INFLUENCE DIAGRAMS IN SERVICE OF GROUP DECISION-MAKING
Lascelles F, Anderson.
The University of Illinois at Chicago
Center for Urban Educational Research and Development
The College of Education
1040 West Harrison Street
Chicago, Illinois 60607-7133
(312) 996-5161; Fax: (312) 996-6400
E-mail: Lascelle@ uic.edu
INFLUENCE DIAGRAMS IN SERVICE OF GROUP DECISION-
MAKING
Lascelles Anderson, Ph.D
Professor of Education Policy
The University of Illinois at Chicago
Abstract: This paper recounts recent experience in the use of influence diagramming as
an aid in the process of group decision-making in a school system in Illinois. Although it
was never the intention at the beginning of the process to move in this direction, the
difficulty of the decision situation coupled with the recognition of the potential usefulness
of systems dynamics methodologies in facilitating the search for pathways to the
understanding of system behavior and changing it, led in the direction eventually
reported here. The paper addresses the context of the problem, its current configuration,
and the way in which influence diagramming led to a breakthrough in how the problem
was eventually posed and group decision achieved. The name of the district will be
changed to preserve confidentiality.
Part 1: Context
The Alpha School district is located in a near suburb of Chicago in northem Illinois.
Many years ago, Alpha Village, in which the Alpha School district was located, decided
that it would be proactive in the area of race relations, and would organize itself
powerfully enough to prevent the emergence of the typical problems that had plagued so
many places in the United States as blacks and other so-called minorities began to move
in. The Village was able to accomplish this due to the presence, in the community, of a
number of very influential persons with a decidedly progressive bent. New ordinances
were established to discourage panic selling on the part of then current residents, and a
new housing unit was established to facilitate the maintenance of integrated housing in all
parts of the district. Additionally, school attendance boundaries were changed, and a
system of middle schools was created to engineer the achievement of an integrated school
experience for all students before they entered high school. Since there was only one high
school in Alpha Village, integrated schooling is certain, at least in the public domain, at
that level of school experience.
Village policy appeared to have been very successful on all accounts until recently when
some observers of the scene began to be concerned about an apparent association
between student test-score patterns and residential location of the Village minority
population relative to that of the majority population. Schools in the eastern part of the
Alpha School district had much higher percentages of minority students, at the same time
as they were showing undesirable patterns on test-scores. This alarmed a number of
individuals, and Alpha Village moved to establish a new community level dialogue to
address the apparent problem. It was decided to break the discussion into relatively
discrete parts, with simultaneous discussions taking place on housing, schools and
community social services.
The sub-committee concerned with schools was given a charge to consider three issues:
(a) report on the level and nature of community perceptions concerning diversity in
Alpha Village schools; (b) discuss the issues which stand in the way of achieving
meaningful diversity in Village schools; (c) offer community-sensitive recommendations
that will help allay fears about the possibility of resegregation in Village schools and
make suggestions for promoting diversity. Committee deliberations were open, with the
understanding that individuals from the community could attend any and all of its
discussions. The committee had twenty members, twelve of whom were from the
majority community, eight of whom were from the minority black community, and there
was one Hispanic. Presentations were made by several invited individuals, including
school personnel, to provide the widest informational basis for the deliberations of the
group. The committee also held a community-wide forum to elicit citizen perceptions
concerning the questions it was charged to discuss. School children were also polled
conceming their own perceptions of the issues.
As alluded to earlier, the background to the problem included the sense that if test-score
gaps continued in certain schools, school integration would soon become a casualty in
those schools, and the areas of theVillage in which those specific schools were located
would begin very soon to lose their majority population, either through outmigration of
existing majority families, or through deliberate choice of other school locations in the
Village for families newly moving into Alpha Village. The situation would be
strengthened even more if both conditions operated simultaneously. The relation between
perceived school quality and percent minority population in any school became an
underlying concer of the group, even as it became difficult for committee members to
address the issue without attaching negative connotations to any dominance of minority
presence in schools.
A further point of tension in committee deliberations related to the conflict between a
clear Village goal of maintaining diversity and the sense that this would not be
sustainable if the above conditions turned out to be true in the sense that overtime, the
schools could become increasingly resegregated, leading to serious departure of actual -
to-desired diversity patterns in Alpha Village as a whole.
These tensions were always there in committee discussions, reaching near-boiling point
on a number of occasions. Minority committee participants objected to the inference that
majority-minority schools would be always perceived as undesirable due to test-scores
associated with minority students, and progressive majority committee members also felt
unease with that inference. The problem before the group was to find some way of
addressing what was an implied association between test-scores and minority percentages
in the schools on the one hand and a deeply-held community value conceming diversity
in all areas of community life on the other. Reflecting the difficulty of the issue, much
committee discussion time was devoted to an irresolvable issue of finding some ratio of
minority /majority students above which Alpha Village School district would step in to
identify mechanisms to reduce that ratio, either through redrawing district lines or even
considering busing, a distant possibility. In reality, no such ratio exists, and redrawing
school boundaries to satisfy such a parameter would be a recurring policy problem. It was
in recognizing how apparently irresolvable that set of issues really was that it became
obvious to the author to try to find a way of understanding the dynamics of the problem
and crafting some solution if in fact one existed.
