Lancaster School Board

Speaker A Just introduce that thing with Jake and Phillips again, I think if you ask how can this can Jake's work be applied to areas other than industry or business? Such when he came to visit and stayed the weekend, we had an afternoon and evening with Vicki Phillips, an assistant superintendent, and she was superintendent of Langster city schools, and I was board president at the time. It's a large 12,000 student inner city school, Lancaster, Pennsylvania. And we had hired her as superintendent because we were looking to reinvent and ramp up the school system of Lancaster and make it actually an excellent school district. And it's inner city, mostly minority, probably 70, 80% minority. I guess that's by definition now majority. And what's interesting is Vicky Phillips at this time, as of today, is head of the Gates foundation, the educational division of the Gates foundation. And she and Elliot and I talked at length about this application, this theory in the public education. And one thing we had discovered in trying to get performance rate is that all the discussion about schools are well, we need more money, or the parents need to be more involved, or the kids ought to get off their butts and appreciate the opportunities they have and on and on, which has nothing to do with the organization. And what we found was one of the things that we put into the school was ISO 9000, the first school district in the world to be certified, ISO 9000, which mandated constant improvement, continuous improvement. And as part of that, we found that the key probably with the correlation of .8 of higher of the success of a school building was the principal, the leadership. And you look at the principal as a level three, and the teachers are the two and the students is a one. Well, then if you have a lousy principal, you will then drive out good teachers. He'll tolerate, he or she will tolerate bad teachers, and the whole thing doesn't work. And we could see by these annual presentations, within five minutes of the presentation that you could see with the teachers there in the room, a public meeting with the principal giving, showing how they were using this $3 million we were given them to run the school, whether or not they were making progress. Three to five minutes into the presentation, just by the person's manner of speaking and the level of complexities they were taught, you could tell the school was going to work or wasn't. And the first round of 20 principals, at least a third, was an embarrassment. You could tell this was not. And we probably over three years, replaced 20 principal. We turned over 20 principals trying to find them. So using this leadership model, if you were going to change so, then the superintendent would have to be at least a level four. And you had Ms. Phillips, who was a level five or six, because we were trying to reform, and now she's in position of six. So she's looking at how do you make significant changes in the whole system? And you ended up with a level five, level six thinker. And we had these conversations with Elliot, and Elliot, in his typical manner, was trying to find the weak part and start an argument about how she was thinking wrong. But besides that and I think he made some points, but the one thing he was interested in is he said, I don't know whether or not there could be a curriculum for elementary schools starting at kindergarten, first and second grade, you could take a young child and bump them up a level. And he said he and his wife Catherine had a curriculum designed to do that. And we agreed that we would actually give him two schools, and we were in that mode of we can try. If it works, we can put them we can't do any harm. We figured that's the first thing, do no harm and see if it would work. As we were tracking these kids through now with testing all the way up through the system, we could do it, and unfortunately, died about a year later, and for various reasons, we moved on. She became state secretary of education, so that project died, which was, I think, unfortunate, because at some point, somebody's gut would like to see some of this work continued, because there would be a and maybe the answer is no. You're born with it, and once you come out, pop out of the womb, you're on an intellectual trajectory, and there's no way to speed it up. But at this point, he didn't know, and certainly I don't know then the next thing is, well, how do you apply this to public not only has an application to public education, and when you look at if, in fact, principals are the key ingredient to a successful school system, well, where are they coming from? Where is the talent pool? Well, they're all ex teachers, and they've all taught for a number of years, and you have to contrast that with the US. Navy, that you don't go in the navy as a seamen for three or four years to get the flavor of what it's like to be in the bowels of a ship or rent gun. Where does your talent pool come from? Well, it comes from seniors in high school. You're picked as a senior in high school with an excellent record, and then you go to four years of college to be trained. But you're trained as an officer. You're trained to think strategically. You're trained to think in a certain way, and not as a sailor. They do have a nisset program where they'll take sailors and move them up, but I don't think that's successful. It's just an outlet. But if we're going to get true leadership and change in public policy for schools or leaders, you would have to create a talent pool from the get go. They would take kids that want to get on that trajectory as they come out of high school, if they want to go into a public to school administration. And it could be a straight liberal arts education, but they should not be forced to become teacher and certified. The rest of it becomes irrelevant in terms of being able to be able to think and manage the system.