“In the state of blur everything must connect”

It’s official; we are in the state of “blur”. 

Stan Davis and Christopher Meyer introduce the business world to “Blur: the speed of change in the connected economy” (1998). They challenged thought leaders in business with a framework to make sense of the then unprecedented speed of change. Fourteen years later, two of their ideas “change is constant and knowledge and imagination are more valuable than physical capital” are arguably still considered as novel or some sort of aberration to our daily work.

Of particular interest to me are the recommendations of Davis and Meyer to prepare, adjust, initiate, and navigate blur. Here is one that has import today: “connect everything with everything”.

Sounds simple enough but not so easy to do.

In our recent Organizational Assessment (OA) exit interview, senior leadership listened to the OA team share their preliminary findings. One finding, though disappointing, is that many in our organization and community are not aware, understand, and support the vision, mission, strategic commitments, and expectations for results.

An additional finding was the limited awareness and understanding of the role of the Department of Public Instruction (DPI) and the consequences or penalties hanging over the head of our entire organization.

It was communicated during the interviews that staff and community members were unaware of Race to the Top and the recommendation and approval by our Board of Education to choose the transformation model to reform the school system.

The transformation model requires several actions including replacing ineffective principals, ineffective teachers, meet student performance targets set by DPI, agree to district, school, and instructional coaches, and agree, if performance growth is not achieved to relinquish control organizational decisions to DPI including budget, staffing, and instructional programming.

DPI control means that the School Board has no authority or control for decisions or direction of the school system. There are several additional requirements that must be met before the end of the instructional year 2014. The Anson County Board of Education in the late fall of 2010 agreed and approved all of these requirements.

To be fair, administration crafted the plan that included almost all monies provided by the RttT grant to be used for Human Capital Development (HCD) and the adoption of Common Core Essential Standards (CCES).

Presently, the Learning Development Centers (LDC) at Anson Middle and Wadesboro Elementary are a part of the HCD plan. With the funding provided by the School Improvement Grants (SIG) at Anson High and Morven Elementary two more LDC’s were added. The HCD plan also includes our strategic partnership with Discovery Education, Learning Together, Math Together, Pitsco, Instruction Technology integration, Power of Teaching, Total Instructional Alignment (TIA), A+, Model Schools conference, and much more.

These combined with the vision of Best of Class, the mission, “All means all”, and the Strategic Commitments provide a clear picture of “how” the Anson County Schools plans to meet or exceed state standards as well as community expectations for their schools – our schools.

There is also a general lack of awareness and understanding about the new evaluation model. The model is designed for coaching staff by providing specific, measurable, actionable, relevant, and timely (SMART) feedback and input to assist staff in building capacity. It is fundamentally different in two ways.

The first is that it takes more time, more reflection, more implementation, and more focus on the evidence of effective practice including actual student learning results.

The second difference is that the principal’s assessment of teachers is public, under unprecedented scrutiny, and includes actual student performance as a measure of instructional effectiveness.

What may be confusing is that these are not my rules, the Board of Education’s rules, or Anson County School’s rules. These are State and Federal rules. As I was told by DPI when I questioned attending required training – when we said, “yes” to the money, we said, “yes” to conditions and requirements.

Change is blur.

We must work with renewed determination to connect everything we are doing with everything we are doing.