Principals as Instructional Leaders: Rhetoric and Reality (Part 2)

Past and current research on principals reveal that school-site leaders perform managerial, instructional, and political roles in and out of their schools. Of these multiple (and often conflicting) roles, however, the instructional leader role has been spotlighted as a “must” for these men and women because, as the theory (and rhetoric) goes, it is crucial to improving teacher performance and student academic achievement.

Yet studies of principal behavior in schools makes clear that spending time in classrooms to observe, monitor, and evaluate classroom lessons do not necessarily lead to better teaching or higher student achievement on standardized tests. Where there is a correlation between principals’ influence on teachers and student performance, it occurs when principals create and sustain an academic ethos in the school, organize instruction across the school, and align school lessons to district standards and standardized test items. There is hardly any positive association between principals walking in and out of classrooms a half-dozen times a day and conferring briefly with teaches about those five-minute visits.The reality of daily principal actions conflicts with the theory.

Much of the rhetoric of instructional leadership flowing from true believers in the theory rings hollow when researchers actually go into schools and shadow principals, observing what they do day-after-day in a school a week or more at a time. Such time-and-motion studies have been done ever since the days of Frederick Winslow Taylor and “scientific management” in the early 20^th century. When such studies were done, they showed that the bulk of the a principal’s time was spent on managing the building, teachers, students, and parents. That was then.

Now, a few published studies make the same point: what principals do is largely manage people and buildings spending most of their time outside of the classroom, not inside watching teachers teach.

A recent report ( Shadow Study Miami-Dade Principals) of what 65 principals did each day during one week in 2008 in Miami-Dade county (FLA) shows that even under NCLB pressures for academic achievement and the widely accepted (and constantly spouted) ideology of instructional leadership, Miami-Dade principals spend most of their day in managerial tasks that influence the climate of the school but may or may not affect daily instruction. What’s more, those principals who spend the most time on organizing and managing the instructional program have test scores and teacher and parental satisfaction results  that are higher than those principals who spend time coaching teachers and popping into classroom lessons.

The researchers shadowed elementary and secondary principals and categorized their activities minute-by-minute through self-reports, interviews, and daily logs kept by the principals.

In the academic language of the study:

The authors find that time spent on Organization Management activities is associated with positive school outcomes, such as student test score gains and positive teacher and parent assessments of the instructional climate, whereas Day-to-Day Instruction activities are marginally or not at all related to improvements in student performance and often have a negative relationship with teacher and parent assessments. This paper suggests that a single-minded focus on principals as instructional leaders operationalized through direct contact with teachers may be detrimental if it forsakes the important role of principals as organizational leaders (p. iv)

Two things jump out of this study for me. First, the results of shadowing principals in 2008 mirror patterns in principal work that researchers have found since the 1920s although the methodologies of time-and-motion studies have changed.

Second, there is an association–a correlation, by no means a cause-effect relationship–between principals who spend more time managing the organization and climate of the school than those principals who spend time in direct contact with teachers in classrooms.

Another study of first- year urban principals prepared by New Leaders,  a program imbued with beliefs in instructional leadership, revealed that new principals, a large fraction of whom left the post after two years, had little impact on student achievement even while observing and monitoring teacher lessons (see RAND_TR1191)

A few studies, of course, will not banish a theory lacking convincing evidence, temper the rhetoric of principal-as-instructional-leader,  or alter principal preparation programs.  Current rhetoric and ideology highlighting instructional leadership trump research studies, past and present, again and again.

Some donor-funded efforts try combining the results of the above studies and earlier research about principals managing the instructional program with their direct involvement in teachers’ classroom practices. See, for example, the Wallace Foundation’s recent publication The-School-Principal-as-Leader-Guiding-Schools-to-Better-Teaching-and-Learning.    In their well-intentioned effort, however, they give life to a failed theory and pump oxygen into the prevailing rhetoric.

The rose-colored view that principals of schools, big and small, urban and suburban, elementary and secondary, can throw fairy dust over teacher lessons and improve student academic performance continues to dominate professional associations of principals and university preparation programs.

Day in the Life of a Principal (Part 1)

Jessica Johnson is Principal of Dodgeland Elementary School in Wisconsin. This day-in-the-life appeared on her blog April 26, 2009.

I am guilty of having thought as a teacher and even as an assistant principal, “What is the principal doing all day? Why hasn’t he/she done x, y or z yet?” Well, now that I’m the principal, I take back all of the thoughts I had back then, because you can just never understand what the principal does all day until you live it!

There are so many things that could happen in a day that couldn’t even be shared with staff, because: A) I don’t want to set the tone of the school by complaining B) Some information has to be filtered by me or it would just give teachers more to stress over C) There’s a lot of confidential information contained within a principal’s day. So, I want to write a list of all the crazy things that could happen on any given day.

