Mission Statements II — Examples

My mission statement

As I wrote the section about mission statements, it occurred to me that it might be useful for me to write my own mission statement for this blog. So here’s my mission statement for the part of the blog about school improvement. There's a short version first and a longer version follows.

The short version

The purpose of this blog is to describe strategies and tools that can enable schools to make dramatic, not slight, improvements and to make them consistently, year after year. As a result, school leaders will be able to initiate successful school improvement efforts and students will be more likely to become proficient by measures their schools find appropriate.

The long version (I had to write this one to be able to write the short one.)

Who am I?

I am a mostly retired high school principal. I’ve spent over 40 years in schools in varying capacities — teacher, computer center manager, program evaluator, researcher, facilitator, trainer, site administrator, consultant, and coach. I continue to work in schools as a consultant, mostly to principals, mostly to schools that have been or that are threatened with sanctions under NCLB.  I have spent most of those years in and around so-called inner city schools and nearly all of it trying to figure out what I could do, what we all could do, to help students be more successful. While I do not believe it is likely that schools on their own will be able to make all students proficient, I do believe that schools can help far more students become proficient than they do now.

What is my task?

My purpose is to describe strategies and tools that can enable schools to make dramatic, not slight, improvements and to make them consistently, year after year. 

Why it is important?

Over and over, I have seen schools struggle to improve, often with limited success and often because of problems related to planning or implementation. Their problems, it seems to me, are less problems of commitment and intention and more problems of knowledge and skills. Without the knowledge and skills, they struggle. With them, they are more likely to succeed.

For whom?

I am writing this for principals and school leaders who have tried to improve their schools, who have been frustrated by the slow pace of improvement, and who are looking for ideas about what they might do to increase that pace.

Examples of school mission statements

Here are mission statements from a variety of schools. I show them first as the schools wrote them, then rearranged to fit the model of a mission statement I presented in the previous post. Yes, one could argue with some of my decisions about what was a “task” and what was “important,” but you get the idea.

A typical mission statement that gets progressively fuzzier as it goes along.

The mission of [our] High School is to provide a rigorous and challenging academic environment, to develop skills and confidence for academic and professional success, and to encourage intellectual, artistic, and personal exploration and growth.

Who are we?

The staff of … High School

What is our task?

To provide a rigorous and challenging academic environment

To develop skills and confidence for academic and professional success

To encourage intellectual, artistic, and personal exploration and growth

Why is it important?

To make it possible for students to achieve academic and professional success

For whom?

Our students

A good mission statement. Simple, clear, mostly free of jargon and buzz words.

Our [elementary school’s] mission is to provide all students with a rigorous instructional program that is aligned with state standards. We are also deeply committed to closing the achievement gap so that all students will reach the standards and move on to middle school prepared to succeed.

Who are we?

The staff of … elementary school

What is our task?

To provide all students with a rigorous instructional program that is aligned with state standards.

To close the achievement gap so that all students will reach the standards

Why is it important?

So students will move on to middle school prepared to succeed

For whom?

Our students

A muddled mission statement (with my comments in italics).

[Our] High School, in partnership with our community, is committed to academic excellence that leads to a positive and confident approach to life and to a lifelong love of learning.  We will educate our students to think critically and creatively, make choices responsibly and honestly and resolve differences peacefully. Students will increase their understanding of themselves and others, and become active, involved citizens who will be empowered to welcome intellectual and social challenges.

Who are we?

Lack of clarity here. We know that the school staff is involved, but did they create this mission statement in partnership with the community? What will the community’s role be? Or, are they saying that part of their job is to create a partnership with the community?

What is our task?

To educate our students to think critically and creatively, make choices responsibly and honestly and resolve differences peacefully

To increase students’ understanding of themselves and others

Why is it important?

So our students develop a positive and confident approach to life and a lifelong love of learning

So our students become active, involved citizens who will be empowered to welcome intellectual and social challenges. (I was OK with it up until the “empowered.” Sometimes the jargon just gets to be too much.)

For whom?

Our students

Notice that this school seems somehow to have lost any focus on the importance of future academic success. Yes, we want involved citizens, but — I think — the main focus of schools needs to be on academics and on providing students with the skills they need for college and career.

A mission statement for a magnet school, a school that really does have a mission that distinguishes it from other schools.

The Mission of [arts magnet high school] is to provide a specialized high school program and learning environment [that is] conducive to creative and independent thinking and artistic and academic excellence for promising students of the arts.

Who are we?

The staff of an arts high school

What is our task?

To provide a specialized high school program and learning environment designed for promising students of the arts

Why is it important?

