What Are We Learning About Why School Districts Make Changes?

Welcome to the future of education. I'm Michael Horne, joined by two of my good friends. Bob Mesta, my co author on Choosing College and the author of the new book Demand Side Sales 101, which everyone go out and read. It's terrific. And Tom Arnett, senior research fellow at the Clayton Christensen Institute. We've been working together for. Tom, what has it been, seven years at this point? Is that, is that how long?

Yeah.

So I remember some things still, but very few. So I'm really excited for this conversation and because you all have been digging deeply for the last couple years into why school districts make changes to how they operate, to how teachers change practice. Right. To these different dimensions. Using the jobs to be done theory, but really to frame the context and the progress that they're seeking. Not in terms of like the project based learning implementation or the blended learning or the new textbook that they're implementing, but using those to understand like what's the actual motivation and context and problem they're trying to solve and progress they're trying to make. And I'd love to dig into that topic. So Tom, let me start with you. Give us a summary of all the research you've done and sort of the high level conclusions in all of two minutes. In all two minutes. Right. That's a tough question because you guys have been doing a ton of stuff. But Tom, I would love you just to do distill it a little bit and then Bob, I've got a newsy for you.

Oh good. All right.

Can't be as hard as that one. That's a pretty hard one. Go, Tom.

Well, you remember the. I don't know if you guys remember maybe a little bit past your time, but the Micro machines commercials that were on tv so I'm going to try and replicate that guy. Just kidding. But we do have like 11 jobs that we've uncovered so far. So first of all, let me bucket them. We did research on why do teachers change their practices. We did research on why do districts change their curriculum. And then most recently this is a study that we're still in the process of drafting and it'll come out early next year, but one on why do districts decide to take on improvement initiatives or improvement efforts. So on the teacher front, I'd say there's four jobs. We found two that I find most interesting but to give them kind of an order. One was teachers who make changes because they've been tapped to lead something and it's less about. I'm bought into project based learning or blended Learning or whatever. And it's more about, like, I've been asked to lead something, and I am really honored to take that on, and I want to do it right. And so it's more about, how do I, you know, I'm going to step up and do this, to be a leader. The second one, and this is, I think, the one that's most common, teachers who said, I'm going to change, but I really don't want to change in big ways. Like, more or less, I feel like I'm good at what I do. I've been doing it for a while. I've got certain methods and practices and tools on my tool belt and just give me things that help me to get marginally better at engaging my students and challenging them. But really, it's got to be manageable. It can't be. You know, these changes can't be, like, let me throw at everything I've done. It's got to be, let me just take what I've done and add something to it. The third teacher job, this is the one I find most interesting, was around teachers who were saying, wow, like, conventional instruction just isn't working for me anymore. And I'm at the point where I'm either, like, ready to leave the profession, ready to totally change jobs, or I need to try something radically different. And then the last job, kind of an unfortunate job, was teachers who were saying, you know, I'm only doing this because my principal or my district has told me to, and I'm going to do what I have to do to check the box, but that's about it.

So those are going along to get. They're going along to get along, those guys, right?

Yeah, pretty much. Pretty much. So big question we have was like, how do you. What. What does it take to shift them to one of those other jobs? So there's so much we can talk about on those. I'll go to the district ones. Now, on the curriculum front, there were one job we saw was districts that were, like, ready to overhaul everything. It was like, we know that we've got major problems and we're ready to not just change curriculum, but change instructional practices, change PDF. And curriculum is just a piece of this broader shift we're trying to make. That I think was kind of an outlier scenario because most districts fell into kind of a variation on what we saw as the second job. So the second job was districts that just said, hey, it's time. Like, our district, every so many years, we update our math curriculum or we update our language arts curriculum and the person who's leading that change. For them, the job is all about, like, just how do I manage the process and get people to consensus? How do I get something that everyone's happy with or at least everyone's willing to live with? And it was much more about, like, complying and following rules and getting buy in than it was about trying to make any kind of major push. Then kind of two variations on that. One was leaders that said, hey, you know, we're still going to follow that process, but we do see, like, there's something broken, but we're not ready to do a massive overhaul. We really just need to update our stuff. So it's like district leaders that say, you know, we didn't. You know, Common Core came around. We haven't updated the Common Core standards yet. So our, you know, our student achievement will get better if we just update to these new materials or we shifted our instructional practices, but our materials are still from another era. If we just update our materials to match our instructional practices, things will get better, and that'll solve whatever problem we're into. And then the third one, or the. Excuse me, the last one on the curriculum front, that again, I see as kind of a variation on that more completely like, follow the steps, follow the process was leaders that said, hey, we actually. We feel like we stand out and we want to influence and we've got to follow this process because there's not enough impetus to, like, do an overhaul. Things aren't broken enough for us to totally step outside the normal process of things and make big changes. But we do want to adopt something that'll let us.