Monday morning arrive to work at 6:30 am. Turn on the computer and start looking at my list of things to accomplish today (includes 7:35/3:05  Individualized Education Program (IEP) meetings, teacher observation, teacher meeting, parent conference, call McDonald’s for additional donations of ice cream coupons for student of the month awards, write monthly principal newsletter, finalize summer school course packets, sort through the junk mail still piled up from last week-because I didn’t get to it over the weekend, complete purchase requisitions, file pink copies of all purchases for budgeting, get into classrooms).

7:00 receive call from sub-caller, write down list of teachers out today—we ran out of subs so I have to figure out coverage for one of the first grade teachers. Write a note for the secretary regarding this, tell her I’ll be to the class at 8:00, but for her to keep looking for coverage.
7:05 Try to start on paperwork, but a teacher comes in to tell about a phone call she received from a parent after school on Friday regarding a bus incident—record the information to investigate.
7:10 Try to start on paperwork, but get a call from a teacher that our online student information system (for attendance and grades) is down again. Put in a call to tech director to get it fixed…send out an email to all staff that the problem should be fixed soon *hopefully*.

7:20 Parents are here for the IEP meeting…show them to the conference room to wait….no chance of getting paperwork done now. Go to get IEP information for the meeting and see the voicemail light flashing again…check it and hear that a teacher got stuck in traffic and won’t make it in time…go tell the secretary and then run back to the IEP meeting.

7:35-8:00 IEP meeting…this one went well. Now I have to run to cover that class.

8:00-8:30 Teaching a lower grade level, no lesson plans (note to self-remind teachers to get emergency sub plans/folders ready) making it up as I go.

8:30 Call from the office that one of our Emotional/Behavioral Disability (EBD) students needs to be removed from the room—an aide is coming to cover the class instead.

8:35-9:15 Remove EBD student—severe physical aggression, I’m sure I’ll have some bruises from this one—not to mention the mess the conference room is in now (we don’t have a time-out room). I’ve had my glasses broken before, so glad that didn’t happen this time. He/she finally is calm/compliant and I escort the child back to class…
Fortunately another substitute was able to come in and cover that other class now. Thank goodness, I can get to my list…
Check my voicemail—1 teacher call with a question about the new report card, 1 teacher call requesting me to come speak with her about a student, 1 parent call angry about a bus incident, another angry parent upset with a teacher.

9:20 put the sign on my door that says “I’m out in classrooms to see what students are learning” and get to each of the teachers that left me voice messages. Make a move to classrooms for walk throughs—first one has guided reading groups and centers with 1st grade kids reading amazingly well! Start to enter the 2nd classroom of the day when I’m called for on the school loud speaker (I don’t carry my walkie-talkie when I’m going into classrooms and my secretaries know only to call for me in an emergency). Hurry back to the office to find that one of our special needs children ran off from the aide (he/she has never done this before!) I make a special all-call to the staff to let them know we’re looking for ______ and then several of us split up to search….10 minutes later we find her/him in an unattended office in the dark pretending to type on a computer. Whew!

10:00-10:30 Morning Recess-I don’t end up making it out there for all 30 minutes, because I get stopped by 3 different teachers on my way out. (Question about grades deadline, information shared about a student and another technology question)

10:30-11:15 Back out to classrooms. Get into 4 of them (with a note to myself on needing to meet with a teacher for classroom management concerns)

11:15-11:45 Meet with the 4 students that had bus conduct reports. 1 has had enough to be suspended from the bus…make the phone call home and get yelled at by the parent that they can’t pick them up. I’ll spare the rest of the details. Meet with 2 other students that have “earned” after school detention for continuously disruptive classroom behavior.

11:45 Head for the fridge to grab my sandwich for lunch, but get called to a classroom for another EBD student. Fortunately, this child is calmed down much easier than the one this morning.

12:00-1:00 Lunch room duty—grab a slim fast to drink on the way. No, I’m not dieting, but I keep them in the fridge for days like today when there is no time to eat. I sometimes refer to my hour-long lunch duty as migraine hour (because it’s always loud), but I secretly enjoy this hour. Our kids sit at round tables and actually get the chance to talk with their peers. I’ve seen schools where the kids have to eat silently, but I think that’s just mean. I enjoy the chance to walk around to each table and chat with the kids. If I’m not walking around (using proximity) they do try to get away with things (however, they know that if I catch them throw any food they then have lunch room clean up duty!)

