Subject: System Dynamics and School Effectiveness Research

Posted by Peter Robertson on 10/11/2004

Message:

I have been somewhat involved in systems thinking and system dynamics modeling over the past 13 years – first teaching at a high school that taught a modeling and simulation course using Stella (Blair in Silver Spring Maryland), then while a management consulting at McKinsey & Company building a people-flow model to guide welfare reform-related resource planning in an urban area (Cleveland, Ohio) in 1998. I was also part of a (largely failed) effort to build a stronger system dynamics modeling practice at the firm.



I am now on leave from my job as Chief Information Officer of the Cleveland Municipal School District (~70,000 students) to complete my doctorate in Educational Leadership at Teachers College, Columbia. I want to do my dissertation on using system dynamics modeling and the resource-based view of organizations to create a better understanding of how to create and sustain school effectiveness.



If I am successful, I intend to press forward with it, working to get microworlds integrated into the work of training principals and other educational managers.



Below is a very brief summary of my idea, and I am looking for help on the following 4 sets of questions (or any others you think I should be asking):



Where is my topic similar enough to pre-existing work that I need to understand and build on that work, and where does it appear to travel new ground?
Who is currently doing good work in this area with whom I should communicate and make sure I’m not re-inventing their wheel-in-progress?
Any particular methodological issues or other potential pitfalls jump out at you (other than those I will find in a thorough review of the literature)?
What can I learn from other efforts and the reception they’ve received to maximize the chances of my work making a contribution to the field?


I do not expect immediate answers to these questions – only a sense of whether you’d be interested in a dialogue.



OVERVIEW OF PROPOSED TOPIC:



This study argues that school effects and effectiveness research has been limited by the lack of adequate frameworks within which to build theory. Further, it suggests that lack has been exacerbated by the overly linear implications of multi-level modeling, its dominant analytical technology. This study suggests the field could benefit from the use of “resource-based view” organizational theory as a framework for theory building, and from the use of system dynamics modeling as a technology for analysis.



This study will be a dissertation-scale effort to test this argument. Specifically, it proposes to build a system dynamics model of the human resource system at work in urban K-5 elementary schools. The model building effort will draw upon relevant research findings, organizational theory literature, and system dynamics methods. The central questions the study will address are:



Can a model be built using existing research findings, relevant data from a larger urban school district, and the judgment of expert administrative practitioners that can pass standard expert-validation tests of system dynamics models?
Is that model sufficiently generalizable across different schools to adequately explain outcomes (or the presence of school effects and effectiveness attributes related to outcomes)?


Positive answers to these and related questions will suggest that resource-based view theory and system dynamics methods hold promise as a path forward for school effects and effectiveness research.



This message is from Peter A. Robertson



Please reply to peter.robertson@post.harvard.edu,

Follow Ups:

System Dynamics and School Effectiveness Research - Gary Hirsch 10/13/2004