however, requires skills, judgment, and intuition refined from the administration practice experience that goes beyond the administrative credential content and training.

Chapter 7 introduces the concept of next (best) practices that is the constant search for the next best practice process improvements that will make a marginal difference in service delivery quality and value. But the search is constrained by the intelligence of the organization and administrator. A rational approach is desirable supplemented by intuition combine as wisdom visioning the best methods and choice fitted to the organization context. Such ability and skill requires specialized training to acquire the characteristics that will embrace change and innovations in the form of next practices. Envisioning the next practice and successful application and diffusion in the organization will become a highly valued quality in the futurist administrator particularly schools in highly competitive environments acquiring the ability and skill to become agents of innovation and creative destruction¹⁰ perpetually. The distance learning next practice challenges and presents opportunities for the administrator and teacher to employ technology ingeniously that will improve student achievement. The study results revealed technology for the sample school systems was not correlated to academic achievement reflecting in large measure the technology in the classroom experience over the past decade. This circumstance and low return on investment begs the question, how can we employ technology more effectively? The answer points to best practices that include relevant technology plans and building capacity to implement the plan as designed. As distance learning expands and becomes an integral part of the education spectrum, quality standards and accreditation that grades the quality of distance learning education will become more important. We foresee the likelihood distance learning will become preeminent as a cost-effective alternative to traditional education methods.

We conclude with a discussion about this evolving next practice and influence on the changing complexion of accreditation, adjusting the evaluation paradigm to accommodate a more individualized education model through distance education, evaluation criteria and expectations for results unlike any before. The authors introduce the new evaluation and benchmarking paradigm retrieved from international sources such as the International Standards Organization (ISO) (appendix 3) that offers standards, best practices, and process improvement templates adaptable to the accreditation system.

These are extraordinary times for developing charter schools. The challenges of operating a school system stress its capacity to respond nimbly to environmental factors beyond its control. Moreover, what is controllable can be just as challenging as the school’s organization may not be operating as efficiently as it could.

Best practices offer an answer to the school administrator’s quandaries about how to improve school operations with limited resources and thus allowing the administrator to focus more intently on what is important, academic achievement, and avoid being bogged down by the minutiae. Best practices diffusion can make a difference by showing a marginal improvement in productivity and efficiency translated into academic achievement along with the other factors that define a quality education program. The following graph depicts how best practices can add to the strategy mix, from a base of operation, adding improvements intended to elevate the school system’s Academic Performance Index (API), effectiveness, and return on investment:

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Figure 2.   Strategic mix and best practices performance impact

What follows is an entreaty for those who want to know how to better their school organization’s performance. Expect to discover how best practices and benchmarking can guide innovation, implementation, and its diffusion in the charter school education delivery system adaptable to the contemporary school organization development, perpetually. The by-product is elevating student achievement, performance, and marginal value resulting in higher return on investment that will not only benefit the school system but their community at large.

NOTES

1.   Patricia Keehley and Neil N. Abercrombie, Benchmarking in the Public and Nonprofit Sectors: Best Practices for Achieving Performance Breakthroughs, 2nd ed. (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 2008), 89-90.

2.   Theodore J. Kowalski and Thomas J. Lasley II, Handbook of Data-Based Decision Making in Education (New York, NY: Routledge, 2009), 12-13.

3.   Theodore J. Kowalski, Thomas J. Lasley II, and James W. Mahoney, Data Driven Decisions and School Leadership: Best Practices for School Improvement. (Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon, 2008), 13.

4.   William H. Cordell and C. D. Chisholm, Will the Real Evidence-Based Medicine Please Stand Up, Emergency Medicine News 23(6) (2001): 4, 11-14.

5.   Ronald A. Heifetz, Educational Leadership: Beyond a Focus on Instruction, Phi Delta Kappan, 87(7) (2006), 512-513.

6.   Christopher E. Bogan and Christopher W. L. Hart, The Baldrige: What It Is, How It’s Won, How to Use It to Improve Quality in Your Company (New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, 1992), 115.

7.   Frances Hesselbein, Marshall Goldsmith, and Iain Somerville, eds., Leading for Innovation and Organizing for Results (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2002), xi.

8.   H. George Frederickson and Kevin B. Smith, The Public Administration Theory Primer (Cambridge, MA: Westview Press, 2003), 93.

9.   Roderick A. Munro, Matthew J. Maio, Mohamed B. Nawaz, Govindarajan Ramu, and Daniel J. Zrymiak, The Certified Six Sigma Green Belt Handbook (Milwaukee, WI: Quality Press, 2007).

10.   Joseph Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1954), 555.

CHAPTER I

The Innovative Administrator

Innovation requires organizational learning.

—Senge¹

Organizational learning also requires transformational leadership that finds its genesis in The Study of Administration, written by Woodrow Wilson. He described the future role of the public administrator through civil service reform by saying, We must go to adjust executive functions more fitly and to prescribe better methods of executive organization and action… it is opening the way for making it businesslike.² Paul P. Van Riper interpreted this statement to mean:

Wilson