McKinsey Education Report

I would like to comment on Dr. Holliday’s article titled “I-SS Redoubles its Efforts” that was printed on Feb. 18^th in the Statesville Record and Landmark. In the article Dr. Holliday talks extensively about the McKinsey Education Report. I have had a chance to study that report, and although I agree with some of Dr. Holliday’s statements, I feel that he missed the true focus of the report. Dr. Holliday refers to the recent achievements that have been made in the Iredell - Statesville schools but does not give proper credit to the teachers in the system. The main emphasis of the McKinsey report is that “The quality of an education system rests on the quality of its teachers.” Therefore those achievements are due to the quality and dedication of all of the I-SS teachers and their efforts to make sure that students have many opportunities to excel. In his article, Dr. Holliday does talk about recent efforts of I-SS to enhance its recruitment efforts in order to hire the best candidates. However he then goes on to dismiss the efforts of most of the teachers by saying that over 80% have been with the system for more than three years and thus must be retrained. Does their education and experience mean nothing to Dr. Holliday? The McKinsey Report does stress the need for professional development, but true professional development enhances the abilities that the teachers already possess rather than replacing those abilities. What Dr. Holliday is really saying is that he wants all teachers to march in step with his version of the Baldrige system. The Baldrige system does have some good points such as continuous improvement, but to say it is the only method that works is against all sound educational pedagogy. The McKinsey Report states that students have different strengths and weaknesses and teachers must be encouraged to select the appropriate instructional methods to help them learn. Teachers also need to have exposure to variety of learning opportunities. Dr Holliday states that teachers are not sent to conferences unless they are presenting. Is Dr. Holliday afraid those teachers might learn something other than his precious Baldrige dogma? Dr. Holliday recently criticized a group of science teachers who, at their own expense, went to a one-day science conference. He said that you couldn’t learn anything at a one-day conference. If Dr. Holliday had bothered to ask any of those teachers he would have found out just how much they learned at that conference. I-SS has put instructional facilitators in place at each school but their main job is to force feed the Baldrige method and its myriad of acronyms to each of the teachers. Did you know that OFI means Opportunity For Improvement? Just imagine how much more improvement there could be if the instructional facilitators were truly allowed to facilitate instruction. All the time and money that I-SS spends on the implementation of the Baldrige method would be much better spent on sending teachers to conferences and enabling them to share ideas with their students and colleagues.

This post written by Paul Klaene