ISO 9001 and Public Schools - Under continuous fire for low student achievement

[Jen Kirley]

ISO 9001 could help, but its focus on minimizing variation could be your undoing.

Students come and go, but your thread is titled ..."Public schools under fire for low student achievement". Ergo, you unfortunately have to deal with students, not just teachers, to obtain sufficient gains to prove your methods are effective. How will you do that unless you pay attention to their responsiveness to the methods?

Let me put it into a process perspective: if I decline to notice chatter in machined aluminum CNC products, I am not succeeding in making a sound machining process. Students, being children, have at least as many factors to deal with as aluminum machining parts do. Students, being not only people but people in early psychological, physiological and intelligence development have a dizzying array of factors to address when trying to develop an education process that results in "good education performance."

These children are not only early in development; they have opinions: those dastardly nuisances that managers must also content with, only the childrens' opinions are untempered for the lack of years of exposure to a Dilbert world. Children have very acute BS radars, and little reason to shut them off without help. The teacher is tasked to shut off those BS radars. How will you prepare teachers to do that?

You gave a good example about a teacher trying to point out relevance in a poetry lesson by declaring it would help in making advertisements. That's wonderful. Really. However, how many of the students are interested in advertising? Tell your average group of kids that a poetry lesson will benefit an advertising project and they will tune you out because maybe one of them is interested in advertising. Your low performers will reject the relevance. I promise you that. Is your teacher pressing the button because he/she has told 30+/- disinterested children that this poetry would be useful in an ad?

If improving school performance is your aim, you must focus on the student, because the student is the source of the metrics that indicate schools are performing well or not. How can it be otherwise? Pay attention to the outcome, and the forces that impact it. Childrens' performance is the outcome. The sum of their inputs, very importantly their baggage, must be considered - just as I would consider different machining for tempered steel than iron.

The renaissance is getting worse because it's not being allowed to take hold. We still have NCLB - that's not a renaissance, though some schools are in fact reinventing themselves under its pressure. Find who is doing what that works, right now. They are out there. No need to completely reinvent the wheel.

That said, you were right about District X and Y, but it's not just about the process. The process must be designed to the need. Diverse socioeconomic forces do force a need for an elegant solution set. NCLB is no doubt working for some districts, but abjectly fails in others. Find out why, find what works and concoct a strategy to meet the diverse needs among people, regions, vocations, needs and expectations.

I have a background in metalworking. Let's use that to make some analogies.

Machinability to tolerance requires heat treatment - temper. We can equate that with gifted and talented, and their absorption rate to date of life and educational lessons. If you don't need tight tolerances, cast metals can work. But they will be temperamental, prone to loss of material and inconsistent results. Children with challenging socioeconomic status are more often like cast metal - they are likely to have lower performance and need a different set of relevance lessons than some of their classmates.

Metals sometimes have imperfections that are hard to see, such as inclusions. That is like families with struggles such as addiction, disability, un/underemployment, and single parenthood. Children in these families struggle to not only fully apply themselves at school, but grasp why they ought to.

These are people - metals only in analogy - whose scores result in your program's success. How will your educational process development address these children and their factors leading to educational output indicators (some process speak)?

 

[JW9000]

ISO 9001 could help, but its focus on minimizing variation could be your undoing.

Students come and go, but your thread is titled ..."Public schools under fire for low student achievement". Ergo, you unfortunately have to deal with students, not just teachers, to obtain sufficient gains to prove your methods are effective. How will you do that unless you pay attention to their responsiveness to the methods?

I pay attention to the responsiveness of the teachers to the students, not the other way around. I am not monitoring the student.

We need to monitor that which we professionally develop. If I have taught teachers a certain method for questioning students, that is what I will monitor. I am not trying to encompass every factor that can possibly influence student achievement. No one can.

At no point have I stated that the processes I measure are all that is necessary. Classroom management, for example, is a factor that influences student achievement that I do not monitor, because I don't train in it. There are other consultants that can perform such services. But the focus should still remain on the teacher and his or her handling of student behaviors. The behaviors of the student should not be the focus of the monitoring.

So the Deming cycle must be tight. You train in X, you monitor X, you set targets for X. Monitoring Y while not training in it is a recipe for ineffectiveness, but is the typical practice.

