MMSD’s Five Clouds

Strategic plans are always a waste of time and resources.

Because they are always written by committees they read like what committees write. They say nothing. And often at great length. Nobody ever looks at a strategic plan after it is finished. Employees hate these exercises because they see them for what they are and managers like them for the same reason. Because what they are are distractions. A strategic plan never deals with any real underlying concerns about a workplace and it never provides concrete clarity about the organization’s basic goal or an individual employee’s role in it.

The only people who benefit from these things are the consultants who churn them out, no doubt using boilerplate phrases recycled from client to client.

So, the only good thing you can say about the strategic plan coughed up by the Madison schools last month is that it is mercifully short, at only 11 pages of fog. Last month, the Madison school district revealed its five-year strategic plan, two years in the making. They essentially puffed up five clouds. Like all of these things, this plan is so vague as to be ephemeral. It’s a lot of nothing.

Here are the plan’s five guiding principles:

• Future-ready student experiences.

• Organizational alignment and improvement.

• Professional excellence and talent development.

• Culture of connectedness and well-being.

• Family, community and industry partnerships.

This is what you get when you pay $240,000 to a consultant from North Carolina. If you have the slightest idea of what any of those word salads actually mean please write in below and educate us.

Worse than what the plan says (which is essentially nothing), is what it doesn’t say. Not a word about student achievement. So, I’ve taken the liberty (for less than $240,000 and in under two years) to take each of their five principles and tweak them into something concrete. Here goes.

• Future-ready student experiences. Here’s how a student can be ready for the future: they can learn to read and write at grade level or better. We’ll measure that through standardized test scores and hold ourselves accountable for the results.

• Organizational alignment and improvement. We’ll align everything behind the goal of student achievement as measured primarily by test scores.

• Professional excellence and talent development. All professional development opportunities will be evaluated around the question: how will this improve measurable student achievement?

• Culture of connectedness and well-being. Okay, I’m stumped. I don’t have a clue what the hell this means. But since they brought up culture, let’s try this: We’ll create a culture of politeness and respect. Respect for teachers and respect among students for each other.

• Family, community and industry partnerships. Very important. Most of the MMSD students who are not learning come from troubled families. Student achievement is a product created by things both outside and inside the classrooms. It’s important to recognize that and to work on structures that support learning outside of MMSD. So, how do we do that? Now this is something worth creating an entire concrete and detailed plan around.

Again and again this school board and superintendent waste taxpayer money — on an enormous building spree done before they did an attendance area boundary review, on huge raises for the board, on new logos and marketing plans and now on this exercise in speciousness.

Madison is a community that deeply values education. Why does it settle for management and leadership that is this bad?