Oh, you froze.

Tom.

Tom, you're freezing your Internet connection.

So I'm going to pause getting the updated material.

Keep going.

You're. You keep going. Keep going. Yeah, now we can. Yeah, keep going.

So. So anyway, they were looking for, you know, how do I make a deal with the publisher or work out an arrangement with the state where this change lets us really stand out and influence. Okay, so now we've been teachers. I'm gonna.

I'm gonna pause you there. I'm gonna cut you off. I'm gonna cut you off. I'm gonna cut you off. That's a good summary. No, no, no, it's good. It's good. We'll get into continuous improvement in a moment, but I want to push a little bit. Bob, you ready? Which is one. So that overhaul job sounds a lot like the teachers who are about to quit and are like, change it all. And then if I got you right, like the influence one sounds a lot like the help me sort of be a leader as part of my school, if I've got that right. And then there's like this compliance one where with districts, like, it's time to change the curriculum because it's the seventh year and that's when we change curriculum. That sounds a lot like going along to get along. Am I. Am I off Bob? These sound like the same jobs.

So. So what? So a job is really about that. The context that people find themselves in where they pull in a new solution. Right. And what you find is that there are. There are going to be some patterns that some overlap of these. But it's sometimes it's the devil in the details. But like, when somebody frames like, it's not working, we need to overhaul. It's. It's the notion of whether. Whether I'm a superintendent or a principal and saying, hey, we've improved from 39% reading proficiency to 43%. Them still going like, yeah, this is unacceptable. We need to restart our whole way we think about this thing because at this rate, we're still not servicing the students the best way we versus a teacher who says, the variation in my class is just too wide. And the fact is, as much as I try to keep the balance between the two, I can't actually keep up this notion of helping the students who are at one end or another end and really be able to figure out how to kind of make sure that I can service all these kids. And so that's where they go, like, I got to find out a whole new way to do something. And so it's whether it's at an individual level, organizational level. But the reality is, like, overhaul by framing your framing, your situation is like, I've got to change. Everything is very different than like, let's get consensus and let's everybody buy into what we want to do and figure out what we're going to do. And so to me, there are parallels, but it's very dangerous to kind of just almost job wash it where it becomes a high level of that. There's these four jobs that are very similar. It's the details that make them have the energy to help people make the progress.

Okay, that's helpful. So let me switch the frame a little bit for both of you, which is you did this other research that's coming out in the beginning of the next year on why do. Excuse me. Districts adopt continuous improvement. So continuous improvement is a strategy that they can adopt. To, you know, do other changes in the district. I'm going to make a guess, which is that that might be even closer in terms of overlap to why do I hire curriculum change. But talk me through what you found there, and is the overlap more because we're talking about the same sets of people or no. Go ahead, Bob.

So I think that it actually represents, like, if you think about districts up here and teachers down here, I think the continuous improvement thing actually kind of fills the gap between it. It actually goes vertical because it's like, again, sometimes teachers are actually saying, I'm going to adopt a continuous improvement mindset in my classroom. And sometimes you have basically superintendents going, like, we need to actually teach people how to improve from the front lines forward. And so it's this whole notion of whether it's from the top down or whether it's basically from the bottom up. And so I feel like it actually starts to stitch the world together between all the other things we learned around what causes teachers to change the way they teach and what causes districts to change the way they buy curriculum.

Gotcha.

So it's filling in the box, if you will, is what I feel like.

Got it, Tom. That's helpful. Tom, what's your take?

Yeah, yeah.

So on the improvement ones, in a lot of ways. I see. So let me give some. A little bit of context. When we did the interviews, we were asking folks about a change to what we call what's called continuous improvement. That's been.