So our students are capable of creative and independent thinking and artistic and academic excellence

For whom?

Promising students of the arts

Mission Statements I — Why they're important and how they can be used

What is this post about?

Some schools write mission statements because they are expected to. Some schools write missions statements to communicate to others who they are. Some schools write mission statements to give teachers an opportunity to discuss educational issues, to clarify their own beliefs, and to discover areas of agreement and disagreement. 

Those are fine reasons to write a mission statement, but the post that follows encourages writing and using mission statements for a different reason: to drive school improvement. The post assumes that successful school improvement requires the focused involvement of all or most of the staff and it assumes that one of the biggest obstacles to successful improvement is the tendency that all of us have to forget what we said was important and to get distracted from our focus by the demands of daily life. 

In that context, mission statements have three purposes. First, school mission statements can be used to reduce confusion and increase focus by clearly establishing direction and purpose for the school as a whole; second, school leaders can use mission statements to regularly remind teachers what they agreed that their focus and direction should be; and third, team mission statements, which establish direction and purpose for teams, committees, action groups, etc., can help to ensure that the activities of those teams support the mission and goals of the school. 

For school improvement to be successful, each person and every group needs to be pulling together in more or less the same direction and needs to be doing so not for hours or days, but for weeks and months. Using mission statements to focus activity can help.

If that seems useful or important, read on...

What is a mission statement?

As complicated or nebulous as it may sometimes sound, what a mission statement is can be simple and potentially very useful — a group’s mission statement defines its task. It says,

1. this is who we are,
2. this is what we’re trying to do,
3. this is why we’re doing it, and
4. this is for whom we’re doing it.

In short, a mission statement provides members of a group with an answer to the questions, What is my job here?

Why mission statements are important and how they can be used…

Many school have written mission statements and many have found the process of creating a mission statement to be useful — any process that involves teachers in discussions about what they’re doing is useful — but I’m not so sure that most mission statements once written are much used.

In part that may be because there’s just not much confusion about what schools are supposed to do. They are supposed to 1) prepare their students for success in whatever comes next — middle school, high school, college, work, life; 2) they’re supposed to keep those students safe; and 3) they’re supposed to spend the taxpayers money wisely. Those are the basics and the district, the state, and the public keeps track and takes results with respect to each very seriously.

In addition, school mission statements often include language about caring environments, self-esteem, opportunities to reach full potential, creativity, critical thinking, health lifestyles, personal exploration, lifelong learning, etc.

While this additional language may be useful in signaling parents that the school is aware of their values or in acknowledging for teachers that the school is aware of their values, such language is often not taken seriously. If it were taken seriously, it would be connected to specific expectations for action or behavior and that rarely happens. What does it mean, for example, for a third grade teacher to promote lifelong learning for her students? What would it look like if she did that? What would someone see her do? What would someone see her students do? 

On the other hand, if my mission is straightforward and says that my job as a third grade teacher is to make sure that my students are prepared to be successful in fourth grade, what I have to do is much clearer. Not clear, but clearer, and I have an idea about how to make it even clearer. (And, in the long run, students who are successful in fourth grade are more likely to become lifelong learners than students who are not.)

While vague and high-sound missions might make people feel better about themselves, they are not much use for school improvement. School improvement may not require a good mission statement, but school leaders can use a good mission statement to help drive school improvement. School improvement fails when teachers aren't focused and working together and school improvement fails when teachers forget priorities or get distracted by demands that come at them in unending array. One job of school leaders is to remind everyone of the priorities and to help them keep focused on what's most important. Frequent and regular references to good mission statements can help school leaders do just that. 

But then, it’s not just school mission statements that are useful. Mission statements for groups — teams, task forces, work groups, committees, etc. — within the school are equally important and rarely used. As a result, there is often confusion about what the purpose of such groups are and that confusion can lead to conflict and frustration.

For example, in one high school the principal asked members of the math department to review alternative math texts. The members of the department assumed that they would be able to decide which text would be chosen and the principal, who had been a math teacher himself, assumed that he would have a say about their recommendation. When the math teachers discovered that the principal wasn’t comfortable with their recommendation and wanted it changed, some of them felt that all the work they had done had been wasted and they were furious. That might have been avoided if it had been clear from the beginning that their job was to make a recommendation, not to make a decision.

A possible mission: We are the members of the math department. Our task is to make a recommendation to the principal which of three available textbooks/math curriculums our school should adopt for the coming year. Our goal is to recommend a text that we believe will make it most likely for our students to be successful in the math.

In that case, clarifying the purpose of the group might have avoided a conflict between the principal, who had given the group its task, and the members of the group. Other times, clarifying purpose can cut short hours of unproductive discussions among members of a group who have different ideas about what they’re supposed to be doing.

