Education Office Fails to Alter Its DNA

he Education Department's Office of Elementary and Secondary Education (OESE), which provides funding to states and local school districts, is in the middle of a muddle. The quality of services at the agency has deteriorated under a restructuring that was pushed forward by the Clinton administration's reinvention efforts and rushed into implementation in 1994 amid the partisan politics that ensued after Republicans took control of Congress. OESE's attempt to fix management problems through training has been ineffective.

As part of the new configuration, Thomas Payzant, the assistant secretary in charge of OESE, replaced the traditional programs, divisions and branches with a decentralized organization.

OESE administers seven programs: Goals 2000, enacted in conjunction with the restructuring effort; Compensatory Education (Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Schools Act); Safe and Drug Free Schools; Migrant Education; School Improvement; Impact Aid; and Indian Education. The agency distributes approximately $13 billion annually, primarily through grants. (Title I distributed more than $7.9 billion to 14,000 school districts.) Employees' primary work used to be determining applicant eligibility and entitlement as well as monitoring compliance. Most employees worked on only limited segments of a program, and some made visits to the field.

The restructuring plan realigned program staffs into teams. Each program retained a core team of employees, and others were assigned to one of 10 cross-program regional teams that serve specific groups of states. Payzant also created cross-cutting teams, organized by functional area, such as professional development, technology and integrated services.

The guiding principle of the restructuring was to cultivate a staff that was customer-oriented and responsive to educational needs.

One Face to the Customer

Goals 2000, which provides funds for planning at state education agencies, was the cornerstone of the agency's restructuring plan, along with systemic reform and reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary School Act. The goal was to help states consider all OESE programs in their planning processes. Most OESE employees would continue to process applications for individual programs, but they would also assist state officials with cross-program advice. This concept of providing one face to the customer was a worthy one.

The assumption was that staff would provide technical assistance in the systemic reform of a state's educational system. Agency leaders acknowledged that employees would not be able to fulfill this role at first. They would need to learn a lot more about OESE programs other than those in which they had served, and would require considerable training in planning and systemic reform.

The decentralized structure was supposed to improve customer service and cut the number of supervisors by coordinating field reviews. Combining resources would allow people to cover for each other after they had been cross-trained, and allow school superintendents to work with a single OESE employee on a variety of issues.

But doubts lingered about what was expected of regional team members and whether OESE employees could handle their new roles as technical consultants on education planning. The agency had neither job assessments nor job models. Most of the Impact Aid program staff, for example, knew too little about their own program to represent it in the field. So, how could they possibly represent seven programs?

OESE's restructuring was plagued by problems. Among them:

• Teams never became teams in anything other than name.
• The roles, functions and responsibilities were confusing and defied resolution.
• A long-standing distrust of management inhibited change.
• The department failed to deal with diversity problems it had swept under the rug for years, even though diversity was a stated priority under the restructuring.
• And, most significantly, OESE's knowledge base had been shrinking for years, and allowing employees to pick their jobs during the restructuring exacerbated the situation. As a consequence, staffs lacked the expertise to carry out reforms.

The fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of the way OESE does business was a high-risk effort that could not be accomplished in a short time by merely changing the organization chart. Unfortunately, agency leaders failed to understand that this type of change requires an institutional realignment of personnel, incentive programs, information technology and decision-making processes.

The Training Fix

OESE has suffered a significant loss in professional expertise-a situation made worse by the restructuring. For example, positions in the Education Program series once required a college degree with minimal coursework in education and related fields. As employees ascended to GS-14, graduate study was required, including a master's and a doctoral degree or equivalents. The job series consisted of 61 pages of description, standards and criteria.

In contrast, the OESE restructuring allowed voluntary job changes based on a few pages of generic position descriptions with no standards or criteria. Often OESE had to send more than a dozen employees to the field to complete an integrated review of a state plan because individual employees lacked the specialized expertise necessary to conduct the reviews.

When something went wrong with the restructuring effort or when teams failed to function as teams, the problem was said to be lack of training. When roles in the new structure caused confusion about what was expected of employees, more training was prescribed. When employees lacked knowledge about OESE programs, someone would call for more cross-training. When too few black employees were in higher grades, someone would assert they should be placed in high positions and trained to perform at that level. Training was the reflex response-the universal remedy for every problem.

Training is often considered the only solution for a performance need. However, the correlation between training and performance is minimal. In their book, Transfer of Training (Addison-Wesley, 1992) Mary Broad and John Newstrom say, "Most of [the] investment in organizational training and development is wasted because the knowledge and skills gained in training (well over 80 percent, by some estimates) are not fully applied by those employees on the job." Authors Dana and James Robinson sum it up in their book, Performance Consulting: Moving Beyond Training (Berret-Koehler, 1995): "Traditional training approaches in support of performance change are not working, primarily because they are not system-oriented in their approach to resolving performance problems."

With training uppermost in their minds, OESE officials made a number of attempts to resolve the restructuring problems. But their approach disregarded individual learning needs. For example, the agency established a professional development team to identify training needs, but agency leaders mostly ignored the list of recommendations. Also, OESE's Training and Development Center provided training based on team members' perceived needs, but no one identified desired team outcomes or barriers to performance.

The training profession has been changing for more than 30 years. The focus has moved to performance improvement-what people do. This holistic view concerns goals, design and management of the total organization, the work processes and individual job performance. Front-end assessment is critical, and barriers to desired performance must be identified. This approach relies on multiple solutions, and training may not even be among them.

Organizational DNA

OESE failed to recast its goals for a variety of reasons. Top leaders are responsible for knowing their organization's internal character, which is largely determined by the competence of its personnel. The shift from a single-program monitoring role to providing cross-cutting technical assistance in the systemic reform of the nation's schools requires different competencies and organizational character.

In a word, the agency never changed its DNA-its genes of distinctive competence, ways of doing business and culture. Consequently, its efforts to reform itself were a disaster.

Bruce Reinhart, now retired, spent 10 years at OESE and previously was a consultant to federal agencies. He wrote The Middle of a Muddle: How NOT to Reinvent Government (Manta Press, 1999).