Aligning Strategy With Vision

Just recently, I came upon an interesting post detailing the importance of being strategic, being clear on your the goal and aligning activities with it. The article shows one example how an organization, one many of us know and love, may be conducting activities that are not aligned with what it is actually trying to accomplish. In fact, the post argues that their activities may be detrimental to effecting the change they seek!

The organization is TFA (Teach For America). The author, Dr. Jim Horn, is no light weight, being a professor of Ed Leadership at Cambridge and having many years of experience in k-12 education.

TFA's mission as noted on their website is to "end educational inequity."

Dr. Jim Horn expresses his frustration with TFA and articulates their difficutly in aligning their strategy with their mission.

"This year TFA has an operating budget in excess of $100 million, net assets of over $120 million, and a work force of over 6,000 bright, energetic, and, yes, clueless recruits engaged in on-the-job training in some of America's most desperately-poor, low-achieving schools, where children, by the way, need most of all (beyond the need to end their poverty) the most highly qualified, experienced teachers with deep knowledge of the subjects they teach and knowledge of how to teach those subjects."

"First and foremost, TFA leaves unchallenged the urban reality of schools that are largely or entirely segregated by income and race, preferring instead to focus on interventions that do not challenge the poverty that is the root of test score gaps to begin with. Not unlike the vast majority of education reforms of the past century that have been divorced from social forces that are at work in perpetuating poverty, TFA focuses narrowly on changing instruction and on altering the organization and content of the child's mind as the ready remedy for poor schools. In so doing, TFA barricades itself from the root cause of weak test scores, which is poverty, while necessitating, it would seem, a draconian kind of pedagogical treatment that we might expect of 19th Century missionaries in a heathen land. Ira Socol, in fact, refers to TFA as a colonial missionary project."

See the full entry here

Contributed by Meyer Laniado President and Founder of JSET