Let me put it into a process perspective: if I decline to notice chatter in machined aluminum CNC products, I am not succeeding in making a sound machining process.

Yes, but what we need to focus on is your handling of the chatter. When you encounter chatter, what do you do? What are your behaviors? That is what interests me when monitoring processes.

The chatter itself is not my concern as an observer. I am not evaluating the aluminum; that's your job.

These children are not only early in development; they have opinions: those dastardly nuisances that managers must also content with, only the childrens' opinions are untempered for the lack of years of exposure to a Dilbert world. Children have very acute BS radars, and little reason to shut them off without help. The teacher is tasked to shut off those BS radars. How will you prepare teachers to do that?

You gave a good example about a teacher trying to point out relevance in a poetry lesson by declaring it would help in making advertisements. That's wonderful. Really. However, how many of the students are interested in advertising? Tell your average group of kids that a poetry lesson will benefit an advertising project and they will tune you out because maybe one of them is interested in advertising. Your low performers will reject the relevance. I promise you that. Is your teacher pressing the button because he/she has told 30+/- disinterested children that this poetry would be useful in an ad?

Somehow we got confused on one point. I press the button, not the teacher.

I separate relevance into three levels:

1. personal relevance -- the content directly matters to them now, so students need to learn it because they will use it in their daily lives.
2. professional relevance -- the content matters to some form of industry, so it is taught for a good reason.
3. scholarly relevance -- the content constitutes understanding of major concepts that are the mark of an educated person.

Personal relevance is the most powerful motivator, but if we only rely on it to drive lessons we will run into trouble. A ton of academic content is not personally relevant but still needs to be taught, because the public school system is part of a long process designed to produce productive citizens, not just provide kids practical tools they can use every day.

How do students respond to professional and scholarly relevance? It varies, but students at minimum need to KNOW (and not just be told) that we are teaching them a lesson for a good reason.

Teachers should be careful about kowtowing to the whimsy of the students. We don't teach only those things that interest the students, which is why they are not the customers. But at minimum, we need to understand why the lesson content we teach is important to learn, and we need to illustrate those reasons to the students. And that is what I look for. And if I fail to see it, I bring it up to the staff for them to discuss.

If improving school performance is your aim, you must focus on the student, because the student is the source of the metrics that indicate schools are performing well or not. How can it be otherwise? Pay attention to the outcome, and the forces that impact it. Childrens' performance is the outcome. The sum of their inputs, very importantly their baggage, must be considered - just as I would consider different machining for tempered steel than iron.

Right, but I am looking at the different techniques you are using for steel and iron, not the steel and iron itself.

Maybe the iron is poor quality. Okay, what do you do in that situation? What processes do you have in place to improve the quality? That is what I mark, not the quality of the iron, which is beyond your control.

The renaissance is getting worse because it's not being allowed to take hold. We still have NCLB - that's not a renaissance, though some schools are in fact reinventing themselves under its pressure. Find who is doing what that works, right now. They are out there. No need to completely reinvent the wheel.

If I was to take your advice, I would definitely not focus on students. Why? Because all I can transfer from one district to another is the behavior of the staff, not the students. I can get a staff member in one district to accept the same process as a staff member in another district (to a reasonable extent of course).

So "it" works great in District X. But if "it" is defined according to student behaviors, then I cannot transfer it to District Y because I cannot get the students in District Y to act and think like the students in District X.

Focusing on students to drive education reform sounds great on a bumper sticker, but it has real harmful effects in practice. "You don't know our students" is the battle cry of those that oppose professional development.

Moving on, suppose a school has a tremendous boost in its test scores. Why? Was it the instruction? If so, what exactly took place that boost the scores? Was it the curriculum? How can you tell if it was one or the other?

The schools cannot tell you, because they don't measure these processes. Their monitoring of instructional processes is scant and exceedingly subjective. They typically don't monitor the curriculum at all.

So what exactly are we supposed to learn from these high achieving districts you mentioned as exemplars?

Machinability to tolerance requires heat treatment - temper. We can equate that with gifted and talented, and their absorption rate to date of life and educational lessons. If you don't need tight tolerances, cast metals can work. But they will be temperamental, prone to loss of material and inconsistent results. Children with challenging socioeconomic status are more often like cast metal - they are likely to have lower performance and need a different set of relevance lessons than some of their classmates.

