A decision made in a school district this year produces its actual result somewhere between eight and fifteen years from now, in the working lives of people who are currently in the sixth grade.
Nobody who made the decision will be in position to be credited or blamed. The board will have turned over twice, the superintendent will have moved on, and the connection between the choice and the outcome will be untraceable.
What the lag does
Three consequences, and they shape everything else in this chapter.
Feedback does not arrive. The mechanism that builds judgment — deciding and finding out — is broken by a decade-long delay. Leaders in these institutions can operate for a career without ever learning whether their approach worked, which is why the field is unusually prone to fashion.
Proxies substitute for outcomes. Since the real result is unavailable, institutions measure what is measurable now: test scores, completion rates, enrolment. These are not worthless and they are not the thing, and an institution managed to its proxies will optimise them at the expense of the thing.
The incentive runs short. A leader whose tenure is five years and whose results appear in twelve is being asked to make decisions whose benefit accrues to a successor. The stewardship problem, in an acute form.
The same structure in workforce institutions
Community colleges, apprenticeship programmes, and training partnerships operate on the same lag with an additional complication.
They are attempting to supply a labour market whose requirements they must forecast years in advance, and the forecast is frequently made from what employers say they need now — which is a description of the present shortage rather than of the future one.
A programme designed around today’s stated need will produce its first graduates three years out, into conditions that have moved. That is not an argument against building them. It is an argument for building them around durable capabilities rather than around a specific current vacancy.
Everybody has standing
A distinctive feature of these institutions: nearly every adult in the community has direct experience of the system and a legitimate view about it.
Nobody argues with the water district about hydrology. Everybody has been to school, has children in one, or employs its graduates, and each of those is a real basis for a position.
Which means these bodies operate under a level of public engagement that other institutions do not face, and the communication obligations in the civic chapter apply with more force: reasoning stated, criteria explained, testimony genuinely heard.
A district that decides well and explains poorly will be treated as having decided badly.
What a leader can actually do about the lag
Write down the reasoning and the expectation. What was decided, what it was expected to produce, and by when. A successor eleven years out then has something to evaluate against, which is the only mechanism by which these institutions learn anything.
Find the shorter signals. Not substitutes for the outcome. Intermediate indicators that move within a year or two and are causally connected: whether students are completing the sequence, whether employers are taking the graduates, whether the people who left are returning.
Ask the people who went through it. Five years after leaving, former students and programme graduates can say what was useful and what was not. Almost nobody asks them, and it is the closest thing to a real outcome measure available.
Protect what works from the next enthusiasm. An institution with weak feedback is highly susceptible to adopting whatever is current, and the accumulated weight of unmaintained initiatives is described in the change chapter.
What this chapter covers
Leading a school system under those conditions. The skills gap as employers and educators each describe it, and the part of it that is not a training problem at all. Building apprenticeship and training arrangements that survive their first difficult year. And the question underneath all of it in this state, which is who stays and why.
The chapter addresses the craft of leading these institutions. It takes no position on contested questions of education policy, which are properly settled by the boards, legislatures, and communities that hold the authority for them.
Edited by Patrick J. Wolf, PhD