Yeah.

By the way.

Yeah, Pause right there for a moment. Continuous improvement sounds like this major buzz words in education that, like, comes in because they've seen it in another movement in another sector in manufacturing.

Right.

And they're. Oh, we, We. We should do that. Tell us what continuous improvement is, Bob.

You should take this one and you should share the camera view.

Oh, yeah, there's Dr. Deming.

This is my. My. My mentor wall. Right. It's Dr. Willy Moore and Dr. Genichi Taguchi and Clay and Dr. Deming. Dr. Deming was my. I was his intern when I was 18 years old in 1985. And he is the father of continuous improvement. He's the father of. Of lean. He's the father of all these different kind of practices. He basically went to Japan in 1949 to help MacArthur rebuild the Japanese infrastructure. And he's. He helped Toyota build the Toyota production system. And so these are methods and tools that are generalized methods of what is the process that you use to improve a process or to improve an organization. And they are different Sets of tools and methods and philosophies that basically people adopt to say, like. Like, for example, one of Deming' key point is you never put a quota on anybody. You basically make sure that they're trying to make the process better than it was yesterday. And so it's about this notion of continuous improvement. And so it has trickled from the 80s, it was here in the United States. It basically got brought over in the 90s. It moved into the government and hospital in different areas. And then I think in the late 90s, it started to get into education. And so it's been around for 20 years. And there's some of these school districts who have adopted it. And it's this. It's this mentality of like, we're never done and we're always trying to be better than we were yesterday. And it's like, how did that, you know, what were. What was the context people had to be in to say, like, we need an improvement methodology. We need a way in which to think about how we improve, whether it's attendance or basically enrollment or its applications for college, or like, how do we actually have a standard approach or a universal approach that. That helps us make sure that we're making improvements in those areas. So instead of waiting for things to be a problem, it's literally saying, how do we continuously improve whatever we're working on? So that's. And that's near and dear to my heart now.

Yeah, so. So near and dear to your heart. Didn't mean to insult it, but just wanted to make sure I understood it because we have a lot of fads in education that's not uncommon for education. So, Tom, tell us your take now with that context.

Well, so I think improvement, the continuous improvement practices that we were, you know, we focused our interviews on districts who had adopted those. And I think those are interesting in their own right as a, you know, going kind of tying into. Not to complicate two things too much. But in our. In our research on disruptive innovation, we talk about disruptive versus standing innovation. You know, districts are looking for ways to get better at doing the things they're already doing. I think continuous improvement is a really interesting thing to. To know and to look into. But when we look at the jobs, the jobs to be done weren't. I think they're relevant not just to folks who are adopting continuous improvement, but really to districts that are looking at any kind of improvement effort. So some districts may land on continuous improvement. Others may say, no, we're doing a curriculum overhaul. And others may say, no, we're going to do a massive personalized learning initiative. And so the underlying job there, you know, could lead to any of those. And it's really kind of the context and the way in which, you know, the forces of progress play out that I think leads districts to continuous improvement over these other things. But I think the jobs have kind of this, this interesting relevance across a bunch, you know, potentially across a bunch of different types of initiatives or programs the district may take on. But underlying that is the sense of, to get into the weeds of, you know, what were the jobs we found? You know, usually districts were looking at leaders. I should say district leaders were the ones that had these jobs. One job was about like, I have a specific problem that is, that is, it's been broken, it's been broken for a long time. Help me fix this problem. Kind of in the middle ground was folks that said, I have this problem, but this problem is interdependent with other things that aren't necessarily directly within my control. So I need a language to be able to coordinate with other people to solve this problem. And then the third one was we have a whole bunch of problems. So think of like the superintendent of a large urban district. They come into their job and they know like there's a bunch of stuff that isn't working right. Results haven't been what they need to be for a long time. I feel this incredible sense that we're failing our students. But I know that just pushing down some kind of top down initiative isn't going to get them there, isn't going to get us there. People are used to top down stuff and they're used to just saying, this too shall pass. And so how do I bring in a method that helps people get better at whatever they're doing and really solves problems across the system. So it's more of like a how do we change our approach? How do we have a new way of doing things? So I'll stop there. Bob, I'm sure you've got a ton to.

