Gallup Management Journal March 5, 2009

HEADLINE: Lessons in Solving Big Problems

What business and government leaders can learn from a think tank that’s saving New York City’s public schools

A GMJ Q&A with Robert Hughes, president and CEO of New Visions for Public Schools

As most executives and managers know, every problem may have a solution, but that doesn't mean all problems will be solved. Sometimes the solution is difficult to find even when the problem is hard to ignore.

Following this dictum, problems in New York City's public schools have appeared to be intractable for decades, but real solutions have been elusive. Estimates of the city's success at graduating its high school students vary -- the city and state use different methodologies to calculate the graduation rate. But both the city's estimate of 62% and the state's estimate of 56% in 2007 (counting August grads) lag behind the national average of 71%.

And yet, there is cause for hope. New Visions for Public Schools, an education reform organization founded in 1989, is achieving notable success in partnering with the city's Department of Education to help more students graduate. New Visions has managed this feat by operating as any innovative business should -- by rethinking old assumptions, creating new strategies, and rooting out systemic problems.

As Robert Hughes, president and CEO of New Visions for Public Schools, explains in this interview, a key to New Visions' success has been keeping its distance from the system it serves. The rest has been a matter of getting good advice from the right people, paying close attention to problems, and finding real-world solutions -- but mostly it's because New Visions has a zero-tolerance policy for failure.

GMJ: What was the impetus for creating New Visions?

Robert Hughes: We wanted to create an innovation shop that private philanthropy could invest in that would work intensively with the New York City public school system to improve student outcomes. But we also wanted a place that's at arm's length from the school system. It goes back to William Edwards Deming, right? Deming said that people in a system aren't necessarily good at diagnosing the problems of the system because they're involved in it, and things seem inevitable to them. New Visions is a place that helps schools think through endemic problems and create new systematic structures and strategies to address those problems.

GMJ: Your board of directors is about evenly balanced between business leaders and educational leaders. What do the business leaders bring to the table?

Hughes: I think they bring a commitment to innovation, an understanding of what long-term success needs to be in the public sector, and a lot of direct advice on strategies we're using and how to implement them effectively.

GMJ: How do the educational leaders respond to that perspective?

Hughes: They've been very positive. New Visions has functioned as a special space where different strategies and innovations can be tested. I think most of the stakeholders in the New Visions community understand that our job [at New Visions] is to help the [New York City] Department of Education innovate, then either spin off whatever we learn to the department or to a separate not-for-profit, or kill it because it wasn't a good idea. We're able to absorb some of the risk that's associated with innovation, so people with direct responsibility for the system don't always have to take that risk. What we aspire to be is kind of an open-source Xerox PARC for public education.

GMJ: Do you think that the business world has a responsibility for improving education?

Hughes: I think businesses have a self-interest in improving education. If we're going to continue to be a vibrant country, we must enable all kids to function and compete effectively in a 21^st century environment. I think that organizations with direct roots in the city and in the United States understand that for the country to be competitive, it's crucial that we have an educated workforce.

GMJ: I've read that performance measurement is important to New Visions. What do you measure, and what do you do with the data?

Hughes: We've developed a system that enables us to track students fairly closely. One of the challenges at the high school level is that there's never been a roadmap for young people or teachers to understand where students are at any point in their school careers and to see what they've accomplished, what their assets are against high school graduation requirements, and what they must do to finish and graduate.

Our on-track system looks at credit accumulation, course passage, and test score passage on the Regents graduation exams to make determinations about where a young person is and whether or not he or she is on track to graduate. This starts in ninth grade, and every student gets an on-track report three times a year. That way, kids have time to make changes before it's too late.

So the metric lets students and teachers see whether students are on track, near track, or off track. But then we can also aggregate to the class level and the school level. That enables us to make judgments about how schools are performing and what they must do to get as many kids as possible to graduate. We can make adjustments and changes according to the schools' needs. We have an expressed goal to graduate at least 80% of our kids, college ready. So we're constantly evaluating and judging schools to determine where they are against that metric -- and then working to support them when we identify gaps in their practices.

GMJ: How many of your kids go on to college?