One reason why students from poor communities are like cast metal is because they have always been treated like cast metal.

Let me provide you a concrete example.

I am currently helping a banker write curriculum on financial literacy. One of the lessons we focused on had applications in science. The banker pointed out that students don't see themselves as scientists and offered an alternative relevance centered on working at the local Wendy's. By his reasoning, students see the latter as more personally relevant to their lives, since they can see themselves as burger jockeys more than than scientists.

Sounds reasonable. It is dangerous. (edited)

Those kids are going to end up working at Wendy's because we keep tailoring the relevance of our lessons to their low personal expectations. So students begin to think that is all school has laid out for them. "If the school teaches me a lesson because I can use it when I work at Wendy's, then that must be what the schools plan for me."

Professional and scholarly relevance is critical, even if the students fail to appreciate it at the moment. Again, teachers drive the curriculum, not the the students.

Teaching both the personal and professional relevance is the best idea, but for this lesson I would choose professional relevance over the personal relevance if I had to choose. The kid may end up at Wendy's, but I don't want it to be on my account.

These are people - metals only in analogy - whose scores result in your program's success. How will your educational process development address these children and their factors leading to educational output indicators (some process speak)?

How do you measure success? Well, what is it you are trying to achieve? If I professionally develop a staff on aligning curriculum to standards, then success is defined according to whether the alignment tightens over time. If I work with a staff on academic engagement time, then success is defined according to whether time is used more wisely by the staff during subsequent monitoring.

I never gauge the success of a program according to student test scores, which is anathema to the educational community.

 

[Jen Kirley]

I pay attention to the responsiveness of the teachers to the students, not the other way around. I am not monitoring the student.

We need to monitor that which we professionally develop. If I have taught teachers a certain method for questioning students, that is what I will monitor. I am not trying to encompass every factor that can possibly influence student achievement. No one can.

I trust someone is monitoring the student, since those kids are both the result of, and the cause of failing schools.

At no point have I stated that the processes I measure are all that is necessary. Classroom management, for example, is a factor that influences student achievement that I do not monitor, because I don't train in it. There are other consultants that can perform such services. But the focus should still remain on the teacher and his or her handling of student behaviors. The behaviors of the student should not be the focus of the monitoring.

I think it's good to work on teachers because I have seen some who could really use it. However, teachers are the low hanging fruit in school improvement. We in QA avoid fixating on retraining operators when the system itself is flawed to the point where it's difficult for the teachers to perform well when they do try.

So the Deming cycle must be tight. You train in X, you monitor X, you set targets for X. Monitoring Y while not training in it is a recipe for ineffectiveness, but is the typical practice.

I wonder if Deming would approve of not monitoring the kids' response to your teachers' training - since the kids are the source of school performance metrics, not whether the teacher's technical delivery methods were judged sound.

Yes, but what we need to focus on is your handling of the chatter. When you encounter chatter, what do you do? What are your behaviors? That is what interests me when monitoring processes.

Here in the Cove we have sent people with tool chatter to look at the entire process possibilities, not just operator error.

The chatter itself is not my concern as an observer. I am not evaluating the aluminum; that's your job.

I look forward to your sharing your results with us - of not monitoring the subjects of school performance during your intervention.

Somehow we got confused on one point. I press the button, not the teacher.

I separate relevance into three levels:

1. personal relevance -- the content directly matters to them now, so students need to learn it because they will use it in their daily lives.
2. professional relevance -- the content matters to some form of industry, so it is taught for a good reason.
3. scholarly relevance -- the content constitutes understanding of major concepts that are the mark of an educated person.

Personal relevance is the most powerful motivator, but if we only rely on it to drive lessons we will run into trouble. A ton of academic content is not personally relevant but still needs to be taught, because the public school system is part of a long process designed to produce productive citizens, not just provide kids practical tools they can use every day.

How do you know what's personally relevant to them? Do you ask them?

How do students respond to professional and scholarly relevance? It varies, but students at minimum need to KNOW (and not just be told) that we are teaching them a lesson for a good reason.

Teachers should be careful about kowtowing to the whimsy of the students. We don't teach only those things that interest the students, which is why they are not the customers. But at minimum, we need to understand why the lesson content we teach is important to learn, and we need to illustrate those reasons to the students. And that is what I look for. And if I fail to see it, I bring it up to the staff for them to discuss.