I think one thing I would add to that is the notion of like, like there's so many problems, I can't be in all of them. How do you help me scale the underlying approach to hope to help people who, who are closest to the problem solve the problem? Because at some point people might, might know what a solution is, but they actually don't know the process by which to, you know, get the data, get the feedback, how to prototype, how to like most people aren't aren't wired to change. Most people are wired to standardize. And so this is one of those things where it's a very, very different kind of. It's thinking about, how do I scale me as the superintendent to help the most by providing them a process in which they can improve. It's a very interesting kind of notion of realizing, like, I don't have to do it all. I have to set up the environment to help everybody else do it or help them, empower them to do it, really is the better way to say it.

So when you say that, Bob, actually. Oh, go ahead, Tom.

So I want to jump in and say the one thing that I find interesting across all the improvement jobs was that in all cases, they had come to a point where they're like, what we're doing in the past hasn't worked.

We're done.

In other words, if we feel like, oh, we can fix this by just adopting a better curriculum, or we can fix this by putting in this new PD practice or putting in this new teacher evaluation practice, if that was their mindset, they weren't in any of these jobs yet.

That's right. So. So I want to restate that a little bit differently, which is they had tried multiple things, and they literally made no progress. And so at some point in time, they realized, like, we have ideas, but we actually don't know how to make them either acceptable to everybody or we don't know how to actually do it. And we're. We're in some cases where our idea is so big that it gets rejected, or it's too small and it doesn't have an impact. And so part of this is. Is realizing, like, we have ideas, but we don't have a method to actually implement these ideas. And so that's when people kind of go, like, I've tried this, I've tried that. I've tried that. And now it's like, okay, what's going wrong? And it's more like our approach is wrong. It's not. The ideas are wrong.

Yeah. So I have two questions, but first, a reflection which is channeling Clay Christiansen for a moment, which is that Clay often talks about sort of two visions, if you will, of management. One is the manager or the leader sits on high, sort like a Zeus, like God, and sends down commands like lightning bolts and expects change to occur. And then there's the other version where God, if you will, or leaders say, no, we don't actually make specific changes like lightning bolts down from on high, but instead we understand how the system, the organization functions. And we just tilt the scales lightly, right? We nudge different processes and priorities and then let the resource allocation process take effect and sort of hone this. And it sounds like continuous improvement in many ways is being identified as that. The first question off of that, that occurs to me and then I want to go a totally different direction. But the first direction or first question that occurs to me is districts are incredibly complicated places. There are a lot of stakeholders with a lot of different opinions that are there for a lot of different reasons. I think Covid has put those different desires for progress that all these different stakeholders, even within the stakeholders, have in sharper relief than ever before. And not that they weren't always there, but just it's easier to see, if you will.

Oh, yeah, for sure.

So how does a methodology like continuous improvement, how does it cut through? Like, how does it actually work in a district environment where people not, you know, at different levels aren't framing the goals in the same way? Or even the theory of cause and effect that's probably animating, you know, a process like continuous improvement.

Yep.

Tom, you want to start or you want me to start?

Well, so I'm going to jump in a little bit. This is going to be a little bit of conjecture, but when we look at, when we did the continuous improvement interviews, we asked a few of the folks like, are you using this for Covid? And a lot of them said no, which was interesting. Right. Because if this is a method that they're bought into and they've hired, why aren't they using it now? And my take on that is that it's hard to see. Continuous improvement is kind of a. It's an iterative process. It's something that you do and, you know, it leads to change over time. It's not one and done kind of a thing. And when Covid hit, districts were in this crisis mode where in some ways they kind of had to resort to that command from on high command and control type approach because they had to make things happen quickly and they didn't have a lot of time to, you know, try an idea and test it out and really explore. They just felt this incredible crunch of like, you know, we've got shifting circumstances. We don't know if we're going to be open or not or partially open. You know, we don't, we don't know how to do this. We've never done this before. We've just got to like, we've got to figure out what we're doing. To move. So we didn't see it a lot there. And I guess that's kind of my take is that, I don't know that continuous improvement really helps you with that crisis management kind of scenario. But now that districts have, you know, put up something, you know, we've gone from the summer where they were trying to figure out what was going to happen, to the fall where they're doing something. And most have probably had some taste of, like, we've done some remote learning, we've done some hybrid learning. Now that they're in the phase of, like, okay, some of this works, some of it doesn't. How do we. How. Where do we go from here? This is where I think continuous improvement becomes, again, really interesting and relevant. Bob, I'm just hearing your take on that.