1:00 Talk to a couple teachers about student behaviors in the lunch room as they pick up classes (friend issues)

1:05 Get back to the office and secretary tells me that a parent has tried calling several times and is very angry. Go back to my office and check my voice messages—there are 6 of them (not all from the one parent)! I have a classroom observation at 1:30, so I write them all down and just call back the angry one–this parent calls daily, so I’m used to it…I’d like to tell this parent to get a job so he/she has something to do each day, but I refrain from expressing that opinion! The parent again tells me they’re going to call the school board to complain…I’m not worried, because I know that what we’re doing on the school end is the right thing and I’ve already talked to a couple school board members about this parent. Note to any potential administrators reading this—be prepared for threats such as, “I’ve got a lawyer on retainer,” “I’m going to call your superintendent,” “I’m going to report this to the school board” and “I’m going to report you to the state department of education.” If you’re doing your job right, you have nothing to worry about. I now just give them the phone number and am usually able to add, “I’ve already spoken with the superintendent regarding this issue.” I don’t like surprises or hiding things from my superintendent or the school board, so I keep those lines of communication open.

1:30-2:15 Classroom Observation: I love doing formal classroom observations, because you get to see so much more than just in walk-throughs (of the teacher,

instruction and the students). I do think I’m getting carpal tunnel, because I’m so insistent on scripting everything—gives me good information when I’m writing up the evaluation and when I meet with the teacher.

2:15 bathroom break—I seriously think this was my first one today—I’m dying!

2:20 Check with my secretary-2 more phone calls passed through to my phone—nothing major though, so I’ll check them later. Try to tidy up my desk before parent meeting at 2:30. Since I am on the run so much and hardly in my office, I have several piles on my desk. I don’t have a great system yet for organizing yet, but I know where everything is. I once had a principal that said “If you’re desk is a mess, it’s because you’re doing your job well—you’re out in classrooms and not sitting at your desk.” I’ve worked for a principal that was adamant about keeping the desk clean, but I still agree with the previous one!

2:30 Meeting with parent: she wants to request a specific teacher for next year. This is something on my list that I haven’t gotten to yet—working on the class list procedures and a letter to parents explaining why we can’t honor specific teacher requests. I explain it to her and tell her about the letter that will be coming home in a month and ask her to think about her child’s learning styles/needs and not just the teacher that the older sibling had. This isn’t how the previous principal did things, so she’s a little annoyed, but agreed to it. (Note to self—get moving on writing that letter and meeting with staff about class lists)

2:50 Pop into grade level meeting (teachers have grade-level collaboration time

2:40-3:30 on 2 week rotation. Aides cover the class 2:40-3:00 to give them someadditional time). I’d like to sit in on these meetings for the full time to help facilitate discussions on student learning, but it hasn’t happened all year.

3:00 Walk the halls quickly as students are being dismissed. I have a particular student that I walk to the bus each day and remind him/her about how to be safe on the bus.

3:05 IEP meeting…this one goes on forever. Parents are not on the same page as everyone at school. Gets quite heated and I have to do quite a bit of mediation. At 5:00 I finally say that we will have to come back at a later date to finish (No, IEP meetings do not normally last this long!!)

5:05 Back to my office…finish checking voice messages and start calling a few back (had to prioritize which ones can wait until tomorrow). Now to my list from this morning—hadn’t touched any of them! Write my principal newsletter because it was due last Friday. Check my mailbox and add it to the stack of mail from last week (never knew how much mail the principal gets—good grief!) Pull out time sheets, absence sheets, and purchase requisitions because those are time sensitive, but leave the rest. It’s 5:45 now and my husband has called three times asking when I’ll be home. I grab some files to shove in my bag, along with my flash drive so I can type up the teacher evaluation at home).
6:00 Finally home—didn’t have a bad day, but still feel like I got run over by a semi. I’d love to just lay on the couch and crash, but have to make supper, clean, play with my son. After he’s in bed I type up that teacher eval (most of it) until I’m too exhausted and go to bed at 11:45.

I must say that the kids are the easiest part of this position. I can’t even get into detail on some of the difficult conversations with parents and teachers each day that get my stomach churning (and I mean that literally…but now I am on meds for the ulcer, so I’m doing better with that!)

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Johnson spends a great deal of her time managing tasks that are both on-going and unexpected. She is in and out of classrooms also and in short bursts of time sees parents, children, and teachers again and again over the course of one day. How typical is her day-in-the-life of a principal compared to one in a middle school or high school? Compared to principals in large suburbs and big cities? I take up the answer to those questions in Part 2.

For previous posts that I have written on principals, see here, here, and here.

