In June, when the school year was coming to a close -- the program was still not implemented. The principal, the reading supervisor and the Title I director asked their cousins from IT to come to their rescue. Cousin IT identified why the little program could not run. "The servers and computers were the wrong ones." Unfortunately, no funding had been allocated for the hardware upgrade, and the problem could not be solved. The decision-makers had put all their eggs in one basket, and the eggs sat there, and sat there, unhatched. All of the Title I directors, principals, teachers and supervisors could not make the reading program work.
During the long winter, the district had repeatedly cried out to the big bad vendor who sold them the reading program software to come and help them. First, the big bad vendor generated a new million-dollar proposal to install the program in every school. But since the initial program was still unhatched, the three decision-makers said "No, no," to the big bad vendor's proposal. Next, the vendor sent all its technicians, managers, vice presidents and network specialists to the school to analyze the problem. Lo and behold -- the vendor confirmed the problems that Cousin IT had already identified. "The servers and the computers were the wrong ones."
To this day, it remains a mystery why the salesperson who sold the solution to the district or the school staff or IT people did not figure out that the little reading solution would not run because "the servers and the computers were the wrong ones." Several more visits were made by the vice presidents, sales managers and technicians of the big bad vendor, but no one could make the reading solution work.
The ending of this sad tale: The promised gains of the reading solution never occurred. There was wasted effort trying to make the little reading program run. A group of children who could not read lost six months. And another school learned not to trust technology to improve teaching and learning.
LESSONS LEARNED
The moral to the story is not "watch out for the big bad vendor." That would be an easy but unhelpful message. The moral is: partnership begins at home. Decision-making and coordination within the district cannot be loosely coupled.
For technology to work, teamwork has to occur between all the stakeholders within the school and district organization, or the technology will not help the boys and girls learn to read. If the principal, the IT department, the business manager, the reading supervisor and the teachers had worked together from the beginning, this problem could have been avoided.
The problem that this district had in not implementing the promising reading solution is being repeated across the land. The problem is more organizational than technical. It can be avoided by involving all of the internal stakeholders in planning and having the right organizational processes in place.
PROBLEMS OF DECENTRALIZED DECISION-MAKING
Our tale illustrates an all-too-common organizational systems failure. Decision- making in schools is decentralized, or more accurately, loosely coupled. Groups go mostly their own way with limited coordination. The ultimate in loose coupling is site-based management, where schools do their own thing.
As the tale of the reading solution that couldn't illustrates, loosely coupled decision-making and technology are a bad mix. The IT cousins, the schools, the accountability and the purchasing people all have to be engaged in a structured way in decision-making, or the technology won't work. Don't do away with site-based decision-making. Rather, have structured processes where necessary decision-makers participate in purchasing and implementing the technology. In the case of the reading solution, if IT had been involved in the beginning or the purchasing office had insisted that the vendor demonstrate how the reading solution would work in an existing infrastructure, the problem would not have occurred.
FIVE STEPS TO EFFECTIVE INTERNAL PARTNERSHIPS
The five-step program below can help create the internal partnerships and processes necessary for effective classroom technology and avoid "the reading solutions that couldn't."
1. Require a single point of approval for all IT purchases, i.e., the IT director or director of instruction. That individual will be responsible for the overall selection and implementation process of the technology and will assure that the coordination between stakeholders occurs. This will bring some tightening and accountability to the loose coupling process.
2. Include the total cost of funding in the budget, including application, necessary hardware modification and training. Schools often only cost out the purchase of an application without including the other hardware and organizational components such as training, modification of existing hardware necessary for an application to be fully implemented.
3. Assure that technology purchase conforms to district network specifications. There needs to be a formal approval requirement for the vendor, the key stakeholder and the IT department that must accompany the purchase order. Vendors and IT staff need to guarantee that the application will run on existing hardware, or the needed modifications and costs must be stated in the agreement.
4. The solution (curricular, communication or administrative) must support the district's strategic and administrative objectives. Only those applications that address stated objectives of the district such as accountability, staff development or administrative efficiency should be purchased. The technology application should be purchased only if it addresses a stated goal of the district.
5. Require an internal review early in the process for all major applications. Before selecting a strategic application such as reading or student information, all of the stakeholders -- technical and instructional -- should participate in a review. This process will assure that all staff members understand the limitations of their current infrastructure, the factors they must consider in reviewing programs, the additional funding they must allocate to assure success of the program throughout the implementation process, and the requirements they must place on the vendor before and after the sale.
SUMMING IT UP
School systems are just beginning to understand the internal organizational processes and human coordination necessary to make technology work. Much more often than not, a systems failure has a large organizational component. If school systems can get the right organizational processes and internal partnerships in place, there will be a lot more "reading solutions that can" than "reading solutions that couldn't."