Yeah, I think the fact is, is that people resort to their natural kind of, like, when you're stressed, you actually change your behavior in a very different way. And so I think command and control is kind of, to be honest, what is taught is the way that we are first introduced to a lot of things. And the fact is, when a crisis happens, we tend to move that way. But my reverting back to your instinct, my experience is that real leaders actually use continuous improvement principles to realize, like, I need the people on the front lines to help us figure out what to do. I don't actually know the answers, and I have to tell them I don't know the answers, but I'm going to give them the freedom to find the answers. And so this is where during COVID we had just finished this research and I was talking, I've been helping different school and school districts do different things. And at some point I realized, like, they were in the job where it's like, well, I'm just going to wait for the governor to tell us what to do. And I lost it. I just lost it because I'm like, what does the governor actually know about your school and your students and what's going on there? And at the same time, they're like, well, but we're going to have to adjust. I'm like, you're going to have to adjust. Any way you do this, the last thing, the thing you don't have is time. You can't waste the time waiting for this. So my thing is, how do we get you to lean in? And so I help them reframe their world as an overhaul. Because at some point in time, you start to look at this and say, like, there was this notion of, like, well, we're going to be able to go back. This is only going to be three weeks. This is like in June, right? We'll be back in September. I'm like, but what if you're not? And oh, by the way, what are the good things that are happening right now? And you start to realize, like, when they take this continuous improvement mentality, it's like, we gotta learn and we gotta learn fast. It's like they've almost, you know, kind of forgot the process of how they learn because they're teaching everybody else to learn. Right? And so I really, really think that this is, you know, Covid as bad as it is as a, you know, across the country and across the world kind of thing. It literally, I, I feel like there's been more innovation and education in the last four months than possibly in the last 10 to 20 years. Right. Because everything had to be so measured. And right now it's like we don't know what to do. We have to figure it out. And like, some of the districts I'm working with, they like, every week they have a, they, they do a standup, like, what went well, what didn't go well, how do I, what, what are the metrics we're following? How do we actually know that these are, things are working or not? And it's like ultimately it's that continuous improvements that's going to get there, but sitting there waiting for somebody on high to have the answer and, and, and get the answer right and these times, I think is really, really risky. It's just, it's not, it's just, I think that notion of waiting and, and it's just, oof.

So this is that I, I think the reflections there are fascinating on two fronts. I've heard the same thing, Bob. A lot of people saying, like, I need leadership from on high. I don't feel like I can make moves. And it's, it's been my frustration that more districts haven't said, hey, we're going to build the micro schools ourselves, regardless of the on high. We're going to, you know, take the risk and do X because, like, we need to, to support these families. And we know that when you're learning remote, like education is a team sport, it's not right. You know, we can't just rely on the teacher somehow magically connecting through zoom to work and all those things. But in terms of your comment, more innovation in the last few months than many years. I know Tom has some views of whether that will stick or not. I'm going to save that for another conversation, we're going back, the three of us, and come back on that. The question I want to pivot to is this as we, as we offer final reflections, if you will, which is this job's work, like, why? And the circumstances that compel you to do things super interesting intellectually for a district leader who's like, trying to take this and do something with it, like, help me understand why I should care.

Right?

Like, bring it home to me.

Right?

So here's the thing. Think of it as the job is the context and the outcome. You wrap yourself in in order to go do something. And if, if you, if you don't have the right set of elements wrapped around you, you actually can't get it done. So, so, for example, in the overhaul job, it's one of those things where you're, you have to build a case to everybody to say what we're doing isn't working and you have to get buy in. And the fact is, is that, that once you get buy in, that people aren't going to. That, that what we've been trying hasn't worked, that they're at least way more open to accept really, really different ways. And so part of this is, but you have to wrap it in the fact of what's the data say? How do we actually build the case that what the future has to look like, there's a very thing versus the consensus way is like, well, what do we want to do? The thing is you're looking for waves. And so when you wrap yourself in the consensus blanket, it's a completely different process for improvement.

Right?