Right, but I am looking at the different techniques you are using for steel and iron, not the steel and iron itself.

Maybe the iron is poor quality. Okay, what do you do in that situation? What processes do you have in place to improve the quality? That is what I mark, not the quality of the iron, which is beyond your control.

Is it beyond your control? What makes you sure? I would like you to check out the schools I referenced for you, and learn how students' aspirations are changing in those schools.

If I was to take your advice, I would definitely not focus on students. Why? Because all I can transfer from one district to another is the behavior of the staff, not the students. I can get a staff member in one district to accept the same process as a staff member in another district (to a reasonable extent of course).

Ignore the students at your peril.

So "it" works great in District X. But if "it" is defined according to student behaviors, then I cannot transfer it to District Y because I cannot get the students in District Y to act and think like the students in District X.

Focusing on students to drive education reform sounds great on a bumper sticker, but it has real harmful effects in practice. "You don't know our students" is the battle cry of those that oppose professional development.

Oh my.

Moving on, suppose a school has a tremendous boost in its test scores. Why? Was it the instruction? If so, what exactly took place that boost the scores? Was it the curriculum? How can you tell if it was one or the other?

The schools cannot tell you, because they don't measure these processes. Their monitoring of instructional processes is scant and exceedingly subjective. They typically don't monitor the curriculum at all.

I feel very sure that most schools are as you describe. But the ones I'm trying to refer you to do know how to measure, and they know how to connect the dots between program design (not just curriculum or lesson design) and aspirations, among many things.

So what exactly are we supposed to learn from these high achieving districts you mentioned as exemplars?[?quote]I hope you will research them and learn that discarding the manufacturing system of current education program design is very often the key. One reason why students from poor communities are like cast metal is because they have always been treated like cast metal.

Yes, exactly. So why are we setting about ignoring them in the instruction process?

I am currently helping a banker write curriculum on financial literacy. One of the lessons we focused on had applications in science. The banker pointed out that students don't see themselves as scientists and offered an alternative relevance centered on working at the local Wendy's. By his reasoning, students see the latter as more personally relevant to their lives, since they can see themselves as burger jockeys more than than scientists.

Sounds reasonable. It is dangerous. (edited)

Those kids are going to end up working at Wendy's because we keep tailoring the relevance of our lessons to their low personal expectations. So students begin to think that is all school has laid out for them. "If the school teaches me a lesson because I can use it when I work at Wendy's, then that must be what the schools plan for me."

Who is "we"? Please go see if the schools I referred you to do that.

Professional and scholarly relevance is critical, even if the students fail to appreciate it at the moment. Again, teachers drive the curriculum, not the the students.

There it is, the manufacturing system hard at work trying to make our kids look, think and act alike when they emerge. Did you know Asian teachers are being sent here to study teachers who manage to break loose of that regimen?

Teaching both the personal and professional relevance is the best idea, but for this lesson I would choose professional relevance over the personal relevance if I had to choose. The kid may end up at Wendy's, but I don't want it to be on my account.

The best program examples I have seen focus on vocational careers and allow the curriculum to be tailored to them, and more project based than lesson based. Almost all the students graduating from there aspired to, then attended postsecondary schooling and training of various kind, versus almost none before the changes took place. Ask the schools for some of their data, both quantitative and qualitative.

How do you measure success? Well, what is it you are trying to achieve? If I professionally develop a staff on aligning curriculum to standards, then success is defined according to whether the alignment tightens over time. If I work with a staff on academic engagement time, then success is defined according to whether time is used more wisely by the staff during subsequent monitoring.

I never gauge the success of a program according to student test scores, which is anathema to the educational community.

Interestingly, Chugach's students did remarkably better on tests after using the new programs; but that wasn't the goal. Deming also warned against trying to meet numerical objectives. I want what they want: for their students to achieve self-supporting, meaningful employment as adults; since postsecondary education and training (including vocational schools or apprentice programs) is usually needed now, it's important that the kids go on to further their education and graduate from it. That's the metric schools really struggle to keep, since they lose track of so many people. What we end up with is a series of inspections we know of as tests.

I do appreciate your hard work. Do any of those "other consultants" you mentioned work with you as a team to address the system while you address the teachers?

 

[JW9000]

I trust someone is monitoring the student, since those kids are both the result of, and the cause of failing schools.

