Joel Klien's Initial NYC School Reform Vision Looked At Through The Lens of Kotter's Steps To Transform an Organization

Posted by Teddy at 10/28/2010 11:04 PM
Categories: Education Issues

I watched Joel Klein’s speech about changing the culture of urban education that he gave to The Academy of Management  in Atlanta, GA on August 13 2006 right after reading John Kotter’s 1995 essay Leading Chang: Why Transformation Efforts Fail  http://cssp.us/pdf/LeadingChange-J%20Kotter.pdf) which is about about the steps one needs to take to transform an organization. It got me thinking what Kotter would think of Klein’s plans. In the following paragraphs I will analyze Klein’s plan through the prism of Kotter’s “8 steps to transforming your organization.”

 Kotter’s first step is to establish a sense of urgency; Klein does that right off the bat by using a story about a school that fixed a floor but not a leaky roof that was causing the floor damage as an analogy to the types of small reforms that have not addressed the underlying problem of school culture which have produced statistics that show that many students in urban environments falling behind.

            Kotter’s next to steps are to form a guiding coalition and to create and communicate a vision. Here I think Klein’s and by extension Mayor Bloomberg’s approach does not completely measure up. I would argue that Klein does articulate a clear vision for the future based on the 3 principals of moving from a “culture of excuses to accountability, a culture of compliance to performance, and a culture of uniformity to differentiation.” However, it seems to be that he only creates a partial coalition. His most effective coalition building step and the one that communicates his vision seems to be the creation of the Leadership Academy which is designed to create new school leaders that will carry out the reforms he wants to implement. That being said, overall his plan seems to be to consolidate much of the reform power with Mayor Bloomberg and himself and did not focus enough on educators “buying in” to the program. Recently when there was a large drop in students being considered proficient in NYC, I think many of the cracks in Klein’s coalition have become larger and led to more groups and people being resistant to his reforms (source: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704394704575496184121773688.html)

            Getting back to Klein’s initiation plan, he does seem to follow Kotter’s step 5 (empowering others to act on the vision) to a T, by creating the “autonomy zones” which gave principals more freedom and more responsibility. Step 6 of Kotter’s plan is to create short term wins and it seems to me that an example of this in Klein’s vision may be giving schools discretionary spending if the principals of the schools adopt the accountability reforms. In addition it seems that Klien negotiating his contracts with the teacher’s unions which ends some practices such as the ability of teachers to insist on school transfers fits into the Kotter framework for producing even more change and consolidating improvements.

            The final aspect of Kotter’s steps to transforming organizations is to institutionalize the changes; Klien seems to be battling to do that step as I right this. My question is should these changes be institutionalized. In the last couple of months of have read Diane Ravitch’s Death and Life of The Great American School System and Linda Darling Hammond ‘s The Flat World and Education which both have very strong critiques of Klein’ reforms in NYC. The recent evidence that NYC initial gains might not have been as strong as they seemed, is also cause for concern.(source: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/city_test_scores_decline_after_state_snEQajtlL2368HpVtkmOeJ)  Should we institutionalize a reform before we know whether or not the reform has actually worked? Or In The Current Case of Klein's Reforms when the reforms may have failed? 

 

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