Keeping it Simple: Revising and Benchmarking Hastings Education Centre’s Mission Statement
The Vancouver Board of Education succinctly states its mission for Adult Education (AE). In a single sentence, it clearly indicates AE’s goal to offer flexible, sustainable, and responsive programming. As cited in the 2011-2012 School Plan (Robertson, 2011, p.1) the mission statement of Hastings Education Centre (HEC) is an adjunct to the Adult Education mission statement. It is verbose and repeats both itself and much of the AE mission statement.
The mission of Hastings Education Centre is to provide a safe, supportive learning environment within a diverse school community. The centre fosters self-esteem, cooperation, and mutual respect; graduating responsible citizens with the knowledge, skills and attitudes necessary to fulfill their potential for lifelong success. Towards this end, HEC employees provide:
- A community environment, which acknowledges, as equals, adult students seeking learning opportunities and supports learners towards the fulfillment of their individual learning goals.
- A friendly, safe, supportive, learning environment.
- Opportunities for students to integrate their learning and acquired skills with events and programs based in the wider community, encouraging the further development of social and cultural capital.
- Advocacy for adult learners
A variety of problems with HEC’s mission statement can be eliminated simply by editing for brevity and clarity of expression alone, but I took the process of evaluating and improving this mission statement further by ensuring that it has components required for benchmarking as set out by Goldring and Berends in Leading with Data (2009, pp.). This essay will summarize my process.
HEC’s mission statement is not “brief and to the point” (Goldring & Berends, 2009, p. 49) because it suffers from repetition and wordiness. Repetition emphasizes the importance placed on providing a “safe, supportive learning environment” (Robertson, 2011, p.1), so these intentions remain part of my revised version, but wordy phrasing such as “learning and acquired skills” (p.1) were eliminated. The bulleted list of what teachers will do in order to uphold the mission statement reads more like a code of conduct or part of a school plan than a mission statement. The intentions of this list are important features of the school; however, outlining a series of actions blurs the statement’s focus.
While the mission statement’s lack of focus creates room for “flexibility in implementation” (Goldring & Berends, 2009, p. 49), these diverse assertions are challenging to conceive because they do not “clearly specify the school’s reason for being” (p. 49). As a result, the mission statement does not “serve as a rallying point, motivator, and moral compass for the school” (p. 49). By trying to say everything, it fails to propose direction for meaningful measurement of success, making it difficult to “provide evidence that the mission statement can be fulfilled” (p. 49).
Finally, the mission statement does not offer a singularity of voice. It employs a variety of voices from the straightforward as in “a safe, supportive learning environment” to the convoluted as in “encouraging the further development of social and cultural capital”. Also, concepts in the mission statement are slightly at odds with each other: if the intent is for teachers to acknowledge adult students as equals, how is it anything but condescension for the school to take on the task of “graduating responsible citizens”? This plurality of voice prevents the mission statement from being “clear, understandable, and meaningful” (p.49).
I suggest the following mission statement addresses the evaluative criteria proposed by Goldring and Berends (2009), reflects the school’s originally stated aims, and offers the school an opportunity to measure its success.
Hastings Education Centre is a student-centered school where a safe, supportive learning environment includes and engages a diversity in ability and experience. The centre fosters self-esteem and mutual respect, graduating students with the high school skills required to achieve their academic potential.
This new mission statement contains the following key concepts:
- Safe, inclusive, supportive learning environment
- Student-centered, engaging courses
- Students achieve their academic potential
These three concepts can be used to establish benchmarks that measure how well the school’s mission is being achieved. To determine whether the school is safe, inclusive and supportive, data can be collected on the number and purpose of office referrals. Although classroom management is not a major concern in AE, students who do not meet classroom requirements are referred to the outreach worker, the academic advisor, and/or the principal. This information can be counted and measured against total number of students, providing a percentage that can be compared year to year or term to term. The office referrals can also be evaluated in terms of outcome: the number of referred students who go on to complete the course could be compared to those who do not. Additionally, students referred to the office because of conflict with a teacher can be weighed against referrals resulting from conflict with other students or conflict with self. Trends revealed by this data will also guide continual improvement as referrals that occur after the implementation of new initiatives can be weighed against reasons and results of referrals prior to new initiatives.
To determine if courses are student-centered and engaging, data can be collected from course evaluations. This data can be judged by course groupings or analysed temporally. Survey data could also be correlated to office referral data. With specific outcomes in mind, current course evaluations could be evaluated for relevance and improved accordingly.
The multifarious academic potential of adult students makes meaningful measurement on a broad spectrum difficult. Further complicating matters, students enter the school at every level and at various times throughout the year, and circumstances beyond the control of the school make it impossible to predict how long they will stay. Data that could prove relevant, however, is relatively simple to collect. To measure how well students are achieving their potential, final grades of new students can be compared to those of students who have taken the prerequisite course at HEC. If the marks of established students are consistently lower than students who completed pre-requisite courses elsewhere, it will indicate that the school is not helping students achieve their academic potential.
My process of evaluating and benchmarking HEC’s mission statement has been informative. My initial attempts to intuitively revise the mission from a writer’s perspective were reinforced by the conscious investigation suggested by Goldring and Berends (2009); but my editor’s eye would not have seen me through the intellectual rigor of benchmarking, a process I now see as a valuable tool for school improvement. As an individual, it would be tempting to implement my mission statement, but as a leader it is my responsibility to involve the collective in the development of the school.
References
Goldring, Ellen, Berends, Mark. Leading with Data: Pathways to Improve Your School,
California: Corwin Press, 2009
Robertson, Darlyne. “Hastings Education Centre, School Plan 2011-2012”, 2011,
retrieved September 10, 2012, from http://www.vsb.bc.ca/schools/hastings-education-centre