Leading Schools

Helping with homework is part of everyday life once your kid hits school age. For the first couple years it isn’t hard stuff, but you know that one day your kid will have an assignment that stumps them and you. Luckily, you have other options besides furtively googling the answer while your kid isn’t looking.

There’s no shame in turning to others to help your kid understand their homework. Forcing yourself to try to help them when you’re not equipped can lead to frustration for you and your child. Using the resources you have available takes the pressure off everyone and helps your kid learn the material.

Through their research, McKinsey studied the organizations that scored the highest and found these seven traits of "good implementers."

1. Ownership and commitment to change.
If you're going to have a shot at sustaining change, you'll have to assign clear, organization-wide ownership. This includes every department at every level across the organization. Although it's a tedious process, ensuring that everyone has a role and is a part of the big picture is vital to driving commitment.

2. A prioritized set of changes.
Tackling too many changes at once will bog down your organizations and lead to employee burnout. An operational or strategy shift doesn't happen overnight.

It can take months if not years before the benefits of organizational change are realized. To streamline the process and save employee's mental bandwidth, roll out a prioritized list of changes in succession.

Sending your kids to school late pays off.

Delaying school start times nationwide to 8:30 a.m. could contribute $83 billion to the U.S. economy within a decade, and almost $9 billion in two years, a new study by the RAND Corporation and RAND EUROPE suggests.

“If I am stressed, it means I care,” McGonigal said on School’s In, a Stanford podcast. “Stress can activate strength.”
She thinks this matters for students, in particular, who appear to be under unprecedented levels of stress. Parents should, of course, help kids reduce the sources of stress—not over-scheduling them or excessively focusing on grades and test scores—but they can also dramatically reframe stress, away from avoiding it at all costs to trying to manage the bad and leverage the good.

In a new brief, the SREB offers strategies for improving how administrators provide feedback on teachers' performance. Among them: letting teachers lead the debriefing sessions after evaluations.

The below chart shows some ways administrators' and teachers' roles could continue to change during those debriefing sessions. 

States have begun "loosening requirements" for teaching credentials due to a more than 40% decrease in enrollment in teacher preparation programs, as reported by the Wall Street Journal.

Why it matters: Recruitment has been difficult due to "low salaries and difficult state-issued credentials." This has hit rural towns especially hard, and districts are being forced to hire teachers that may not be as qualified.

The current debate over public education underestimates its value—and forgets its purpose.

Public schools have always occupied prime space in the excitable American imagination. For decades, if not centuries, politicians have made hay of their supposed failures and extortions. In 2004, Rod Paige, then George W. Bush’s secretary of education, called the country’s leading teachers union a “terrorist organization.” In his first education speech as president, in 2009, Barack Obama lamented the fact that “despite resources that are unmatched anywhere in the world, we’ve let our grades slip, our schools crumble, our teacher quality fall short, and other nations outpace us.”

John Hattie of the University of Melbourne has examined more than 65,000 research papers (1200 meta-analyses) on the effects of hundreds of different educational interventions. He discovered that things we think matter a lot—class size and streaming by ability—don’t matter nearly as much as the quality of a teacher. According to the Economist, “All of the 20 most powerful ways to improve school-time learning identified by the study depended on what a teacher did in the classroom.”
Money and prestige matter. The highest performing education systems always prioritize the quality of teachers says Andreas Schliecher, head of the education directorate at the OECD. “Wherever they have to make a choice between a smaller class and a better teacher, they go for the latter. Rather than putting money into small classes, they invest in competitive teacher salaries, ongoing professional development and a balance in working time.”

With an "inward mindset," people focus on themselves, not on other people's needs and challenges. People with inward mindsets might consider others as objects: vehicles that they use for personal gain, obstacles that they blame, or simply irrelevant. 

"We can get in a pattern of dealing with people," said Doug Anthony, the associate superintendent of the office of talent development for the district, who was one of the trainers for the new teachers. He pointed to disruptive students: Are teachers seeing them as real people, or an obstacle to their classroom management?  

But with an "outward mindset," people recognize others' needs, objectives, and challenges, and focus on how they can help others. For those with that mindset, problems start with themselves—not with someone else. For teachers, that could mean greeting students before the start of class instead of finishing up last-minute work. Or taking responsibility for when something goes wrong, instead of placing the blame on a colleague or student. 

New results from the nation’s most widely used college admission test highlight in detailed fashion the persistent achievement gaps between students who face disadvantages and those who don’t.

Scores from the ACT show that just 9 percent of students in the class of 2017 who came from low-income families, whose parents did not go to college, and who identify as black, Hispanic, American Indian or Pacific Islander are strongly ready for college.

But the readiness rate for students with none of those demographic characteristics was six times as high, 54 percent, according to data released Thursday.

A teacher shortage has led legislators in several states to lower requirements to become a public school educator.

The Wall Street Journal's Joseph De Avila and Tawnell D. Hobbes reported that several states, including Minnesota, Arizona, Illinois, Utah, and Kansas, have in various ways revamped the requirements for being a public school educator.

For example, Arizona's Republican Governor Doug Ducey signed legislation "giving local school administratiors the power to determine teacher certification." Candidates with higher-education degrees and "significant" experience in a subject, including having taught a related course over the past two years, can get credentials.

Connecticut is thinking about changing up its own certification process, as well. Oklahoma and California, meanwhile, started issuing more emergency teacher certificates to fill vacancies.

The lack of teachers is not a new development. All 50 states plus Washington, DC have reported a shortage of teachers since 2005, according to the WSJ. Schools have a particularly difficult time filling math, science, special education, and English as a second language posts.

Culture - and its application to strategy and results - is now a core focus of great organizations that "get it." Volumes of research from global consulting firms coupled with my own experiences as a business owner and consultant point to the fundamental belief that there is a distinct correlation between culture and financial performance. I address this topic thoroughly in my new book, TakingPoint, which is about leading organizational transformation and the role culture plays in successfully leading change.

But many companies fall significantly short in doing four things: (1) clearly defining their culture, (2) managing that culture, (3) aligning culture with strategy and desired results, and (4) leveraging culture during times of change.

4. Spiral everything.

Difficult things take practice.

See #3. Constantly spiral the most important, most transferable big ideas in your content. If you’re filling a jar with various size rocks, you fit the big rocks in first, yes?

Schools in 45 states have pushed their start times back to fall in line with research that looks at the biological clock of adolescents.