SPOTLIGHT: INTERVIEW ARCHIVE

I was turning theses questions over in my mind last week when I visited the Dublin City Schools, a remarkable school district in Ohio, to interview Superintendent Steve Anderson on (as it happened) his last day on the job. What distinguishes Dublin from other Ohio districts is its extraordinary record of academic accomplishment, earned, not conferred. And earned the old fashioned way - through hard work. Dismayed by lower levels of achievement than he thought appropriate, under Steve's leadership the Dublin schools committed themselves to systemic changes to improve individual student performance. The proximate issue was reading, which as it improved, resulted in collateral improvements throughout the curriculum.

And the Dublin City School Paper trumpeted the success with a banner headline:

The subheads proudly proclaimed:

Grade 4 and 6 Proficiency - all time high records in 7 out of 10 testing areas

Grade 12 Proficiency - Dublin scores highest result ever in Central Ohio

Metropolitan Achievement Test - district-wide increases in every subject and every grade

Clearly the Dublin Schools and the retiring superintendent have much to be proud of, and every reason to seize braggin' rights, TX style. What accounts for such explosive growth in achievement? Leadership is central. But leaders do not lead at random: they have an agenda, and Steve Anderson's was content driven. And he was in it for the long haul. This was not reform de jour, been there, done that. Steve's reading reforms rippled through the district over the past several years. Emblematic of the academic improvements was Dublin's accreditation by North Central. Dublin is the only district in Ohio and the largest district in the nation with all 16 schools receiving Transition Accreditation. What did it take? "It took six years of hard work and much documentation" says The School Paper.

But there's another reason as well, according to Anderson: technology. Not content delivery over the WEB (or by CD-ROM) but technology that helped teachers and administrators keep track of where they were (and are) as well as where their students were (and are.) In the for-profit sector, keeping track is taken for granted. So too is the old bromide: you get what you measure. The Dublin Schools were measuring academic accomplishment as it occurred (not three months later, the way most state imposed standardized tests do.) And the measurement was not abstract counting, but teacher and classroom based. Where did this revolutionary technology come from? Three Dublin teachers who became convinced that they could only meet Steve Anderson's high standards (and the state mandates they embodied) with technology.

On their own, at night and over weekends, the teachers labored with FilemakerPro™ a program they found easy to master and use. Their program quickly spread, by word of mouth, to their fellow teachers. There was no edict from on high to use it; it was used because it was useful. It passed the most important of all software tests: it was user friendly and user useful. l Without being patronizing, this is particularly important in as school setting where reforms come and go with the regularity of the tides. Teachers' eyes begin to glaze over as the announcements about new programs and goals are made.

In the Dublin case, however, the new program announcements were serious and the teachers took them seriously. Thus the unparalleled success of the teacher designed technology. The technology is not solely responsible for the Dublin success story; indeed, no one would make such a claim. Neither would anyone claim that Babe Ruth's success as a hitter was due to his bat; if it were, every hitter would have used it. The Babe's success was due to the way he used the bat.

The Dublin example is a classic case of "working smarter." That's what IT is all about, intellectual horsepower.

The questions I was toying with at the beginning are deceptively simple - they are the questions that a plant supervisor, mine manager or modern rancher would ask spontaneously. They are also the questions that a modern service economy manager would ask, in either the for-profit or not-for-profit world. After all, technology is not acquired for its own sake, it is meant to be a productivity enhancer. Indeed, in the private sector, technology is not a cost but an investment. To be sure, it is a cost of production, but one that pays for itself. In fact, when adopted sensibly, for the right reasons and with the right deployment, technology more than pays for itself. It is a bargain.

Give me a lever long enough and I could move the world, Archimedes reportedly said. A nice bit of hyperbole to make a powerful point. Technology is about leverage. In the old economy it was about physical leverage - a tractor replaces a horse (or several horses, truth be told); in the new economy it is about intellectual leverage. That is nowhere more true than schools, but so far, it has been very hard to measure. Like the elusive neutrino or quark in physics, technology's impact in schools is elusive and hard to pin down. But technology is an important part of the Dublin success story. How big a part remains to be seen.

Denis P. Doyle
Issue 1.26
07/11/2001