What does everybody think? How do we actually. Is it a voting, is it a democracy of what we choose? Is this where we pick what people most like? Or is this the thing that we just have no objections? Like, like all of those kinds of things play around the way you wrap yourself in the context you want to go make improvements on. And so to me, I think of it as like, it's the jacket that I got to put on in order to be successful for the, for the journey I'm going to go take. And so to be honest, it's like, we think about the solution, but we don't think about the context and the outcomes that we want. We actually think about the details of the solution. And, and most of the time when the solution doesn't work, it's because we haven't wrapped ourselves in the right context.

All right, so bring it. Yeah, bring it down a level for me because that's fascinating. But like, I'm trying to figure out a story that can encapsulate that.

So I think a big aha that came for me as I was writing this up and trying to think of, like, what does it mean in the context is that previously I thought of jobs as like, someone is in a set of circumstances, in a moment of struggle, and that struggle defines their job. But an insight that came in all this through talking to Bob and thinking this through is that as a leader, you, in many ways, and really this applies to any person. But I think it really resonated as like, leaders are in a situation where, yes, they have a set of circumstances they're in, but they can also shape those circumstances. Right? Like, you can decide whether when a problem comes along to be like, okay, we'll just use our standard approaches and everything's going to be fine, or whether to elevate it is like, this is a crisis. We need to do something major about this. You can decide whether to say, okay, I'm going to really bring people together and have a group huddle and try and do a consensus building approach, or to say, like, you know, I just need my board or my, you know, the people that I'm accountable to, to, to give me, you know, pushing to give me the, the authority to go make the changes that need to happen. And so leaders, I think the insight was that they shape, as much as they like, find themselves in a context, they also have the ability to shape that context. And, and so then you can look at the jobs and see these as different pathways. You can say, like, if I need to, if I need to accomplish something, like, which is the pathway I want to be on? Is it the overhaul pathway? Is it the build consensus pathway? Is it the, you know, just look at the different jobs and see where, where they could lead you.

So call me skeptical, but I want to push you both because I think that's true to an extent. But like, if, if, you know, a leader sees a crisis and you can give me a good example of what that might be, but the other, the rest of the community just not feel same crisis like they, they just don't see it. There's a danger, right? If you push too hard, like if you're Michelle rhee in Washington D.C. and you're like, I'm gonna, I've got the broom on the COVID of Time magazine and we're sweeping this up, I've created, you know, a sense of crisis, but the crisis is me as the leader, arguably for a lot of Those people, and there's a lot of backlash. So how do you. How do you control that and make it authentic?

So. So. And I'm gonna go back to Deming because Deming would say a bad system can break a good person every time. And so it's the bad system.

Say it again.

A bad system will break a great person every time. And that. And that. It's not. The thing is, is what Deming would say is, when you look at problems, okay, problems mostly are system problems, not people problems. And so what happens is every time we have one problem, we actually have a prevention problem. So his whole thing was, you need to frame the system. It's the system that becomes the thing we have to improve. And so part of this is, again, how do you shape the crisis? If you shape it as a people problem, then it's just switching people out. This almost becomes a chess match. But if it's a systemic problem of, like, look, we've improved proficiency from. Of reading in third grade from 39% to 44%. Right. But at the end of the day, and everybody says, well, we're getting better at it. That's great. It's getting. It's still saying that, you know, 56% of the kids can't read at grade level. Right. And so you can see the improvement as one angle. But you can also say that we're not serving 56% of our. I think we need to think about a whole new way. And so you'd see school districts who, quote, weren't that bad in the absolute scale of terms of good to bad in terms of school districts in some of these metrics. But they would frame it as unacceptable. This is just unacceptable. And then what they would do is they would say, it's not your fault. It's all of our faults because the system doesn't enable us to do the right things. So how do we change the system? And so this is the thing where. Right.

I'm going to put up another quote that Clay used to say. People don't do stupid things because they are stupid. They do stupid things because they are stuck in stupid systems.

That's exactly right. I mean, that's the derivative of Deming's thoughts. Which is. Which is. Is. And let's be clear. A system will give you exactly what it is, what. What it was designed to do, what.

It was designed to do.

