The State Education Agency: The Chief Learning Organization - Lessons From the Rhode Island Department of Education

Abstract

In a post Race to the Top and No Child Left Behind environment, state education agencies (SEA’s) play an increasing role in influencing the policy and practices of schools and districts. Yet, the challenges of SEA’s are monumental. American students continue to be outperformed by their international peers. Schools and districts across America are struggling to make any headway on the persistent achievement gaps for poor and minority students. The system is in crisis, and the solutions are unknown. To meet this challenge of imagination, ingenuity, and learning, SEA’s must pivot from a predominantly compliance-oriented, highly bureaucratic culture to a more nimble learning-oriented culture. The central question is how can the SEA become a learning organization? Drawing from research on enabling learning in organizations, developing effective teams, and promoting adult development, I argue that by developing an internal learning-oriented team that leads the organization’s efforts to learn and by engaging with statewide stakeholders- defined as educators, parents, business, community leaders, and students in the challenging of assumptions, the SEA will shift its orientation to learning. In this capstone, I describe my efforts at the Rhode Island Department of Education (RIDE) to support this pivot to a learning organization through the design and facilitation of a community-driven, design-thinking based strategic planning process that asks stakeholders to learn from each other, national experts, and RIDE staff and to parley that learning into a collaboratively defined statewide vision and strategy for public education. Furthermore, I describe RIDE’s efforts to learn from and enact this strategic plan. Analysis of this capstone reveal three key insights: (1) taking the time to build broad-based support for a statewide educational strategy matters greatly to building legitimacy and long-term sustainability; (2) despite their traditional compliance-oriented roles, SEA’s can form nimble learning oriented teams that impel learning throughout the entire organization; and (3) SEA’s can best shift their role through a open dialogue of continuous improvement that happens both within the agency and across the state.