What Can Baseball Teach Us About Managing the Business of Schooling?

ISSUE 73 | JUNE 23, 2006

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This owl has been flying around to listen to education leaders and researchers. I found some worth hearing in Sacramento in April, where ETS and Education Week convened a smart briefing on the state of schooling in California

Most interesting was Marshall "Mike" Smith, who is director of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundations education program. Mr. Smith cautioned those in the room — and this particular room at the Sacramento Chamber of Commerce was filled with higher-ups from the CDE, county offices of education, and the Education Coalition — to listen more closely to their public.

His warnings were based on research that what the public wants from schools is increasingly different from what educators and legislators want from schools. Mr. Smith asserted, "We have got to change our standards to align with real life stuff." One example he offered: the public expects high schools to make sure that all students can read and write, and complete their education in three, four or five years. The reality: a ninth-grader who reads at a sixth-grade level may not get noticed in too many California high schools.

Mr. Smith's feet are on terra firma. Yet he has soared high. He is an esteemed policy leader and researcher, and has served as acting Deputy Secretary of Education in the Clinton administration, and chief of staff to the secretary of education in the Carter administration.

One of his recommendations grabbed this owl's attention: a call for an independent, analytic capacity to help district leaders see where their teachers, their students and their test scores stand relative to others. This was not one more empty recitation of the mantra of data-driven decision-making. As Mr. Smith articulated it, this was a call for a body outside the castle of K-12 to provide this capacity (hence "independent"). You can read about Mike Smith at the Hewlett Foundations Web site.

FROM THE CHAMBER OF COMMERCE TO THE OAKLAND A'S

Could Mr. Smith be thinking of Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland A's? Billy Beane was the subject of Michael Lewis''s remarkable book, "Moneyball." And it is in this book that Billy Beanes power of analytic, independent thinking was in direct conflict with the tradition-bound, intuitive thinking of basebal's old-guard.

Does Billy Beane's predicament seem similar to your own? With one of the lowest budgets in baseball, his owners challenged him to build a championship team. He had no option but to build that team by recruiting talented rookies whom he could afford to hire. (Rookies and younger players, who are like indentured servants, cost a team about one-tenth as much as players who after six years reach free-agency, and can auction themselves off in the free market.) As a result, he had to find a method of identifying young players whose value was invisible to the big clubs. Billy Beane did this by relying on the right statistical measures of performance of college ball players. Other clubs relied heavily on the intuitive judgment of their scouts, the old-guard, and old-fashioned, conventional statistics.

Billy Beane saw an opportunity to use the numbers way of knowing. He saw the power of asking a different question. Where most clubs wanted batters with the highest batting average (conventional wisdom), Billy Beane asked, "Which batters get on base the most?"

Here is why. The game is all about winning. Winning is all about runs. And runs are the result of getting on base, not batting average. It is those who get on base the most who score the most runs. And it is runs that contribute most to a teams ability to win games. Since winning games is the whole idea, Billy Beane looked for players who could get on base. His scouting staff, however, searched for players who had promise, looked like ball players, or had a 98-mile-per-hour fastball. Some of Oakland's scouts resisted using any measures at all.

FROM BASEBALL DIAMONDS TO THE SCHOOL GROUNDS

What questions are you asking? Are you asking old-school questions, like "What can I do to raise my schools' APIs?" This might lead you to identify kids on the bubble between proficiency bands, and lead you to invest more in moving them across a boundary. Or are you asking new-school questions: "Who are the teachers who are enabling students to learn the most in a year?" What value do they add to the kids who sit down in their classrooms at the start of the year? And are they succeeding the most with lower-performing, average-performing or higher-performing students? And what can I do to retain those teachers whose students learn the most in a year? And where can I find more of them?

This owl has heard Jim Cox, the assessment maven, lead seminars for principals several times. Each time he challenges educators who think the game is to raise test scores or APIs. He argues that the challenge for leadership is to create the optimal conditions for teaching and learning. If you do that, he posits, the secondary consequences of higher test scores and APIs will result.

If you believe that teachers matter, are you ready to treat HR with higher respect, and give it the strategic importance it deserves? Are you ready to recruit like Billy Beane? You are in a bare knuckles competition not only against every other district, but other employers who are courting your talent pool. Are you prepared to look at the state of out-of-field teaching in your schools? Are you prepared to go to the collective bargaining table to regain the right to decide where high school and middle school teachers work, and what sections they teach?

RECOMMENDATIONS

Read "Moneyball". This book was published in 2003, so you're likely to find it on your library's shelf. If you prefer to buy it, you can read more about it by going to its page on Amazon.

Read up on value-added assessment, and Bill Sanders' way of viewing it. He's the owl's bet as the Billy Beane of K-12. Hes been profiled most recently by the magazine of the American Association of School Administrators.

Another article in the same issue looks at the method of value-added assessment itself, and is a useful survey of this powerful methodology.

You can find more articles about Bill Sanders, and the Tennessee value-added assessment system, on the School Wise Press Web site.

Read up on the Hewlett Foundation's major research initiative. It is designed to inform the upcoming debate over the cost of an adequate education, and help shape legislation over the years ahead.

Browse the work of Jim Cox. He and his wife have formed JK Education Associates, and if you are lucky, youre among the many who have studied with him at La Verne University or attended his seminars. You can find him at:

And his occasional column for parents appears on the School Wise Press Web site.

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