Okay, this is an issue that cuts to the core of our disagreement.

In my view, students are not the cause of failing schools. They are the symptom.

I think it's good to work on teachers because I have seen some who could really use it. However, teachers are the low hanging fruit in school improvement. We in QA avoid fixating on retraining operators when the system itself is flawed to the point where it's difficult for the teachers to perform well when they do try.

And I agree that the problems with the school system extend all the way through to the top levels of governance. I have colleagues that examine those systems. (I do as well, but in limited fashion.)

I wonder if Deming would approve of not monitoring the kids' response to your teachers' training - since the kids are the source of school performance metrics, not whether the teacher's technical delivery methods were judged sound.

We do monitor the kids' responses in terms of state test scores, but reform doesn't begin there. Teachers should always obtain formative feedback from students, and I check to make sure that they do. But my focus is not on the results they receive, but their reactions to it.

Suppose an external auditor comes to evaluate your shop. She is going to see if you measure the quality of the aluminum you are machining, and likely ask to view logs on your actions when you performed such analyses in the past.

I doubt she is going to pull out instruments and perform measurements on the quality of the aluminum herself. (And I am only guessing, as I don't work in your field.) To measure the quality of aluminum requires expertise in that field, which I am guessing would require numerous advanced courses in metallurgy. Are there enough auditors in your field with such expertise?

I have considerable training and experience in classroom observation and curriculum analysis. However, I am not an education psychologist. If a school wants to focus on students, then it needs consultants with expertise in educational psychology, not amateurs who think they know kids because they have been teaching for 20 years.

Besides, to focus on students is a massive undertaking for a consultant, even an entire firm. A medium-sized district could enroll 20,000 students, and all of them are important to the mission of the district. Even a 15-minute interview for each student would be overwhelming, and would likely provide results that lie all over the place. Half the students in a class are motivated; the other half find it boring. Now what?

So you spend some more money to find out that (say) 25% of the unmotivated students have certain problems at home. Now what? Sure, you can contract the services of a parental involvement company, but the problem parents typically don't show up to those meetings. (By the way, parental involvement companies perform a great service. I am not dissing them.)

So what are you going to do? Parents are not accountable to the school system. Even if you managed to cajole them into signing a contract, it is likely not worth the paper it is printed on.

What some districts do is cut the size of the project down by focusing on those students who struggle the most. Even more likely, they choose those students who lie on the fringe between passing and failing state exams. So they have only 15% of the original project size, so maybe it is manageable. But now the gifted or lowest-performing students are left out completely. And I see this happen A LOT. What is the culprit? An overemphasis on outputs (raising test scores) coupled with an overemphasis on the student.

Chugach (which you reference often) has a total of 214 students. That is smaller than many elementary schools. There are high schools that have more than 214 teachers. Sure, a student-centered approach may be economically feasible there. Try it with a district the size of Long Beach Unified.

In summary, by focusing on students a district can spend a ton of money to uncover problems it cannot correct. The district ends up tilting at windmills.

Here in the Cove we have sent people with tool chatter to look at the entire process possibilities, not just operator error. I look forward to your sharing your results with us - of not monitoring the subjects of school performance during your intervention. How do you know what's personally relevant to them? Do you ask them?

That is the teacher's job, not mine. If I was contracted to perform such work, my focus would be on, "Did the teacher ask?" If so, "What did the teacher do in response?" As for Bobbie's particular problems? That lies outside my arena.

Ignore the students at your peril.Oh my.

You misconstrued my point. I am not advocating that reform entails making students in one district behave the same way in another district. Even if we could, we shouldn't.

Somehow, I think you got the impression that I am trying to force students to take on certain habits, attitudes, or behaviors. My approach is completely school/teacher centered -- students are free to be however they want to be.

I feel very sure that most schools are as you describe. But the ones I'm trying to refer you to do know how to measure, and they know how to connect the dots between program design (not just curriculum or lesson design) and aspirations, among many things.

How to measure what?

Student behaviors and attitudes? Does a typical district have the considerable experience and logistical support to perform those measurements?

Curriculum? How much training have they had in large-scale curriculum analysis? What protocols do they follow to ensure a fair, unbiased report? How does the district analyze (say) 1,000 assignment sheets?

