Question: How can a school board know that the school system is meeting its goals?
Answer: Go to the people to whom you have given the responsibility to work towards the goals, and ask them. That is to say, ask the teachers. Talk with them openly about what the goals are. Help teachers to understand what it is that the board/system is hoping to achieve. When you say "increase rigor," or "increase standards," what, specifically, do you want to achieve? What, as a school board, are you expecting teachers to do towards meeting this goal? And what are teachers seeing as the top-down expectations trickle down -- how does the goal affect their daily classroom, and what do they see as working (and not) towards meeting the goal? Teachers can tell you this information in an instant, if you'd let them. Just ask. Make sure you give them a forum to be heard without fear of retaliation if they say something isn't working. You'll get your answer, and you'll also get a lot of information as to how to move forward, refining both the goal and the process of achieving it.
Quite frankly, when you run a company, you run the big picture. It's like an outline. Imagine back in junior high when you learned how to write an outline for a paper. The school board is the title. The superintendent and assistant superintendents are headers and subheaders. Principals and assistant principals are As, Bs, and Cs. But it's the teachers who fill in the details of the outline, the 1, 2, 3 line items under each sub-sub header. If you want to know if you're making your point -- or reaching your goals -- you don't read the title or the chapter titles or the section titles. You read the actual text -- looking to the facts -- and see if it does, in fact, support the titled claims.
Okay, off that analogy. Seriously, though, soooooo much of education is top-down "you will do this," and no one ever asks the teachers, "Does this make sense? How does it affect your day-to-day? What can we do to make it better?" If you want to know if you're meeting your goal, ask the teachers who are charged with making it happen. It seems to me that this logic is true of any business and this is one way in which education is actually similar to business.
To that end, here is something I wish I had said at the board meeting: Any teacher who is worth anything knows that there is the letter of the law and the spirit of the law. Good teachers, great teachers, and amazing teachers all know that you can "play by the rules" while still bending them. And those are the teachers who get results, and who administrators and on up all love. It's not being deceptive or devious, but it's quietly saying, "okay, we need to do x, y, or z ... and I can do that this way instead of that way, and it will work a lot better." But ask any of those teachers what they do to get those results and more often than not, you won't get a specific answer about how they bent the rules.
(If you're wondering why, it's quite simple. Why make waves -- or worse, be told "no," when the fact is that you're being judged on your results, and your method is getting results that people are happy with? It's really a case of what they don't know won't hurt you -- because an idiot manager/administrator may decide that to their mind, your method isn't as good as their method, and then you're back to square one. One thing that many administrators love to do is to micromanage, and the best way to avoid being micromanaged is to avoid giving any information.)
Update: I was told that I sound a little off-the-deep-end, break-all-the-rules-crazy here. That's not what I mean at all, and to be perfectly clear, I am not a rule breaker. You can't defend your actions as right if you started out by breaking a rule, and you come before your bosses already "in trouble." That's not at all what I am talking about: I'm talking about saying that the directive calls for [blank], and the pattern seems to be to get there [this way], but I think I could do a better job doing it [this other way]. Here's an example: School A wants to increase standardized test scores for math. The administration asks the math teachers to regularly use test questions in the style of the particular standardized test. Most teachers take time out of their teaching to give "benchmark" exams, with questions that mimic the style of the standardized tests, in addition to their own tests and quizzes. Teacher A says, "this is unnecessary, it teaches to the test, and giving these extra assessments actually wastes precious time. I'm going to give the same style questions -- or heck, even the same questions -- as part of my homework assignments and regularly-scheduled quizzes and tests." Result: We spend a little bit of class time every day going over the homework questions and discussing how to break them down, kids are familiar with the style of question and not intimidated by them on tests and quizzes, they've had meaningful feedback on each question and the teacher's had a chance to incorporate formative changes because the questions came a little at a time, and we gain almost a full day of instructional time by not giving that additional "benchmark" assessment. By the time it comes down to actually discussing real preparation for the standardized test, the students don't consider it to be nearly as daunting as they might have otherwise. Bent the rules, but didn't break them, and the results are arguably better. Back to the regular post.
So, most teachers won't be specific or talk about not-quite-following-the-mantra-but-following-it-closely-enough-to-ask-forgiveness-if-I-have-to. That's a shame. Because the thing is, everything in education is nebulous. Why not embrace these teachers who are, for all practical purposes, following the rules and the latest "you will do this" edict, but who are making the necessary little bends and tweaks to make it work? Why don't we acknowledge that on a classroom level, you have to make things work for your students, and let's ask these teachers what they are doing? How, exactly, are they interpreting the latest edicts to make things work so well? Instead of this culture of fear -- and make no mistake about it, teachers are quite afraid, for a litany of reasons, to be called out for breaking the rules -- why not grab hold of these rule-benders and take what they are doing, and what is working, and let other teachers (newer, less experienced, less successful) learn from them?
Heck, I have taught at four different schools and something as massive as special education was never done the same way twice, nevermind all the rest of the federal and state requirements! If Washington can't even decide what it wants or how to define it, I see no harm in saying "this is how we, in our room/school/system interpreted this requirement, and look how great we are doing!" But of course, that takes a strong administrator and a strong systemwide leadership. Defend what you believe in, what is right, and what works? It's often so much easier to follow in lockstep.
So to answer the question - if you want to know how you're doing, ask the teachers. Give them an opportunity for candid, consequence-free commentary. Let them tell you plainly what they think about your expectations, how they affect daily classroom life, what is working and what is not. Standards should be set, but how to get there needs to be a fluid, constantly-evolving process -- and quite frankly, meeting standards is a bottom-up, not top-down process.
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