Learning Education Lessons From Ontario

Michael Fullan at The Atlantic:

It's simple. Ontario public schools follow a model embraced by top-performing hospitals, businesses, and organizations worldwide. Specifically, they do five things in concert -- focus, build relationships, persist, develop capacity, and spread quality implementation.
In practice, this meant refocusing the way Ontario schools delivered education. Like many school systems, Ontario had too many "top" priorities. The Ministry of Education selected three--literacy, math, and high school graduation--with a commitment to raise the bar for all students and close achievement gaps between all groups. There are other goals, of course, but these three are non-negotiable and take precedence because they leverage so many other learning goals.
Focus and persistence ensure that these priorities are not going to be discarded along the way. The history of education innovations has generated a "this too shall pass" mindset among teachers. One of our colleagues calls this phenomenon "the law of innovation fatigue." Any attempt to create a high-leverage priority (like the three adopted by Ontario) requires that the education system as a whole commits to them long-term.
But priorities don't mean anything if you don't develop the relationships necessary to enact them. The provincial government set out to develop a strong sense of two-way partnerships and collaboration, especially between administrators and teachers, and in concert with teachers' unions. This required providing significant leeway to individual school districts to experiment with novel approaches to reaching the province's three main educational goals, and focusing significant reform efforts on investments in staffing and teacher development.
By focusing on teacher development, Ontario was also able to raise teacher accountability. Decades of experience have taught Canadian educators that you can't get greater accountability through direct measures of rewards and punishments. Instead, what Ontario did was to establish transparency of results and practice (anyone can find out what any school's results are, and what they are doing to get those results) while combining this with what we call non-judgmentalism. This latter policy means that if a teacher is struggling, administrators and peers will step in to help her get better. (There are, however, steps that can be taken if a situation consistently fails to improve.)

Wait, you can improve the educational system without denigrating the teachers as lazy and overpaid, and trying to force public money to for-profit charter schools?  Maybe the Republican governors of the midwest might want to pay attention.  But really, they aren't interested in fixing problems, they just want to get rid of the public school system which has served the United States for generations.

I recognize there is some irony in posting about management buzz words then posting this: Specifically, they do five things in concert -- focus, build relationships, persist, develop capacity, and spread quality implementation. But honestly, I can explain what this means, and all it is is common sense.  My favorite is build relationships.  I don't understand the Republican infatuation with assholes (Christie, Kasich, Scott, et al.).  One of the more common folk sayings is that you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.  Insulting folks who could help you reach a goal doesn't make much sense.  If you make half the population in a democracy think you are the enemy, you are making things really hard on yourself.  Writing off large groups of minorities seems like the wrong strategy.  Same with serving the interests of the top 20% of the economic scale at the expense of everybody else.  But hey, that's why I'm not a Republican anymore.