Putting the Horse Before the Cart: A County Office of Education’s Journey to Support School Districts in System-Level Problem Analysis

Abstract

In recent years, California overhauled its basic structure and funding system for Lead Education Agencies (LEA). This movement provided LEAs with more local flexibility and converted the county office of education role to the primary accountability and support partner. Kern County Superintendent of Schools (KCSOS) utilized this restructuring to transform the way it provided support to school districts. To begin, KCSOS hired a new team of five former district and site administrators who would later become known as the Learning Network (LN). In the early design work, a focus on continuous improvement emerged and two key questions quickly materialized: (1) How does the county office of education make complex problems visible for district leadership teams, so prospective strategies are high leverage and effective? And, (2) how does problem analysis lend itself to stronger systems of continuous improvement?

Drawing from research about what systemic problems are, why they are important, and how to identify and understand them, I will argue that deliberate and rigorous problem analysis is the first and necessary step in continuous improvement. In this Capstone, I describe my efforts to (1) develop a curriculum guide for facilitating system-level problem analysis, (2) create and implement a pilot institute to apply the curriculum, and (3) meaningfully engage the members of the LN team in the first two endeavors.

This Capstone reveals two key insights: (1) organizations counseling others in problem analysis need to model and measure these efforts in their own work; and (2) people learn the how behind problem analysis through experiencing processes and protocols.