And the reality. And this is one of the reasons why I. I'm, like, in the outside the education world. I'm not a huge fan of Consensus, because most really tough problems cannot be solved through consensus. Right. And so this is where you have to make trade offs and there are, there are things that you have to give up to get. And this is the hardest part. And so the fact is, when you get everybody to actually look at the system and understand the trade offs that we have to get to get to an outcome. So one of the biggest things about continuous improvement is they focus on metrics. What does the measure of progress really mean? Not at a high level, at a very, very concrete frontline level. Right. It's the notion of how do we actually understand how this system or this process is running and how do we know when it's not running well and what does something that's. That that's not a non desirable outcome look like? So we can actually manage it before. Because if a kid doesn't learn parentheses in third grade, that just manifests that all the way through high school. And they'll never get math. And it's literally one lesson they missed.

Yeah. So Bob, I think it's interesting on that because. And Tom, I'd love your reflections on this, but I think it's a really important point which is that leaders can shape that, but they also have to get their folks to agree on the metrics. And there's so much distrust around the metrics in education as being valid in the first place. Right. People just don't accept tests or they don't accept whatever. And so that also plays into this challenge, I think. Tom, a fascinating case study. I'm going to give you some work out of this. A fascinating case study would be to profile, I think, a superintendent who did a particularly good job of actively shaping that context and forging agreement on this is the metric and how they went about doing that when there might have been dissension about what are the numbers out there. I think just showing that as a story because like we could talk about in the abstract, but showing the actual story I think would be incredibly powerful.

And just to build on this, though, I think metrics is actually the hardest and most complicated of all things. We end up picking simple measures that just cause really bad behavior. Right. Clay and I would always talk about this notion of we end up measuring what's easy to measure as opposed to what's meaningful to measure. And that measurement, innovation, the ability to measure things in a meaningful way is literally the number one thing hindering us from actually making progress in other things. And so because we have such simple simplistic measures. Right. And we have ways to, let's say, write tests. We. We actually don't, in my mind, like, we all learn differently. And so the reality is, if we all learn differently and we're trying to put it all through one filter, like somebody who was being dyslexic would have written me off a long time ago. But the reality is, like, I can do math, like there's no tomorrow and there's a place in the world for me. And so this is where I think we need to spend more time. This is the research that really needs to get done is how do we find better metrics and how do we actually understand how people really learn as opposed to how we should teach? Because.

Yeah. So I have a different view from you on this in the sense that. But I want to ask a question out of it. My slightly different view is we need to stop viewing tests. It's not the tests per se, it's that we use them as gatekeepers to say, you are not X, you are not smart, you are not this, as opposed to viewing them as ways to help you find what you are meant to do and to look at your continuous improvement and growth as a child. So to me, it's not the test, though, it's how we use the tests.

Well, I think that is all that, that's related because it's the system by which we measure.

Yes, I agree with that.

So.

So again, a bad system will break a great person every time.

So I agree with that. I just think the language is important here because we end up blaming. We end up blaming the messenger rather than the root cause in my mind, in a lot of this. So, so let me, but let me push on this. And last question for you both as we wrap up, which is I was listening to a really interesting, I thought, conversation at Jeb Bush's Ed Palooza Summit this past week with his brother, President George Bush, and his Education Secretary, Margaret Spellings. And they were discussing about how if at the level of the federal government, you have like 20 different goals, then you have no priorities in essence. And so one of the philosophies of no Child Left behind was to be super laser focused on like, a couple indicators. The downside of that is that it gets the system to narrow. And this is me editorializing now, right. It gets the system to narrow and become overly simplistic. I would argue, even though, you know, I, I would say that the right way to realize two indicators is to be more holistic at the downstream level. How do you balance what I think there's A truth in what they're saying. But there's like this incredibly unfortunate impact, it seems, in the local levels. How do you balance that in your mind? Or where does truth lie in that conversation? I'd love you both to reflect. And then we wrap up.