The first task was that of preliminarily sketching out for the group the obvious positive
feedback loop of the neighborhood change patterns that buttressed the fear of those who
felt that community resegregation was an inevitable circumstance in the present context,
and to show why even a perception of such a state of affairs could set in motion a self-
fulfilling prophecy even in the absence of any real changes moving in that direction. The
next task was to find some way of altering the dynamics in a manner which would
establish some balancing loops enough to resolve the twin dilemmas of the test-score gap
and neighborhood resegregation. The model of the situation that was presented to the
group is attached, along with its accompanying rationale.
That the model achieved its objective is evident from the way in which the group
responded to the use of desirable school quality as a policy parameter in reversing the
effect of the dominant positive feedback loop operating in its current thinking. It was also
evident in the way in which the parameter operated in anchoring all its discussion in the
final report on the achievement of this quality across all schools in the district, and how a
policy objective, founded on the idea of maintaining actual school quality tied to some
new mental model of desirable school quality, could facilitate simultaneous address of a
very wide range of school and community objectives.
Part 2: The Model and Discussion.
The purpose of this note is to identify and clearly locate the collective thinking that
underscores the conclusions of the sub-committee’s report, and in so doing, set the frame
for a continuing discourse on diversity in Alpha schools. A major conclusion arrived at in
our discussions was the need to anchor school policy in the school district on the
attainment of overall desirable quality for all Alpha schools and the over-time
maintenance of this status for all district schools. This condition of desirable quality for
all schools speaks to the overriding concern that led to the formation of this committee as
well as the other committees formed under the diversity rubric, namely the fear that some
schools in the Village may appear to be resegregating at the very same time that the
Village, long a strong supporter of desegregation in schools, housing and other social
amenities, appeared to be experiencing greater diversity broadly. If schools are
resegregating, then it may not be long before neighborhoods follow schools, so the
argument goes, and we are back to the characteristics of an undesirable community,
despite the Village’s recent effort and experience.W hether in fact the schools in the
district are resegregating is an empirical question: either they are or they are not. If
however there is even a perception that the schools are resegregating, that is enough
reason for there to be concem, even if there is not yet enough rich data to defensibly
argue the case either way. A generally understood sense of what desirable school quality
is and how it solves the problem of maintenance of diversity across all schools in the
district will be addressed later in this paper.
This section of the paper is also meant to show how school officials and school
communities can understand the over-time behavior of test-score differentials in
communities such as Alpha Village that are particularly supportive of diversity, and to
anticipate such score differentials enough to avoid panic, and how to be organizationally
well-positioned for responding to them when they appear. Such a capacity will also go far
in undermining the possibility of any inference that it is the diffusion of any
concentration of minority students that will do the trick in maintaining high school
quality, or to put it another way, that minority schools need non-minority students to
become good schools. Diversity in schools and test-score differentials may co-occur, but
they are analytically distinct and separate issues. The one, diversity, is a desirable
objective in its own right; the other, test-score differentials between minority and non-
minority students, is a result of the playing out of history in the lives of school-age
children. Where the two are linked is in the recognition that desiring diversity
unambiguously forces attention to the task of addressing and improving the conditions
that make the test-score gap to arise in the first place and to persist.
This awareness points to another dimension of the dynamics of broad social change
patterns, in this case how these changes are reflected in the over-time distribution of the
most easily observed school skills of in-migrating students. That history matters in the
distribution of opportunity is at the heart of this part of the argument, the importance of
which proposition should not be played down.
The argument begins with the observation that the “tipping point” phenomenon is usually
experienced in communities to which minorities are moving for the purpose of
consuming any or all of a set of desirable public and private goods and services,
including schools. What usually happens is that such non-minority communities display
levels of tolerance toward the incoming group up to a particular point, usually defined as
some critical percentage of the total population identified with the minority population.
