Strategic Planning: Putting Your Strategic Plan Into Action During the Fiscal Crisis

Click here for the Agenda (.pdf)

"I urge all states to set high expectations for themselves and take advantage of the opportunity to create strong plans to move reform forward…to do the hard work necessary to write the comprehensive plans necessary to succeed in school reform." -Secretary Arne Duncan upon announcing the recipients of the Race to the Top grants

As Secretary Duncan’s call to action illustrates, public schools are being urged to create strategic plans that systemically use standards, data, effective teachers, and school turnarounds to advance student achievement.

This strategic push seemingly runs counter to the reality of fiscal distress. Districts may have tabled their carefully crafted strategic plans as they deal with the immediacy of shrinking revenues. They may even have sacrificed their strategic initiatives to budget cutbacks.

Does your strategic planning process help or hinder an execution plan under financial constraints?

Yet fiscal crisis is actually the most important and, paradoxically, the easiest time to enact strategic plans. As districts must do more with less, they must think in terms of tradeoffs. Making these tradeoffs is an opportunity to implement the strategic plan by prioritizing the set of activities that the district does best to deliver on the ultimate goal of raising student achievement. Indeed, far from being tabled for better times, strategic plans can play a crucial role during financial distress by clarifying the cutbacks to be made and minimizing the impact of them.

The January 2011 Superintendents’ Strategy Summit will chart a process for how districts can use the recession as an opportunity to put their strategic plans into action.

Using the plans that districts have already created as a foundation, participants will address:

• Strategies to move forward and make progress with district goals despite significant reduction in resources;
• Techniques for managing and leading given an uncertain future;
• Approaches to budgeting, decision-making, and communication that connect the strategic plan to ongoing operations.

Duncan O'Brien, Global Manager of Business Development, General Electric

Duncan attended Stanford University and the Stanford Graduate School of Business, graduating with an M.B.A. in 1984. For the next 13 years, he worked in the Investment Banking Division of Goldman, Sachs & Co. in a number of different areas, including corporate finance, asset-related financing, structured finance, and new product development.

From 1993 to 1995, he was Managing Director of Goldman Sachs Australia, the firm’s Australasian affiliate. In 1997, Duncan became Vice Chairman and Director of Investment Banking for George K. Baum & Company. In 1999, he formed Crescendo Capital Partners, LLC, an investment banking and private investment boutique. Duncan joined GE Insurance Solutions as Business Development Leader in November 2004, where he led the business’s strategic transaction activity. He joined GE’s Global Business Development team in Fairfield, CT during the summer of 2006, after the closing of the GE Insurance Solutions transaction. He currently focuses on GE’s Technology Infrastructure businesses (Aviation, Healthcare, and Transportation), GE Capital, the Global Research Center and China.

Dr. Jerry Weast, Superintendent, Montgomery County Public Schools

Dr. Jerry D. Weast is Superintendent of the Montgomery County Public Schools, the largest school system in Maryland and the 16th largest district in the nation. Appointed to the position in 1999 and twice reappointed, Dr. Weast is directing an ambitious comprehensive reform effort designed to raise academic standards and narrow the achievement gap for 144,000 students. The managerial excellence he has overseen led to Montgomery County Public Schools’ receipt of the U.S. Senate/Maryland Productivity Award in 2005.

The school system also was a 2006 Finalist for a Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award and is a finalist once again in 2010. The district also is a 2010 finalist for the prestigious Broad Prize in Urban Education. The district’s success in closing the achievement gap is chronicled in the book, Leading for Equity: The Pursuit of Excellence in Montgomery County Public Schools, (Harvard Education Press, 2009), and innumerous case studies.

Dr. Weast has been named superintendent of the year in two states. He has twice been awarded North Carolina’s highest honor, the Order of the Long Leaf Pine, for his work on behalf of the state’s children, and has received an award from the Yale School of Child Development for his support of initiatives in early learning, among other awards and honors. Dr. Weast has been an invited speaker to wide-ranging audiences of stakeholders with an interest in public education, and serves on the boards of several community, education, and research institutions.