So I'll chime in and I'll say where I find myself going with this is like in my own personal improvement as a person, which is I've seen in different phases of my life where I double down on something. It's like double down on grad school or double down on different goals. And it's really good. Doing that helps me make progress on those goals faster. But it often puts my life out of balance in other areas. Like, I'm doing really well with grad school, but I'm not getting enough sleep and I'm not eating and not getting exercise or I'm not spending enough time with my family. And so I don't know that I have the answer, but I think I tend to lean toward, like, it's important to pay attention to all of these things and at the same time not get stuck in the. It's also easy to get stuck in this mode of, like, I'm doing all these things and not getting better at any of them. So I actually, if I were to. If I were to gesture at what I think is the take, it's actually going back to this continuous improvement work. Because continuous improvement is very good at looking at the system, not just a piece of the system. I think that's the. One of the big insights I've had, I've taken out of all this work is how do you look at. How do you. How do you be clear about the progress you're trying to make, but at the same time have a whole systems view, not just a narrow view.

Bob, final word.

Yeah, so Michael, you might have to translate here, but this is, this goes back to interdependence and modularity. I think the fact is, like, we don't think about the synergies between things. Like, so when I have a set of work to do, I build something called an interrelationship diagram that tells me, like, if I work on this, does it help me with this other part? And we never take the time to actually understand the true interdependence between things. And the reality is there's a natural priority of what we should work on. But we think priority is set by either someone's agenda or the budget or what's going to have the biggest impact. But if I work on this part first. That'll help me with this other part. And so to me, the fact is, they're not taking the time to actually understand the nature of the work or the metrics they're picking and the interdependence of them, as well as the fact that there are also modular things that they could work on totally independently. So it's how they frame the systems is what's actually critical. And so they spend more time working on the problem than the system.

Yeah.

So, yeah, I don't know. I don't know if that made any sense. So.

No, no, let me try. Let me translate it, because I think it makes a ton of sense. And I'm trying to figure out who has the. Where the breakdown occurs right now in that. But the way I'd say it is twofold. So reading after you've learned how to read, you understand phonics and you can decode and you have fluency and so forth. Reading is actually not a skill at that point. It's actually about background knowledge so that you can, you know, you can actually distill meaning from stuff and figure out what it says and so forth. And so like science and history and music and art, studying all those things is actually what boosts reading, like, in a coherent way. It's interdependent. In other words, to use the language you were using. It is not a modular set of things. But we treat them in schools. Exactly like a modular. And we try to boost reading in 9th grade or 11th grade, I guess. Right. 8th grade and 11th grade. We try to boost them by just drilling you on passages of what's the main idea? Which is never going to work, full stop.

Okay, well, now I want to fix that. It will work for some.

Okay, fair.

It does. But the thing is, for a lot. It literally leaves a lot of people by the side of the road.

That's a very good point. Very good point. And then the second analogy I would use is, I think we've also treated tests similar to how doctors treated the measure of blood pressure in the 1800s. Right. So we learned that blood pressure was a leading indicator of other detrimental things on your health. Well, so what did doctors do in the 1800s? They just leeched you. They literally attached leeches to you because it would drain the blood and it would lower your blood pressure. But your health certainly did not improve. In fact, it declined.

Right.

That's how George Washington died, actually, in. In the early 1800s.

So.

So I kind of think that's been our reaction to tests is like we've been doing the equivalent of leaching by drilling and making it reductivist and so forth, rather than viewing these interdependent holes or frankly, what you were saying, Bob, is differences. But if that's true, I guess I'm curious what responsibility lies at the upper reaches of, like, where do we. How do we help align the system in terms of the accountability or transparency?

Well, and that's why, I think, to be honest, continuous improvement is so important because it takes the notion of, like, what the people who are closest to the work understand the underlying problems and the solution way better than the people above the work.

Totally.

And so the notion here is that we haven't actually given teachers any ability to innovate. Right. They have no latitude to innovate. They've literally that somebody else actually decides what they're going to do. They're close to innovation is like, what is my lesson plan? And I want to change my lesson plan and what I talk about. But their ability to innovate is like this big. And the problem they have is this big. And so part of this is one of the best things you can do for a company that's actually struggling is literally give people more time to actually think. Because what's happened is you get so lean that you only have enough people to literally just keep the wheels moving, but there's no ability to actually improve it, so you can actually do more or do better. And so you're so lean that we've actually lost our ability to actually make the system better.

Bob, Tom, great conversation. Thanks for joining me. We'll be back next time. And guys, we will continue this because there's more to unpack. I learned, I learned. I learned a lot. Thanks so much for being here.

Thanks. Thanks for having us on.

Thanks, Michael.