A review of two works published in the 1990s indicates that strategic planning as practiced by most in public education may have strengthened a school’s public relations but may not have led to improvements in school performance, in particular in student achievement. In the Winter 2012 issue of the Harvard Educational Review, “The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning and Strategic Planning in Education” (http://www.hepg.org/her/abstract/310) by Edward Meich reviews The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning by Henry Mintzberg (New York: Free Press, 1994) and Strategic Planning in Education: Rethinking, Restructuring, Revitalizing by Roger Kaufman and Jerry Herman (Lancaster, PA: Technomic, 1991).
Meich’s review indicates that strategic planning in both the business and education realms failed to produce significant increases in profit or performance. He points to the fact that strategic planning is essentially an analytical tool for evaluating the past and present data but fails to synthesize these evaluations into strategies for the future. The missing ingredient, he claims, is the absence of training for the planners in strategizing and the real disconnect between the representative stakeholders called upon to analyze multi-faceted data and the employees who will be expected to execute a new plan. Meich states that “to do” lists and timelines with expected outcomes is not a strategy but lack the organizational changes of an encompassing strategy that will institutionalize the completion of tasks and timelines and achievement of outcomes for the organization’s future prosperity.
It may be that smaller enterprises such as school districts where the data analyzers also are the plan executors and there is a continuity of leadership have the best likelihood of benefiting from strategic planning designs. In this scenario, the disconnects found in Meich’s review may not be present and the efficiencies of a smaller scale may prove an exception to the review.