And I am not saying they don't. I don't know. Do you?

Please keep in mind that the teachers in a district like Chugach probably know every student at the school very well. They probably know the parents too. I know many schools where the principal doesn't even know the names of the students, because he has 4,000 of them.

There it is, the manufacturing system hard at work trying to make our kids look, think and act alike when they emerge.

Where did you get this idea? I don't even measure the students, so how can I be trying to make them all think a certain way?

In fact, a student-centered approach is much more prone to the cookie-cutter mentality.

Did you know Asian teachers are being sent here to study teachers who manage to break loose of that regimen?The best program examples I have seen focus on vocational careers and allow the curriculum to be tailored to them, and more project based than lesson based.

Actually, I am probably more project-based than the majority of consultants in the field. When I was teaching, I asked my students to perform field calculations to determine if there was sufficient braking distance at a troublesome intersection. I also asked them to design a motorcycle stunt.

I want my students to experience engineering, and physics, and chemistry. They may end up being poets... great! But I want the entire pallet of experience in front of them so that they know what is out there. We need higher expectations, in my opinion.

I do appreciate your hard work. Do any of those "other consultants" you mentioned work with you as a team to address the system while you address the teachers?

We can go in as a team, or independently.

We all want the same things for our schools. We just disagree on how.

 

[JaneB]

Well, didn't this turn into a quite fascinating discussion! Thanks for sticking around and debating, JW9000, I've found it very interesting.

The students are not the output. The effects of the curriculum and instruction delivered to the student is the output. At least that is how I see it.

And one of the differences in viewpoint here have been the various differences in what people consider to be the 'output' of the system. It took me a while to understand where you were coming from...

I fully agree with you about the students not being the customers, and the weaknesses and dangers of adopting that approach. (And I'm an ex-teacher also, by the way, a long time ago). I know there is/was/still is a view that kids should/could be taught by only ever learning things that they personally find interesting, and think there are inherent flaws in the approach and dangers.

I am a professional developer and education researcher, but strictly at the classroom level. More and more school systems are seeking ISO 9001 certification but after seeing that many ISO 9001 schools have essentially no oversight of their classrooms, I sought an explanation as to how that could happen.

I'm not in the US, so I don't know the system there, but I don't see how the classroom itself could or should be left out!

My ultimate goal was to provide additional support for schools seeking ISO 9001 certification. I would not act as an auditor, but rather as a consultant who could help a school system "impress" an ISO auditor.

I'd hate to see anyone helping anyone else in how to 'impress' an auditor! I'd much rather see them helping others to get a better system! Doing things better - as in the various examples you give of using a basic Deming cycle to improve.

But after the discussion, I am not sure what role I would play as ISO 9001 does not seem to target classroom processes.

Well, ISO 9001 doesn't target anything specific, but it does require the organisation itself to choose what it calls 'quality objectives' (ie, things to be achieved' and insists that they be capable of being measured. So if schools are putting in ISO 9001 but not choosing measurable objectives that include better classroom practices, I'd query how well they are actually implementing/understanding ISO 9001! Not very well would be my guess.

There seems to be a similar disconnect between classroom processes and ISO certification. It's all rather strange, because the activities inside the classroom define, more than anything else, the school system.

I'm sorry to hear that there's a disconnect, and it should not be so. Because it's the actual activities of teaching (no matter where 'the classroom' is physically) that are critical.

 

[JW9000]

I'd hate to see anyone helping anyone else in how to 'impress' an auditor! I'd much rather see them helping others to get a better system! Doing things better - as in the various examples you give of using a basic Deming cycle to improve.

My choice of words was too glib. You are right, of course.

Well, ISO 9001 doesn't target anything specific, but it does require the organisation itself to choose what it calls 'quality objectives' (ie, things to be achieved' and insists that they be capable of being measured. So if schools are putting in ISO 9001 but not choosing measurable objectives that include better classroom practices, I'd query how well they are actually implementing/understanding ISO 9001! Not very well would be my guess.

Hence the problem and why I sought more information in this forum. I will say that I have learned a lot.

I'm sorry to hear that there's a disconnect, and it should not be so. Because it's the actual activities of teaching (no matter where 'the classroom' is physically) that are critical.

Agreed. We all want the same things, I suppose. Much of the problem is miscommunication, the Achilles heel in just about any discussion.