Measuring What Matters

Pulling Teeth

Results-based performance measurement is a dirty word.  At least it used to be.  Years ago I was involved in a multitude of projects aimed at moving Canadian government departments away from counting widgets and towards measuring what matters.  RESULTS!!

Many workshops went something like this:

Consultant:  How do you know that your program is making a difference?

Stakeholder:  Because we serve x number a given community.

Consultant:  But how do you know that you are meeting their needs?

Stakeholder:  We just know that what we are doing is important.

One of the hardest projects that I ever worked on was for a small program that faced losing its funding if it couldn’t develop a results-based performance model.  Helping these stakeholders re-define their business in terms of results was like pulling teeth.  We helped them renew their funding. I don’t believe we convinced them that the model would help them deliver their program.

A Commitment to Measuring Results

You can imagine my delight on hearing the Chief of Staff and Strategic Planning for Wake County Public Schools, Dr Marvin Connelly, present the district’s commitment to measuring its results!

Dr Connelly talked about Wake County’s determination to measure whether or not the school system is creating productive citizens.  In other words, the high-school graduation rate alone tells you nothing about whether or not students learned what they needed to in school.  Instead, it is much more instructive to look at how they are doing in the real world.

Dr Connelly threw out some possible measures:

• do former students vote?
• how many freshman within the UNC system are enrolled in remedial classes?
• are WCPSS students graduating from college?

Making it Count

As a parent with three children in the public school system I am deeply invested in the district following through on this commitment to shift towards measuring results.  However, I believe that until this commitment shifts down into the classroom it will be a challenge to produce the productive citizens we need our children to become.

In my perfect world, the net effect of the implementation of results-based management in schools will be a shift away from using test scores as THE metric towards a more well-rounded assessment of both how well students and their teachers are doing.  A teacher at my children’s elementary school shared a wonderful article from the Boston Globe that sets-out seven things kids need to master.  These skills include:  reading, having a conversation and asking questions.  Would I ever love to facilitate a workshop focused on developing metrics to measure these things!!

Let me tell you, you don’t need to hire a consultant to tell teachers that a simple test-score does not measure what matters most in the classroom:  whether or not children are actually learning and growing.  I look forward to the day we start measuring that!