Focus On Results
A Newsletter from Focus on Results • Spring 2005
From Central Offices to Central Services: A Focused Plan for District Improvement
The conference director introduces the keynote speaker, a Superintendent with a long list of accomplishments. Achievement scores in her district moved from among the lowest to some of the highest in the state. She refocused her staff and reallocated her resources so that all district employees — Cabinet members, mid-level staff, principals, teachers, and even bus drivers — restructured their daily work to support the improvement of student literacy skills. She worked closely with school-level leaders to measure progress and ensure teachers and principals were getting the support they needed. Through her relentless efforts, the district is achieving its goals.
As the Superintendent walks to the podium amidst the applause, other Superintendents in the audience consider their own district's challenges and successes. They wonder, "Why, despite my own unwavering commitment, did my vision for improvement not translate into significant gains in student learning? What was it that kept me from focusing on my goals? What peripheral work got in the way? What might I do differently to have the results this Superintendent achieved?"
At Focus on Results, we often find that Superintendents and their Cabinet have clear ideas about how to improve student learning. What they need is time and support to realize their vision. The following is intended to help Superintendents and their Cabinet begin to consider where they are in relation to where they want to be and strategize how they might refocus a traditional Central Office into a results oriented, instruction-focused, and customer-service driven organization called Central Services.
From Central Offices...
The work of a traditional Central Office often flows down in a linear fashion. The district begins by providing a broad improvement agenda and then develops multiple initiatives to help schools implement the agenda. Central Offices communicate these ideas through numerous memos to schools and offer multiple and sometimes competing professional development opportunities to support implementation of the various initiatives. Most traditional Central Offices expect learning to improve out of this process. However, they often find that implementation of these plans and initiatives is uneven across the schools.
When traditional Central Office staffs accept this process as the status quo, not surprisingly, so do district principals, teachers, and of course, students. The typical school staff ends up believing the Central Office is out of touch with their true needs. A recent survey of school leaders suggests schools are frustrated that Central Office staff rarely visit their buildings to see school challenges first hand, much less ask schools to define their hurdles, strategies, and needs.¹ Communication from the Central Office tends to be directive instead of engaging and reciprocal. Schools perceive district personnel to have a poor grasp of teaching and learning and therefore incapable of truly supporting their needs.
This research suggests a disconnect between district intent and school understanding and implementation. To reconcile this challenge, districts must be willing to improve side-by-side with their schools.
To Central Services
We support districts in moving from a traditional Central Office to a Central Services organization sharply focused on instruction. By this we mean rethinking the way district staff see their responsibilities, tools, expectations, strategies, interactions, and even their name. The purpose of this revamped Central Services is to provide high-quality customer service to its primary constituents — schools. Success of Central Services is defined not by compliance of schools, but by the support to and achievements of the schools in gaining results for students.
In Central Services, the work of the district evolves from a linear to a circular flow. When developing agendas, strategies, and professional development offerings, Central Services solicits feedback from its clients — the schools — to ensure the district is in fact serving their needs.
For example, the Superintendent in Edmonton, Alberta led his Central Office to develop into a Central Services organization by ensuring his administration truly supported the needs of his schools.² He created the district-wide focus of achieving "superb results from all students" and asked each department within Edmonton Central Services to define its work by how it will support such student results. Further, he provided district staff with the professional development they needed to reframe their work and become more customer-service oriented.
Getting Started
Moving from a traditional Central Office to Central Services often requires rethinking the way districts do business. For example, look at the new way Central Services does its old job as detailed below. Reflecting on your own district, where does it fall on this continuum? What specific examples support your placement? What are the next steps you can take to move your district towards the Central Services side of the continuum?
Use student data to develop focused district improvement plan.
Central Services develops a district improvement agenda first by determining the true needs of the schools throughout the district and then developing a plan to address those specific needs.
Central Services determines its schools' needs by examining multiple sources of data including standardized tests, local performance-based assessments, and samples of student work. Central Services also solicits input from school leaders by surveying their greatest strengths and challenges and asking how the district may better support their needs. Forums for gathering this information might include focus groups, satisfaction surveys, and regular conversations with schools.
Based on this data, Central Services determines its schools' greatest need. Our experience suggests districts should support schools in identifying one specific instructional focus — one area of the academic curriculum the staff has chosen as most important for its students to know and do. Finally, the district builds an improvement agenda that directly addresses this most pressing student need and instructs all Central Services staff to reorganize their daily work to support the instructional focus.