The contribution of the model used in this note to understand the dynamics of
neighborhood change is to be found in the way in which this event triggers a whole series
of responses, some easily observable, others to be inferred from surveys or other means
of eliciting responses on psychological states. These dynamic responses, playing out first
through non-minority withdrawal from schools and community and resulting downward
evaluation of neighborhood quality, followed by minority middle-class downward
evaluation of these same neighborhoods come together in a feedback loop which
escalates the original change in minority percentage of the total community. School
quality declines as a result of this set of reinforcing changes, and could conceivably
continue in that way in the absence of some policy response on the part of the school
district and individual schools to hold all schools to some determined level of school
quality, thereby closing any gap between desirable and actual school quality. The
intervention of this school and district response fundamentally alters the pattern of
dynamic responses in the system and changes the direction of the feedback effects. No
longer does an initial positive change in the minority percentage of a community’s total
population continue to result in community resegregation and decline in school quality. It
is the critical role of desirable school quality which this sub-committee strongly suggests
that Alpha Village appropriate as a central part of its long-term response to this historic
pattern of school and neighborhood change which does the trick in the model, and the
absence of which has so often undermined well-meaning efforts at maintaining vibrantly
diverse communities and schools.
The question might reasonably be asked as to whether such an approach will address the
immensely important issue of the test-score gap so evident in the press these days. I
believe the answer is in the affirmative. In this, the understanding of the role that
desirable school quality will play in triggering appropriate responses in schools where for
any of a number of reasons average school quality is less than desirable is crucial. The
response will be evident in what such a policy on the maintenance of all schools at
desirable levels of school quality will do for schools not operating at those desirable
levels. That is not the only outcome however. Since more mobile minorities, those with
more income and exposure, are likely to be first to in-migrate into desirable communities,
particularly those with good schools, test-score gaps may even widen over time as
minorities with less income and exposure, compared to earlier migrants, move into these
desirable communities. This simply reflects a pattern which has been seen in the human
and social capital bundles associated with successive waves of migrants into desirable
countries and communities. Communities which anchor their expectation about schools
to some level of desirable school quality will understand this dynamic and quickly
respond to the implications of it for appropriate adaptive responses in a variety of ways.
The sub-committee report addresses this issue with reference to specific schools. Such an
approach does not imply a continuously widening gap and therefore an increasing
burden to maintain district schools at these desirable levels. In a climate of statewide and
national emphasis on improving school performance, at some point in the future in-
migrating students are likely to bring with them richer bundles of human capital, and the
historic test-score gaps are likely to diminish as a result of a broad range of socially
significant policy emphases on education quality. None of this means though that the
critical role of the desirable level of school quality is in any way diminished. It still
guides district and individual school efforts. How we understand this notion of desirable
school quality will now be addressed.
The notion of desirable school quality can be addressed from a variety of viewpoints and
at different levels. No attempt will be made here to address this issue in all its generality.
This task may very well be one that Alpha District will want to take up as a follow-up
activity to this report and we suggest in fact that this be done.
As argued above, the notion of desirable school quality dramatically alters the dynamic
patterns of school and neighborhood change under diversity away from a continuously
escalating pattern to one which gets corrected when the difference between desirable and
actual school quality is both observed and addressed so as to remove this difference. If
the potential for the tipping point to operate is always there for any reason, if the
community values diversity, and quite rightly so, and if school quality stands very high,
perhaps even highest in the minds of individuals and families who plan to move to an
area, school officials will need to articulate what is meant by desirable school quality so
that it will appropriately influence neighborhood choice, in the best of all possible
worlds, making such choice fairly random with respect to school quality. Only when such
choices are random with respect to school quality will the racial composition of schools
in the Village approximate the racial composition of the Village as a whole. The Village
as a whole and individual elementary schools will have to be very flexible in their
response to student and parent needs that can be expected to impact school quality.
Desirable school quality therefore references the following at least: (a) ability and
willingness to address deficits students bring to the schooling enterprise; (b) ability and
willingness of the district and the schools to mount aggressive programs for leveling the
playing field for all students; (c) ability and willingness of district and schools to address
resource deficits on the part of parents in their parenting roles; (d) ability and willingness
of district and schools to support very active and creative parent/school linkages to make
the curriculum of the home as consistent as possible to the curriculum of the school; (e)
constant address of the conditions which make the intemal operations of the schools as
organizationally healthy as possible. These appear to be minimally necessary for
achieving consistently high levels of school quality across all schools in Alpha Village,
thereby making school location choice fairly random for those who plan to move into the
Village. Under these conditions, and in the intermediate-to-long run, racial identifiability
of schools will cease to be the problem some think it could become as a function of test-
score differentials, since in the new situation, there are no school factors which have the
potential to strongly tilt the demand for particular schools in any one way or another.
Dynamics of Neighborhood/School Change
Neighborhood
Minority
Population in
School (above
( + ) some tipping point) . ) ( + )
School and
District Effort
Non-minority
to Reduce
Discrepancy Cc G Expectation of School
Quality
t+)
Discrepancy in
School Actual Non-minority
Quality School ( - i withdrawal
[MSQ) - (ASQ)] Quality (ASQ) sil Fram ;
chool and Communit
+ ty
-) +)
" j
i Minori = )
Desirable ty Real Estate
School Middle Class
i Expectation of Evaluation of
Geo) Neighborhood and Neighborhood
School Quality +) Quality
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0