At no other time in history have we asked for so much from our public schools. Yet at the same time, those same schools have seen funding continue to reduce. Today, public schools are a long way from simply providing basic education in reading, writing, and arithmetic. Even beyond advanced 21st century student outcomes, our
schools now provide health and social services, nutrition programs with up to two meals a day, transportation services to and from schools, and after school care, to only name a few. Many of the issues discussed in education are placed in the classroom – with teachers, testing, and technology. However, in it’s most basic form the issues come down to one – having the resources needed to improve. Public schools must do more with less.
The reality is that efficiency in education is beyond the classroom teacher to manage. Even the smallest public school system has high numbers of policies and procedures for activities outside of instruction. These policies and procedures have often been in place for years and are often loaded with “waste” – meaning that they may require excessive amounts of time, money, material, and energy to complete thus driving costs higher and reducing the hours available for critical work.
Opportunities for improving efficiency in education lie buried in these policies and procedures. Often the policies and procedures are so common to those doing the work every day, they may not be able to see the “wasteful” activity for what it is. Instead people often have a tendency to overlook frustrating or redundant activity by explaining it away as “the way we’ve always done it”. Being able to see and understand these “wastes” is the first step in being able to do more with less.
Examples of Wastes:
▪ Manual processes that could be eliminated, reduced, or automated with existing “on-hand” technology
▪ Too much paper being used due to manual processes which in turn increases hard costs (copiers/printers, toner/ink, repair and upkeep) and also increases the soft costs of time loss (e.g. the time for teachers and staff to deal with paper jams, add toner/ink, hunt and search for supplies, etc.)
▪ Redundant and/or non-standardized activities — not sharing best practices from school to school, from department to department within the same district
▪ Buying too little — not using full purchasing power to negotiate prices/contracts
▪ Buying too much resulting in tying up cash unnecessarily and increasing costs to store and inventory items while increasing opportunity for obsolesces or spoilage
▪ Abandoned facilities no longer used by the district that have not been re-purposed, and remain the financial responsibility of the district
▪ A lack of management systems to standardize and document procedures, measure and monitor the performance of those procedures, and drive the continuous improvement of those procedures
Efficiency in education comes from removing these and other “wastes”. This may not sound easy. It does require a level of understanding of tools and approaches that have not historically been used in public education — Lean Six Sigma. Those that that take this approach are often surprised at how easy these tools work and have applied them to achieve outstanding results opening up resources of time and money to reapply more directly to improving student achievement.