The main thrust of this blog is that taxpayers deserve the same quality of management and performance tracking with benchmarks from government agencies that businesses practice. And that includes the Lake County School District.
Most of the articles we have posted here about School Districts have been about fiascos or missing management methods. But here is one about a District that practiced good management like businesses do on a daily basis.
Columnist Lauren Ritchie from the Orlando Sentinel wrote a great overview today of the former School Superintendent of Florida's Okaloosa County, Don Gaetz, who used "lean, mean" management techniques to reduce District expenses and vastly improve the performance of all the schools in the district. Gaetz is now a freshman Florida State Senator. The Wall St. Journal, according to Ritchie, also wrote an article about the District's success in "incorporating disabled students into regular classrooms" while spending less per student than most other districts.
Read the article below, then come back to these comments:
Comments:
1) Gaetz basically implemented a "holding company" approach to School District management by reducing the central administration staff and pushing funding, decisions and performance tracking to school principals and school advisory committees. Coincidentally, today's Sentinel also had articles about a visit by the new owner of the Sentinel and their parent company, Sam Zell, who is implementing the same holding company approach, eliminating a central "top-down" bureaucratic system. I have worked in holding companies at the lean headquarters offices (The British use this practice a lot for the companies they buy), and it is a very good model for developing management and improving the productivity performance of work operations. A few years ago, Boeing also moved to this approach. One hallmark is to move the holding company staff into a separate location so they can focus on analysis and coaching of low performers.
2) Principals resisted becoming "managers" with measurable performance requirements (not just FCAT) and he had to fire 37 of 41 of them in his first term.
3) He set performance standards for school administrators (i.e. like benchmarks, like we discussed in our last posting on this blog) and fired those that did not get a 60% higher approval rating.
4) As we have mentioned on this blog, almost half the 5000 Lake County School District employees are "non-instructional" or administrators. They are not involved in directly providing instruction to students. Gaetz reduced his central non-instructional ratio of staff down to about 10%, but the article isn't clear what the ratio was in the actual Schools.
This is the type of strong leadership needed in the Lake County School District in Central Florida. Unfortunately, the new short list of prospective new Superintendents to be appointed by the Board are all from the educational field, and have doctorates. When they were described in a workshop by the recruiting project coordinator, Wayne Blanton, he didn't once mention that any of them improved productivity of school operations. Thus they probably won't practice the business methods used by Gaetz, who came from the business sector. If we are lucky, the School Board may set some business productivity standards, however, to improve operations under the new Super.
vj
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orlandosentinel.com/news/local/lake/orl-lritchie0108feb01,0,3973703.column
OrlandoSentinel.com
COMMENTARY Lakefront
Okaloosa superintendent put schools ahead of administration
Lauren Ritchie
COMMENTARY
February 1, 2008
On his first day as superintendent of schools in Okaloosa County, Don Gaetz collected all the district's cell phones, car keys and gas credit cards.
Within 10 minutes of his swearing-in, he fired the chief financial officer. ("He seemed to think that every problem could be solved by more money," Gaetz said.)
He hired a former bank vice president who was a CPA. She drove 100 miles a day to work and took a $20,000 annual pay cut to do it because of her commitment to getting the district in clean financial shape.
"It set a tone: Public schools are a community treasure, and people who serve on school boards and as elected superintendents should look at this as an opportunity to build value.
"If you come at it with that mind-set, a lot of things fall into place," Gaetz said.
He applied this single test to every position in the central office: Does this person's job directly contribute to better student performance?
If the answer was no, then bye-bye bureaucrat.
District-office payroll dropped by half. ("It was a moral imperative to put more dollars into direct services," he said.)
Administrators all had contracts, as they do in Lake County, but some in Okaloosa were for three years. Gaetz ripped them up. One guy sued and lost.
"It gave everybody a sense of urgency and a sense of responsibility," he said.
Gaetz, who built and sold a health-care company before his election, promised never to spend more than 10 percent away from the school -- including the expenses of maintenance, insurance, lawyers and transportation. He didn't join the state superintendents association (no time), never attended a single seminar or convention (same reason) and never billed the people of Okaloosa County for a dime of travel. By the time he left last year to start his freshman term as a state senator, the school district was spending only 9 percent on central services. (Gaetz's successor in her first six months has shaved another quarter point off that number.)
But the single biggest change, he said, was forcing principals and school advisory committees to act as chief executive officers and boards of directors, respectively. He turned over 90 percent of what the state allocates for each student to them and told them to spend it in a way to improve academic performance.
Oh, my.
Don Gaetz did the unthinkable: He blasted the culture of education in Okaloosa County to smithereens. The ensuing panic among complacent educators must have been entertaining. Many quit. ("Some left because they just didn't want to have one more meeting with me," Gaetz said. He wasn't laughing.)
Principals -- they'd been hearing claims of reform for years -- flatly told him that they were education leaders, not managers. He responded, "Then you can't cross the river with us and get to the promised land."
Gaetz instituted a customer-service survey system that required administrators at schools to get a 60 percent or higher approval rating or be fired.
He replaced 37 of 41 principals in his first term.
Results: The district that was 27th from the bottom in academic performance among Florida's 67 counties shot upward, becoming one of the top performers. Today, 32 of its 36 schools are A-rated. The remaining four are B schools.
Its teachers are the seventh highest-paid in the state. (Lake's rank 48th).
Impressive report card.
Here in Lake, 33 regular public schools break out like this: 16 are A-rated; 10 earned Bs; 3 earned Cs, and 4 checked in with Ds. Shamefully, four of this county's seven high schools are ranked D. Never before have Lake's high schools rated so poorly.
A recent Wall Street Journal story profiled Okaloosa's success in incorporating disabled students into regular classrooms -- those who pass state achievement tests have increased in number, while discipline problems have gone down. And the district did it while spending $8,947 a year on each special-education student, nearly $1,300 below the state average of $10,218. Lake spends $9,337.
Okaloosa may or may not be the promised land.
But one thing is for sure: The Okaloosa County School District is a foreign land when compared with Lake.
Lauren Ritchie can be reached at [email protected] or 352-742-5918.
