LET'S TALK ABOUT "CONTINUOUS INNOVATION" INSTEAD OF "CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT"

I am beginning to understand the value of both history in education and philosophical perspectives on education.  This is leading me to consider how both play out in my professional context and how my feelings about working within data-driven models.

 Lately, I have been noticing my reaction to funding in data-driven models.   I am finding the concept of “continuous improvement” to be professionally frustrating.  

Don’t get me wrong… I believe in innovation and improvement.  I am just irritated that data is becoming a situation of the tail wagging the dog, instead of the reverse. 

These recent studies in the history and philosophy of education are helping me to better articulate my argument, which is that data is important, but we are so busy trying to achieve data results that we are not really having the level of innovation that we clearly want and need. 

In trying to achieve data results, the approach gets designed only to show these types of improvements.  This often results in doing things that don’t make operational or logical sense in order to see the numbers go in the direct that they need to in order to prove effectiveness.  This translates to feelings of “getting very good at playing the game”… but if the game is a bad game, then why are we trying to get better at it.   In social services,  there are many subjectives.  There are changes at the local community level that might not be considered at the macro level that cannot be addressed when achieving targets and data check points is the only focus.

Continuous improvement, in the context of data, is a total crock.  If data is expected to continuously improve, eventually targets will be hundreds of times their original set point OR you have to hold back good results so as to avoid not going higher than outstanding results in the future.  It is a game no one can win. 

To this point, I was reading a book recently  (Charle Dugig’s “Better, Faster, Smarter”) and there was a very interesting chapter within the book that discussed how some of the worst performing schools in America (the writer’s context) were able to use data to transform their schools into effective centres of education.   Dugig’s message wasn’t about simply having the data, in fact, data by itself was often completely ignored.   What seemed to be the difference was teachers INTERACTING with the data.    The observation from this exercise was that teachers who manually work with classroom data start seeing patterns and become able to devise plans for supplementation that can actually change the data.  Innovation, in this way, becomes not about having access to data, but having professionals who can USE the data to innovate with students, individually and in groups.  

This is where philosophy becomes and history becomes important because it points more toward values and the human factor, not just the data.  What we should be teaching and why we are teaching it has value beyond test scores and success measures.

So, if you want to talk with me about “Continuous Innovation” then, I am all ears.  If you want to discuss “Continuous Improvement” then you need to apply some philosophic and historical perspective to data discussions.  Otherwise, I will simply become good at playing a data-game, rather than focusing on innovation.

I will end with a question….

In what ways can education and social services build compelling arguments using philosophy and history to lead to innovation, beyond data-driven continuous improvement?