What comments can be provided in response to the following material? What questions can be asked of the author?

A few years ago, I coordinated an educational management project to improve the results of public schools in the State of So Paulo, Brazil. The project used the PDCA methodology so that School Principals could along with teachers, students, and parents identify the school's main problems. These problems were then written down as quantifiable goals. For example, when a school identified that its main problem was with a learning difficulty in math, that problem was transformed into a goal to improve X points on the students' proficiency scale in the next State assessment.

Then this goal was broken down into smaller goals that, when achieved, would help to achieve the main goal, such as, for example, reducing the monthly student's absenteeism rate, improving performance in bimonthly assessments, reducing the number of occurrences of indiscipline at school and much more. All this was part of the (P) Planning of the school since after thinking about these goals, School Principals defined an action plan for the year along with their staff.

This plan was composed of several activities that were (D) carried out as planned. But how could they know if the plan was working? It was not advisable to simply wait until the end of the year to verify the final result. It was much less risky to regularly (C) check if the monthly and bimonthly targets were being met. Because if not, it was still possible to (A) act in a way to correct any problems in time and thus significantly increase the chances of reaching and even exceeding the annual goal.

The project was successful so that it was possible to measure a positive impact on the State's educational indicators in those years. However, today I would say that it would have been useful to incorporate the Kaizen methodology into the project, which I did not know at the time. With this continuous improvement methodology, I imagine we could have supported the implementation of a culture in the schools in which everyone would always be committed to making every process they were involved in a little better (Lean Smarts, 2019). With this, I strongly believe that we could contribute to making the good results achieved more sustainable.