Why State Mandates Don't Work.

Abstract

While exercising authority may bring a degree of compliance, Mr. Kelly argues that only leadership can bring excellence. AS A REGULAR reader of Education Week have observed that every issue is replete with articles and references to state mandates. Since the publication of A Nation at Risk in 1983, every state in the union has been attempting to mandate excellence in its schools. Indeed, the practice of issuing mandates is even older in some states. What's more, the federal government has also placed many mandates on the states, especially in the areas of compensatory education and special education. know of no one in education who will claim that either of these two programs is now closer to excellence than the rest of public education. W. Edwards Deming observed that at least 95% of the chronic problems in organizations have structural or systemic causes. These problems stem not from the workers in the organization, but from the structure of the system itself -- from its policies, practices, rules, and so on. After at least 15 years of mandates in 50 states that have not succeeded in bringing excellence to our schools, it's time to look for those chronic structural problems. Mandates are effective when they call for compliance in the form of reasonable and necessary behaviors. The mandate to stop for red lights is sound. Reasonable people perceive it as practical, doable, and necessary for the common good, and they generally comply. Compliance is all that is necessary for such rules to be effective. When mandates are perceived to be unreasonable, impossible, ineffective, or otherwise inappropriate, they are felt to be coercive. In my work as an educational trainer, I've asked the following question of thousands of educators, parents, and students: What do you do when someone tries to make you do something you don't want to do, tries to force you to do what they want? The answer is always the same: I resist. Not only do we resist coercion, we also resent it and resent its source. Coercion breeds hostility and defiance. If the coercer is strong enough, we will give as much compliance as necessary to avoid harm, but we will not commit ourselves to the goal of the coercion. We will always try, at least covertly, to subvert the efforts of the coercer. Because coercion may bring about a degree of compliance, we are sometimes misled into thinking that it is producing the result we desire. If that result is excellence, this is clearly a mistake. Individual excellence is a function of choice and commitment and never a result of coercion. The only person in the world who can make me excellent is me. We can easily verify the truth of this fact from our own experience. Think of a person of your acquaintance whom you view as excellent, as a truly outstanding human being. We all know such people. Who made that person excellent? The answer will always be the same: that person made him- or herself excellent. Nobody can make anyone else excellent. If that were not the case, we all would have become excellent a long time ago. Parents would have made all their children excellent. Teachers would have made all their students excellent. Principals would have made all their teachers excellent. And, of course, state education departments would have made all public schools excellent. The only definition of excellence that know of that is consistent with Deming's idea of quality as an unending, continuous process is Excellence is the habit of self-improvement. Certainly the excellent people we all know share this habit. The same is true for organizations. No external force or authority can make an organization excellent. Organizational excellence is a function of leadership, not authority. And the role of leadership is to persuade an organization's members to commit themselves to becoming excellent. To the extent that a leader relies on authority, he is at best pursuing a degree of compliance, not excellence. …

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