Hughes: It's hard to tell, largely because there's an over-reporting of the number of kids who go to college. But a significant number of kids enroll in college -- I would say upwards of 80% of the kids who graduate. The [real] problem is that we don't know how many succeed in college, which is a much more important measure. Unfortunately the data suggest that very few of the kids in the United States are going to succeed in college. The question is, why don't they complete it? We have an imperfect understanding of why people are opting out of college. Is it because they were poorly prepared? Is it because of financial constraints? And what happens to those people when they leave college?

It's clear that jobs in the 21^st century will require a much higher level of training. For lots of people, college may not be appropriate, and that's fine -- [education] has to prepare you for a career, and some careers are not necessarily dependent on having a college degree. But it's increasingly clear that a significantly larger number of young people need to be able to have that degree to be effective. And certainly more kids of color need to be able to have that credential to be successful in American society and in the global economy.

GMJ: What do you do when you run into resistance from school or Department of Education staff?

Hughes: Teachers and principals are some of the most motivated and altruistic people in our society. Who else would willingly subject themselves to low pay and lousy working conditions? But it's important to help teachers understand the gap between what they're doing and what they must do to reach their students -- then to support the teachers to close that gap.

Too often, administrators or advocates in education talk at 30,000 feet when teachers have ground-level needs for the 35 or 50 or 150 young people they're working with every day. It's incumbent on us to figure out strategies and tools that make their job easier so that they're more effective in their work. If you can give teachers a tool that they understand and that makes them more effective, they'll grab it and run with it. That means deeper thinking about the systems that affect classroom instruction and aggressively supporting individual teachers as they're working to solve problems.

GMJ: It sounds like the basics of good management.

Hughes: It is good management, but we haven't always had the right tools and strategies to implement it. For example, there's usually only one teacher in a classroom at a time, and as a result, rarely are there opportunities for teachers to collaborate and share what they know.

We also needed to focus on the structures and systems that teacher was operating within. Remember, in New York City, New Visions and the Department of Education have been shutting schools down -- which, by the way, were graduating only 35% to 45% of their kids -- and then reconstituting them as small schools. There were a lot of people in those large schools who were working really hard, but the structure was wrong. So their investment of time, energy, and work didn't produce effective results.

One of the challenges in implementing any education reform is figuring out how to ensure that the reform itself empowers teachers to be effective with individual students and that it does so systemically. It shouldn't require heroics -- it should be part and parcel of doing business on a daily basis.

GMJ: In the business world, changes like that require buy-in at every level, which is difficult to achieve. How did you get all your stakeholders on the same page?

Hughes: I don't think you have to be on the same page; I think you have to be committed to a process and a set of core beliefs, then the pages can change depending on people's actual needs -- in our case, young people. You must believe that all young people can learn and that you can measure that learning. You must understand the gaps between what we expect young people to do and what they're able to do. And you must be able to use assessments to make that judgment. Then teams of teachers must work, student by student, to address the challenges.

GMJ: How do you get that commitment?

Hughes: You get commitment by finding your early adapters who understand it and want to do it. You cajole other people to try it. It's like Everett Rogers' diffusion of innovation model, right? You find early adapters, and you hope those early adapters will have success with the strategy. Then slowly, you build a commitment among larger numbers of people and persuade them to implement the strategy.

I don't have the authority, nor does New Visions, to order anybody to make a commitment. I only have the ability to persuade them to commit. But for the most part, by empowering the front line, by talking about expectations and pushing hard for transformation, you can make change quickly, certainly faster than we had expected. And you see this in other areas, such as the quality movement in healthcare led by Don Berwick and the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. Ironically, you can make significant transformations if you start small and focus on concrete problems with the perspective of having zero tolerance for failure.

GMJ: How do you do that without being prescriptive?

Hughes: We only want kids to graduate. Our expectation is that you must get the kids to the top of the mountain, but what trail you choose to get them there is your business.

GMJ: And that's at the discretion of each school?

Hughes: Yes, with constant feedback from us about how they're doing at any moment as they're moving kids through the four years of high school. At the end of the day, you won't be able to regulate excellence across teachers. You can give them tools and push them to create their own internal accountability systems to be excellent, but you can't mandate excellence. And the tools vary, and we're still learning a lot about what kinds of tools make the most sense for which teachers. For example, I think we're good at getting kids to graduate, but I think we still have a long way to go to get them truly prepared to be college ready.

-- Interviewed by Jennifer Robison