Services

Partnering with school districts to address the most complex challenges and achieve lasting impact

Services

Expertise, analytics, and support to solve your biggest challenges

Since 2004, DMGroup has served as a trusted advisor to hundreds of school districts to help solve complex leadership and management challenges. Our consulting services and professional development programs bring together deep management expertise, education best practices, systems-level thinking, and a fresh perspective to help schools and districts bring about lasting improvements. Across all our services, our unwavering focus is on achieving three objectives simultaneously – making things better for students, better for staff, and better for your budget – so that improvements will be sustainable over time.

Our Approach

Partnering with your team to strengthen capacity and deliver results

  • Partnership: Gaining a Deep Quantitative and Qualitative Understanding
    Every district is unique, with its own history, culture, and ways of working. We get to know our partner districts, emphasizing qualitative information in addition to quantitative analyses to develop a deep understanding of the district. With this knowledge and this type of partnership, the right solutions can be identified, and implementation can be tailored for long-term success.
  • Collaboration: Strengthening the Capacity of Your District Leadership Team
    As we work in partnership with schools and districts, we seek to strengthen your internal team's capacity. Embedded in our work together, we’ll provide training on best practices and help your school and district leaders build capacity for conducting deep analysis, leading a team, and managing effectively.
  • Best Practices: Drawing Lessons Learned from Deep Research and Hands-On Experience
    We believe we know more together than we do alone. This is why we draw on education best as well as management techniques with proven results in the private and public sectors, on experience from our team’s diverse backgrounds in education and other industries, and on the collective knowledge of our nationwide network of school districts.
  • Systems Thinking: Taking a Holistic Approach to Bring About Improvement
    School districts are complex, and truly enduring solutions require looking beyond the specific challenge at hand and taking a broad view to achieve coherence and alignment. We’ll bring systems-level solutions that align with your strategic priorities. Rather than simply layering on new initiatives, we'll help you take a holistic approach to how to best use your limited resources to drive results.
  • Implementation: Embedding Change for Lasting Improvement
    We aim to help districts achieve measurable and sustainable improvement, and our work does not end with delivering a report. If desired, we can provide implementation support, working alongside your team as we have done frequently for many clients. We bring a fresh, third-party perspective to help your team work through often complex issues and embed lasting change.

Key Benefits

Bring about improvement with lasting impact

  • Create measurable and sustainable improvement
  • Gain an in-depth understanding of current practices through both qualitative and quantitative assessments
  • Shift current practices to best practices within your current budget
  • Benchmark your district’s current practices against those of like-districts
  • Strengthen district management and leadership capacity
  • Build community and stakeholder support for change
  • Find solutions that work and respond to your own district’s culture, priorities, and context

DMGroup has been a great thought partner and resource as we work to improve student outcomes within an environment that requires more efficient and effective use of already limited resources. We value how they draw upon research and best practices from other sectors and practically apply that knowledge to education. It provides a unique perspective from other education organizations.

Dr. Karen Sullivan, Superintendent Indian Prairie School District 204 (IL)

The balance that DMGroup brings of leading for systemic efficiency but always with the goal of excellence in student achievement is a key to school district leadership in these complex times.

Howard J. Thiery, III, Superintendent Regional School District 17 (CT)

We have less and less resources and higher and higher expectations in public education, and I think District Management Group does the best job of any group of really recognizing those dual challenges.

Dr. Ehren Jarrett, Superintendent Rockford Public Schools (IL)

Client Result

Sioux Falls School District (SD) set the course for improvement with a strategic planning process that rallied the district.

Read the Success Story