Stakeholder-Driven Strategic Planning in Education: A Practical Guide for Developing and Deploying Successful Long-Range Plans

By Robert W. Ewy

No school district becomes excellent without a strategic plan, but many remain mediocre with them. What makes the difference? This book has been written to describe what it means to engage in serious long-range or “strategic” planning and to provide solutions to the inadequacies and inconsistencies found in the way school districts approach this process.

The book is intended to be as practical as possible, meaning that by understanding the design and following the suggested strategic planning team activities found in each chapter, you could facilitate this process in your district. All key components are described and multiple examples are used to help the reader understand the intent of each component and how the components fit together. In addition, questionnaires and surveys are included to simplify facilitation.

The basic reference used to refine the Stakeholder-Driven Strategic Planning process is the Strategic Planning Category of the Baldrige Education Criteria for Performance Excellence.

• Language: English
• Publisher: ASQ Quality Press
• Release date: Nov 13, 2008
• ISBN: 9780873891769

Book preview

1

The Why and How of Strategic Planning

No school district becomes excellent without a strategic plan, but many remain mediocre with them. What makes the difference?

School districts are uniquely designed to take advantage of strategic planning. They have easily identifiable stakeholders, and for the most part the expectations of those stakeholders haven’t varied significantly over time. To a great degree the future can be based on past history; that is, school districts aren’t going to have to change the business they are in—educating students—into something very different. The subject areas of the core curriculum haven’t changed in decades although content is updated periodically. The basic funding of education, although impacted by the whims of state legislatures, remains for the most part predictable from year to year. District stakeholders aren’t going to suddenly en masse stop educating their sons and daughters in the public school system and take their business elsewhere. Most other organizations do not operate in as stable an environment as education. But in order to capitalize on this opportunity, school districts need to understand what drives success.

Success is dependent on the willingness of stakeholders to continue to support the district. That willingness is determined to a great extent by how well students learn. Student learning is a product of the quality of educational experiences in schools, which is directly proportional to the capacity and capabilities of teachers and administrators to create quality learning experiences (see Figure 1.1).

These major drivers of school district success are described as the flywheel effect in Jim Collins’s monograph for the social sectors that accompanies his book titled Good to Great. In the monograph he describes the flywheel effect by stating:

In building greatness, there is no single defining action, no grand program, no one killer innovation, no solitary lucky break, no miracle moment. Rather, the process resembles relentlessly pushing a giant, heavy flywheel in one direction, turn upon turn, building momentum until a point of breakthrough, and beyond (Collins 2005).

These success drivers are a school district’s heavy flywheel. It requires disciplined attention to each of the drivers if your school district, through its strategic plan, is to build the momentum it needs to become one of the truly great school districts in the nation.

Figure 1.1 Educational flywheel.

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS ABOUT STRATEGIC PLANNING

What is strategic planning?

The process for creating a long-range mission, vision, goals, and strategies is called strategic planning. The plan focuses equally on the what (purpose, direction) and the how (goals, strategies). The purpose and primary value of strategic planning is its power to involve people in a process leading to new understandings and insights about what a school district might confront in the future and how it should react to those possibilities. Some future challenges can be anticipated, others can not, but senior leaders in a school district need to put considerable thought into how those anticipated challenges might affect the future health and well-being of the district, what they might imply for the education of students, and what they need to put into place to address and resolve them.

Why would a school district be interested in strategic planning?

"Board members and senior leaders should be interested in developing a strategic plan if they don’t want to be seen as reactive or crisis-prone in responding to challenges or issues

School board members and senior leaders are responsible for articulating the mission and vision of the district, coordinating its deployment, and monitoring results. Another role is to anticipate possible changes or challenges to the accomplishment of the mission and vision and make well-informed decisions about how to respond to those challenges. Board members and senior leaders should be interested in developing a strategic plan if they don’t want to be seen as reactive or crisis-prone in responding to challenges or issues. Strategic planning is a basic function for any organization; that is, successful organizations routinely chart a long-term course, take action, monitor progress, and modify plans over time if conditions and assumptions change. Evidence suggests that organizations with practical working strategic plans consistently outperform comparable organizations that do not have an operational strategic plan.

How will strategic planning benefit the school district?

From past experiences, board members, senior leaders, and district staff state very definite reasons for using a strategic planning process. The most often stated reasons are:

We need to develop effective strategies for coping with the changes and challenges our district is facing.

We need a clear future direction for our school district.

We need a process for determining school district priorities for the long term.

We need a long-term plan that is measurable.

We need to rethink the way we allocate resources and prioritize spending if we expect to retain public confidence and funding for our school district.

We need to better anticipate future long-term opportunities based on conditions within and outside the school district and develop plans to take advantage of them.

We need to better anticipate future long-term threats within and outside the school district and develop plans to minimize their adverse effects.

We need to have some sense of long-term stability across the school district so that we don’t have to refocus our attention on new goals, programs, outcomes, and improvement plans every year.

Strategic planning is not another organizational management fad. It has been used with great success in the past and is considered an essential process in all planning activities. It is a process that, if done correctly, brings the school district and its community together to create a preferred future for students, staff, and stakeholders.

