Wisconsin Wow
Here’s some “wow” from Wisconsin district Menomonee Falls and its pragmatic-yet-visionary superintendent Patricia Fagan Greco¹:
😇 Suspensions are down 62% in five years
💪 Worker’s compensation costs have dropped from $200,000 a year to $26,000 a year
🎉 $100,000 saved on cleaning – enough to save 3.5 at-risk teacher positions.
The stats read like one of those “which one doesn’t belong” questions on the SAT. But all three stem from a common initiative.
First, a bit of context…
Initiative Fatigue
As a 20- or 30-something, it would be understandable to think of education reform as a debate that began in 2001 with No Child Left Behind. In reality, American education has been a battleground of ideas for nearly two centuries.
Teach For America was foreshadowed by the National Teacher Corps of the 60s, value-added measurement echoes scientific management theories of the 20s, and the fix-it-yesterday urgency of the reform movement has been going strong since the 80s.²
It’s not uncommon for educators today to feel fatigued by the pace of new initiatives. Against this backdrop, Menomenee Falls has done something inspirational.
Let’s Just Improve
The district hasn’t picked a cure-all solution. They’ve empowered their stakeholders to solve problems. That’s a truly revolutionary idea, and the results speak for themselves.
It’s human nature to set big, aggressive goals. Menomenee Falls has taken a more subtle approach, striving instead for continuous, measurable improvement on metrics that matter.
To drive continuous improvement, no change has been too big or small to make. They’ve changed their district budgeting process from hours-long annual meetings to more iterative discussions every 45 days. They even analyzed worker’s compensation claims, making it possible to address a surprisingly common problem: teachers falling while decorating their rooms.
The building-level improvements have been even more impressive. When staff at Benjamin Franklin Elementary analyzed nurse visits, they saw student injuries in October had doubled from the year prior. It immediately made sense to the staff — they had combined with another school and needed to reteach playground rules and improve supervision.
Student injuries dropped 50% the next month.
People Power
Not only has Menomenee Falls empowered their people, they’ve cast a broad definition of who “their people” are – from teachers to custodians, everyone has a role in the district’s improvement.
As Superintendent Greco points out,
Half of our staff are not teachers: they are bus drivers, cafeteria workers, teacher assistants, custodians… The culture in the buildings has shifted because half of our employees felt for the first time they were important to the organization.
It’s not just district leadership who feels this way, but most importantly the teachers who work alongside these important school stakeholders. Jeff Stollenwerk, a learning and improvement specialist at Menomenee Falls High:
Our custodial staff got a standing ovation from teachers, and that never would have happened before.
Teachers and janitors have been working more closely together, collaborating to have furniture straightened out before cleanings – saving 5 to 10 minutes per class – and monitoring health data to prevent the spread of flu with rapid response deep cleanings.
Pretty genius.
Can It Scale?
We’re always asking whether a given intervention can scale up to impact more students. What’s amazing about the successes at Menomenee Falls is that it’s not a specific intervention that needs scaling — it’s a mindset of identifying, measuring, and solving problems.
The real question is: which district will be next?
[1] This article is based on Tinkering Toward a Better Education System: A Wisconsin District Goes All In on ‘Continuous Improvement’ Strategies, appearing in Education Week on Feb. 7, 2018.
[2] See The Teacher Wars by Dana Goldstein for an engaging history of the teaching profession.
