School Leaders Can Learn from Lessons Learned About Implementation

I am winding up an executive analysis with hard-core approaches on how to learn from the experiences of other Districts. The cities covered include:

• Chicago
• Cleveland
• Miami-Dade
• New Orleans
• District of Columbia
• Houston area (non-HISD)

Nothing is groundbreaking, which is the truly sad part of my conclusions.  School districts everywhere, keep making the same mistakes over and over and over and over; this is like groupthink on steroids.  The irony, is that what we tend to see with these excellent research reports about the drop-out rate, student recovery, technology and the like is the consistent poor implementation and execution failures, which results in weak to no impact or results that are not sustainable.

Each of the cities are different to be sure.  But, the common theme is chronic failure in low-income communities where people of color dominate.  Thus, if we are not learning and don't do a better job of managing expectations, politically there will be more of the same.

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