One of my close friends called me last night to vent. She wanted to apply for an Instructional Coach position in a different school district a few miles from where she currently works as an elementary school teacher. Here was her problem: She read over the job application and job duties for the position and started to question herself. There were over 28 categories of what the job would entail, along with a 29th category that said, “and other duties assigned by the Assistan

Deming’s work, regarding quality control, has been extrapolated into the field of education for decades. One of his most profound ideas asserts that the “system” is responsible for 94% of the successes or failures of the customer or client (in this case, the “student”) and 6% of all outcomes (of the system) have to do with extreme environmental factors (that lie outside of the system’s control). In other words, if a school or school district consistently fails its students,