One district in Washington State reorganized the work of every department to support the district-wide focus on literacy. For example, the Transportation Department refocused its efforts by placing boxes of books on each bus for students to read while riding to and from school. They even redesigned their bus safety presentations around characters from popular children's stories.
Create and use policies, practices, and resources that are aligned to support the district-wide improvement agenda.
Central Services takes great care to translate the district-wide agenda into reflective and helpful tools, policies, and practices that directly support each school's instructional focus. One Central Services provided schools with access to research-based teaching practices by developing a district-wide database that included literature, materials, and tools to help each school implement its instructional focus.
In addition, these districts reallocate their resources including time, personnel, and funding to ensure these assets align with the focus of the schools. One district returned control of professional development time to the schools so that teachers could collaborate within the regular work day and support each other in their instructional focus. Another Central Services streamlined the teacher application process to assume increased responsibility and free more time for principals to visit classrooms.
Widely communicate district strategies and student learning goals.
By widely communicate, we mean do it repeatedly, and in a way that is helpful and easy to access at the school level. Central Services communicate using words, actions, and deeds in every available forum. Each time the Superintendent speaks, he or she details the agenda and strategy for improvement. Wherever Central Services staff work, these ideas are displayed shamelessly throughout the building. As one Superintendent said, "when my staff interrupts me saying, 'I know, I know, our agenda is...', then I know I am communicating the strategies enough." Another Central Services organization posts the district agenda throughout their building, including on the elevators, on each table in the district cafeteria, on signs in the parking deck — even on the recorded phone message heard while holding for a district staff member.
School faculty do not have time to attend weekly meetings at the district office, complete the reams of paperwork that comes their way, or truly digest the implementation strategies laid out in a memo. Instead, Central Services reduces the amount of paperwork sent schools, reserving that right for truly important information that cannot be communicated any other way. One district met this challenge by compiling a chronological list of all the district requests made to schools and then cut the list by 50 percent.
Provide targeted professional development based on school and district needs.
Traditional Central Offices offer a wide range of professional development opportunities that may be disconnected from the instructional focus or even compete with other district-wide initiatives. Central Services supports schools in creating a targeted professional development plan based on student needs.
For example, one district tied its professional development to each school's needs by providing training in Walk Throughs. This powerful tool enabled faculties to learn how to visit others' classrooms to learn from and provide support to colleagues as they implemented their instructional focus.
Professional development is not an offering simply for schools. Central Services staff needs professional development, too. In one district, Central Services provided a series of professional development sessions to its staff to examine how its improvement agenda impacted their own daily work.
Provide follow-up coaching, solicit feedback from schools, and monitor student progress towards stated goals to help ensure all schools meet district expectations.
After professional development workshops are completed, traditional Central Offices hope their hard work pays off at the school level and that student learning improves. In Central Services, professional development sessions are followed up with more than hope. Instead, these districts provide school-level coaching to ensure the training translates into practice. The most successful models usually involve a cadre of coaches who provide ongoing phone, e-mail, and on-site visits to help the leadership team apply its new learnings in the workplace.
In conjunction with the ongoing coaching, Central Services also develops and uses a system to solicit feedback from schools and monitor student progress towards district goals. It sets performance targets by which Central Services staff may measure its own effectiveness throughout the year. For example, one Central Services department set the following external performance target: "98% of principals will be satisfied or very satisfied with the services provided to them by Personnel Services as noted on the annual District Satisfaction Survey."
This specific data enables Central Services to refine its strategies and provide better customer service to its schools. For instance, principals gave one district the feedback that they were unable to spend time in classrooms because of daily district requests and demands. In response, the district committed to holding all communications to schools until after 10 a.m., enabling principals to use this sacred time for instructional leadership.
Finally, the Superintendent and Cabinet clearly define expectations for implementation of the district effort and hold schools increasingly accountable for using these strategies in the classroom.
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The Superintendent closed her speech by reminding the audience that research and her own experience suggests that a key ingredient in school improvement is district improvement. For the Superintendents in the audience, the message was clear. It is possible to redesign district work to become a results oriented, instruction-focused, customer-service organization that achieves student results. Now it is up to them to reflect upon their current strategies and move forward on theses lessons learned to ignite such targeted improvements in their own districts and ultimately, in their students.