The 2009 Superintendents’ Strategy Summit marked the DMC’s fifth anniversary and was held in Miami, Florida on January 14-16, 2009. Nearly fifty district superintendents gathered at the Coral Gables Hyatt to discuss strategies for leading their districts through this period of fiscal crisis. Despite the tremendous additional pressure of the current economic crisis, district leadership needs to remain focused on student achievement through strategic planning, cost efficiency, leadership capacity, and communications. DMC provided analytical frameworks and exercises, and our distinguished guest speakers provided a variety of perspectives and advice in managing through the challenges school districts now face.
DMC members heard first from two former DMC superintendents who have transitioned to the private sector and who related insights about how their companies’ approaches to the economic climate could also work for school districts. Dr. Joseph Wise, the Chief Education Officer of Edison Learning and former superintendent in Duval County Florida, centered his talk on the use of technology to enable major shifts in the cost structure for delivering curriculum and instruction. Dr. Clayton Wilcox, Scholastic’s Vice President for Education and Corporate Relations and former superintendent in Pinellas County Florida, emphasized the longer-term strategy of maintaining and strengthening corporate relationships in preparation for better times by, for example, providing new products and services to support districts’ existing investments.
The sessions on Thursday extended the comparison with strategic leadership in the private sector while probing the superintendents to apply the lessons more specifically to their own districts. Drawing a parallel to the organizational changes that school districts may be contemplating or executing today, DMC Managing Director John Kim guided the discussion of a Harvard Business School case study, Ericsson: Leading in Times of Change, about the Swedish telecommunications giant’s management challenges through three phases of cost reductions. There were many takeaways applicable to school districts, including the importance of patience and the need for different leadership styles at each phase of reinvention.
Just as Ericsson executives underwent a process of clarifying their core functions and making cuts accordingly, so the superintendents reflected on their districts’ objectives and ranked cost saving approaches. Nick Morgan, DMC’s Managing Consultant led the group in a discussion around school district tactics in response to the economic downturn. Divided into five groups and asked to assign areas of focus to a DMC prioritization framework, the superintendents avowed their commitment to safeguarding academic rigor and cutting as far away from the classroom as possible, but at the same time investigating discrete ways to use people and technology more efficiently and, perhaps, for additional revenue through the innovative use of profit centers.
In the afternoon session, guest speaker Dr. Hugh Courtney, Associate Dean of the University of Maryland School of Business, provided an analytic structure to query the degree of uncertainty in which our decisions take place. Many strategic decisions will lack explicit plans and must rely instead on scenario planning with more discrete possible or even uncertain outcomes. Because recessions should be times not only to survive but also to prepare to thrive in the future, Courtney concentrated less on specific cost-cutting mechanisms and more on the need for strategic planning.
By subdividing highly uncertain, long-range issues of strategic planning, it can be possible to move forward with more manageable and precise decisions. This was the message that DMC Senior Advisor Nate Levenson’s presentation on special education exemplified. Levenson, who reformed special education as Superintendent of Arlington, Massachusetts, explained that special education presents a rare opportunity for simultaneously improving service quality and reducing cost. Levenson shared a 10-step process that he employed in Arlington that resulted in significant academic gains while substantially reducing overall operating cost.
DMC members also drew on the situations in their districts to illustrate ways of grounding strategic decisions. In Fairfax County, Virginia, Superintendent Jack Dale shared his approach to closing an anticipated $200 million deficit through community involvement and participatory budgeting processes. On the opposite end of the spectrum in terms of district size, Susan Lusi, Superintendent of Portsmouth, Rhode Island, shared her experiences managing through a multi-year deficit through a broad-based strategic planning initiative that has formulated a set of principles to steer the district as they have made deep cuts.
DMC Managing Consultant Nick Morgan concluded the conference by examining other specific steps, made easier by the recession, to promote the areas of management focus. In the area of strategic planning and cost efficiency, districts should revisit zero-based budgeting as a tool to justify programs for each fiscal year. Echoing Dr. Courtney’s presentation, districts should also increase their scenario planning activities, especially for events of medium to high impact and medium probability. Planning should take a systemic economic viewpoint that synthesizes financial benefit as well as time savings, operational efficiency, and improved quality.
Recession can foster the second area of management focus, leadership development, by allowing more opportunities for activity improvement and scenario planning teams. Finally, as districts enhance cost efficiency and grow leadership capacity, it is vital that they communicate the changes to their constituencies, particularly those that have the greatest potential to harm or help the district priorities. By determining the market segment to be addressed and the objective to be conveyed, communications can become a strategic tool.
“DMC exposes school district leaders to the best new management ideas and most innovative practitioners from around the country. For forward-thinking districts, DMC is simply the best value for developing high-impact organizational leaders.”
Arlene Ackerman, Superintendent
School District of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
~195,000 students
Pay-for-Performance Programs: Strategies, Structures, and Funding
By Nicholas P. Morgan & Daniel Schiff