THE STAKEHOLDER-DRIVEN STRATEGIC PLANNING PROCESS

This strategic planning process has three premises that provide the context for all planning activities:

The only goal there is. Organizational excellence is the only goal worth pursuing (for any organization and at any level within the organization).

What organizational excellence means. The Baldrige Criteria are recognized throughout the world as the best criteria for defining organizational excellence. It’s hard to find any other definition or set of criteria that comes close.

How you get there. You get to organizational excellence by managing the performance of the organization. That means you spend your time aligning, deploying, and improving all the systems in your organization, which begins with the development and application of a strategic plan.

CREATING A STRATEGIC PLAN

The process of creating a strategic plan can be described as the development of a plan that works in concert with existing district board policies to provide administration and staff the direction they need over an extended period of time (three to five years) to organize expertise, systems, and resources to achieve the district’s mission. (Note: Three to five years is the maximum shelf life for a strategic plan, even in a relatively stable environment like a school district. Trends and assumptions begin to break down after that amount of time, which makes the plan useless unless it has been updated annually.) In addition to the district mission and vision statements, student learning goals or targets are key components of the stakeholder-driven strategic planning process. Also, it is critical that a strategic plan based on the Baldrige Criteria identify the key strategic challenges the district will face that could impact its long-term performance and sustainability. The Baldrige Criteria asks, What are your key education and learning, operational, human resource, and community-related strategic challenges and advantages? What are your key strategic challenges and advantages associated with organizational sustainability? (NIST 2008)

The strategic plan, in addition to the mission, vision, and student learning targets, specifies strategic goals and objectives that are descriptions of what the district intends to do and the strategies that need to be deployed if the mission is to be achieved. Senior leaders within the district then design new tactics or reaffirm existing tactics—the everyday activities, programs, and practices that represent the intent of the strategy (see Figure 1.2).

THE OUTCOMES OF THE STAKEHOLDER-DRIVEN STRATEGIC PLANNING PROCESS

The strategic outcome of the stakeholder-driven strategic planning process is to determine what stakeholders require and expect of students and the district. The strategic issue for school districts is to determine where priorities should be placed. What, among all the possible things that school districts can do to educate students, are the priorities in the eyes of the district’s stakeholders?

Figure 1.2 Strategy pyramid.

The school district can not add value to a student’s education and achieve the educational goals of district parents and community members if the end in mind is not clearly aligned to those stakeholders’ current and future expectations and requirements.

The operational outcome is for the school district to translate stakeholder expectations and performance requirements into an effective management system with the primary focus of meeting and then exceeding stakeholder expectations. The management system is based on four documents: the strategic plan, the strategy map, the balanced scorecard, and the district-level systems map. The management system must include plans for the alignment of organizational systems to the strategic plan, deployment of the strategy map, the integration of strategic plan goals and objectives into department and school improvement plans, the development and refinement of organizational processes to improve effectiveness and efficiency, and frequent monitoring and reviewing of the planning and deployment processes, using the balanced scorecard.

THE BIG PICTURE

Strategic planning plays a critically important role in the success of a school district but it only impacts the bottom line if other organizational components are addressed. Figure 1.3 shows where strategic planning fits into the larger scheme of systems within a school district organization that need to be optimized if organizational excellence is to be achieved.

Alignment

The strategic plan (Chapter 4), as you can see, is the key to the alignment process if a school district wants to achieve excellence. In fact, the basic function of a strategic plan is to define what excellence means for your school district. Once that is determined, then a strategy map (Chapter 5) is developed that describes how the school district will go about achieving excellence as defined in the strategic plan. A balanced scorecard (Chapter 6) follows the strategy map so that everyone in the school district has a set of common leading and lagging indicators that tell them how close they are to achieving the district’s definition of excellence. The last alignment step is to design a systems map (Chapter 7) that graphically shows how all the systems within the school district fit together and align to the district’s definition of performance excellence.

Figure 1.3 The big picture of educational performance excellence.

Deployment

When each of the alignment steps is completed, deployment takes place. Deployment, which is a Baldrige term and can also be stated as implementation or execution, determines if all the work of aligning the organization is actually put to use. There is too much historical precedent in education to take this step lightly. Time after time the best of intentions have met a swift death at the hands of poor deployment. There are many structural problems in education (status quo, state mandates, disincentives to change, evaluation policies, autonomous departments and schools, lack of accountability, poor planning, and so on) that make the transition from alignment to deployment very difficult. Examples of district and school deployment steps will be found in Chapter 7.

Process Improvement

Process improvement is the third equally important phase in achieving organizational excellence. One could make the argument that process improvement is what any organization spends most of its time doing if it is achieving organizational excellence. It is also the phase where school districts generally have the least amount of expertise. Most process improvement activities being used by school districts today are neither efficient nor effective, not because school districts don’t want them to be but because they don’t understand what good process improvement activities require. For example, who is the expert in developing and analyzing control chart and histogram data to understand whether the processes in your district are stable and capable?

TODAY'S SITUATION

Even though developing a strategic plan is less complicated in school district settings, that doesn’t mean the issues that a strategic plan addresses are less complicated. School districts operate in a challenging environment that requires them to plan strategically about their future.