For example, a group of elementary school teachers needed to spend most of one meeting deciding whether their task — revising the school’s action plan — meant that they needed to fine tune the existing plan or start over and follow some or all of the steps of the process that they had used to create the plan in the first place. The discussion was confused as they simultaneously tried to decide exactly what they were trying to do, what data they would have to collect and what process they would use if they were going to fine tune the plan. Not surprisingly, it was impossible to make decisions about data or process before they had decided what they were trying to do.

In many cases, team members find discussions like these frustrating (Let’s get down to business!), but clarifying tasks is an important first step that often saves hours of wasted time and frustration later. This group, having clarified the task, was able to quickly make decisions about process, data and next steps.

Possible mission. We are a group of teachers who have agreed to revise the school action plan and present our revised plan to the leadership team for approval. Our work will be based on what we have learned over the three years since we created the current plan and on data about the progress of our students. Our goal is to support continued academic growth for our students.

The group’s addition/clarification. This means that we will review each activity in the current plan and recommend continuing the activity, modifying the activity, or stopping the activity. In addition, we will recommend additional activities, as needed.

Creating a school mission is a way of encouraging all staff members to align their activities and efforts to achieve a common goal. Creating missions for groups within the school is a way of ensuring that the expectations of various responsible groups or actors are aligned.

In the action plan example, the school’s leadership team had asked for volunteers to review the plan without being completely clear about what that meant. After their discussion, the group could have written a mission statement, reviewed that mission statement with the leadership team, and gotten the leadership team’s approval. In this case, the group did not put their clarified understanding of their task in writing. They just went at it, which is not necessarily a bad strategy if the task is reasonably clear and uncontroversial.

In other cases, writing a mission statement and bringing it to the chartering group (e.g.,the leadership team) for approval creates the possibility of negotiation between the chartering group  and the members of the action team and can be a step towards ensuring that groups within the school are functioning in sync.

Finally, it’s important that a mission statement or, at the very least, a statement of purpose is in writing. Even if there is a discussion about purpose and even if there is agreement now, there is likely to be disagreement later as various members of a group have different memories about what was agreed to. While there is no guarantee that there won’t turn out to be disagreements about what the words in a written mission really mean, having them written is at least a step towards clarity and the elimination of confusion.

Preamble

This blog is an opportunity for me to clarify and share my thoughts about school improvement. Mostly. There are two other projects that I’ve been working on — one for high school biology classes about how science happens and another for elementary school teachers about learning from images — and I expect I’ll write about those projects too.

A bit of background. Five years ago, I retired after nearly 40 years in schools. I was a junior high school and high school science teacher, a computer lab manager, a program evaluator, facilitator and change-agent in a district office, and a site administrator. Since then I’ve worked, very much part-time, as a consultant, mostly to principals whose schools were in Program Improvement.

For years, I’ve thought about school improvement and worked to make school better and now I talk to principals about school improvement. I want to use the blog as a fairly informal way to write about and therefore to think about the issues and the strategies that I talk about with principals. These mostly address problems and confusions that they have about what to do to improve their schools.

In addition, I seem not to have lost completely an old fascination with science. Before becoming a teacher, I abandoned a potential career as a research scientist (zoology) and left graduate school. I taught general science and biology for many years, but moved out of the classroom for the most part in 1980.

About five years ago, in the middle of various controversies about evolution and intelligent design, I decided that the real issue was not that argument specifically, but a more general confusion about how science works, what scientists actually do and how they decide what is and what isn’t true.

I tried to convince my wife, who writes and illustrates children’s books, that she should do a book about how science works, but she has her own ideas about what’s important and has been busy with other books — science books even — while ignoring my idea. (Hard to believe, no?)

Last fall, I finally realized that I didn’t have to wait for her and could go ahead with a how-science-works project of my own and will probably be writing some about that here as I work to make it happen.

In the meantime, my wife and a friend produced a science book of their own, Living Sunlight: How Plants Bring the Earth to Life, which was good enough to win an award from AAAS as the best science picture book of 2010. Last summer, several of us created a teachers’ guide to go with Living Sunlight, but I have never been quite happy with it and would like to rework it this summer.

In part, that reworking will involve making clearer how teachers can use the illustrations in Living Sunlight to help students learn how to “read” the images, so that the illustrations help them understand the text and the text helps them understand the illustrations. I will need to think about that and some of that thinking is likely to appear here.

There may be other things as well.

In any case, if anyone at all finds this blog, I would be delight to hear comments, suggestions, etc.