Does Collective Teacher Autonomy Make Any Difference for Student Achievement? (Kim Farris-Berg), Part 3

Farris-Berg is lead author of Trusting Teachers with School Success: What Happens When Teachers Call the Shots. She is a Senior Associate with Education Evolving, a policy design shop based in St. Paul, Minnesota, and an independent education policy strategist. Her Twitter handle is @farrisberg.

High-performing organizations assess performance and act upon results to improve performance. The teachers who have collective autonomy to make decisions influencing school success do too.

Of course these teachers and their students participate in state standardized tests. Under No Child Left Behind they must. But, like many other teachers, they are concerned about the current policy context in which their school quality is judged by the percentage of students who score “proficient” on these tests—especially in comparison to other schools.

Many teachers who participated in our study pointed out that mean proficiency scores (high or low) cannot isolate the contribution of school and teacher quality from other contributors, such as family background and prior educational experience, no matter how good the test. My colleagues and I have argued that we also cannot learn much about the effects of practice (for example, teachers’ chosen learning approach) in each school so that we can really determine which practices work best. For that, we’ll need an altogether different research approach.

Autonomous groups of teachers want to score well enough on state standardized tests to maintain their autonomy (and consequently their approach to schooling), but otherwise they don’t worry much about a measurement of quality that, in their view, cannot withstand serious scientific scrutiny. Moreover, many teachers reported their resentment that so much school funding and time is spent on state- and district-required tests that are not useful for making decisions about how and what to teach individual students.

These teachers do, however, find a use for testing. They want to know individual student progress down to the specifics, and some choose to spend discretionary funding on assessment tools that they determine most valuable for providing this information. These teachers don’t just want to know if Johnny is doing well in math. They want to know what areas of math Johnny understands, and what areas he doesn’t so he can reach his own next level of achievement.

But individual academic improvement is not the only quality indicator autonomous teachers use to evaluate their practice. And, when you step back and think, this just makes sense. Think about how you evaluate restaurants, cars, and even your significant other. It’s almost never based on a single measure of quality. Why should it be any different for schools and teachers?

A number of teacher groups have opted to use The Hope Survey, for example, to determine students’ psychological adjustment in a school environment over time. Teachers can learn how well they are doing in addressing students’ sense of autonomy, belongingness, and goal orientation.

Teachers also develop their own rubrics and use portfolio assessments, public learning exhibitions, and rounding (just as medical doctors round with patients) to assess students’ nonacademic abilities in areas such as self-direction, time management, team work, information retention, self-advocacy, community interaction, active citizenship, persistence, risk management, flexible thinking, and critical thinking.

One group of teachers serving students in grades 6-12 created the Raised Responsibility Rubric, a tool used by both teachers and students to track students’ development of intrinsic motivation. The more a student develops, the more responsibility she is granted to manage her own time throughout the day.

So, does collective teacher autonomy make any difference for student achievement? The answer is yes. Autonomous teachers value a broader range of achievement than is currently valued in K-12—so much so that they are seeking, designing and financing new ways to assess this achievement. They use all the information they deem valuable to improve teaching and learning in their schools.

I imagine that some folks started reading this blog with the expectation that I would report a nice summary of the state standardized test scores of schools run by teachers in comparison to conventionally governed schools. Out of respect for the ideas and practices of teachers who call the shots, we opted not to report these scores in our work. It wasn’t because we couldn’t say anything good about the scores or because the teachers wanted to avoid measurement. We simply didn’t want to participate in anyone’s attempt to boil everything autonomous teachers do down to a single measure of quality—a measure that doesn’t begin to reflect all they do or their work’s relevance to the future of K-12 schools.

If we are open to trusting teachers, we ought to be open to their broader definition of student achievement and its implications for measuring school quality. These trailblazers could be kicking off a major period of innovation in K-12. Encouraging them will likely require less snap judgment and more confrontation of our nation’s tolerance for the hard work of change.

Are Teachers Interested in the Opportunity To Call the Shots? (Kim Farris-Berg) Part 2

Farris-Berg is lead author of Trusting Teachers with School Success: What Happens When Teachers Call the Shots. She is a Senior Associate with Education Evolving, a policy design shop based in St. Paul, Minnesota, and an independent education policy strategist. Her Twitter handle is @farrisberg.

If we made it loud and clear, in both policy and practice, that teachers can have autonomy to collectively make the decisions influencing whole school success, would any teachers take advantage?

Collective teacher autonomy isn’t for everyone. It is a working arrangement that some teachers long for, but others never imagine for themselves. Teachers who are now calling the shots in more than 50 district and chartered schools around the country describe themselves as pioneers both in the professionalization of teaching and in the modernization of schools and schooling.

Pioneering is intense and difficult work, they say, especially in an education culture that values and even manages toward “sameness.” Yet it is also enormously rewarding. The teachers report that they thrive in these environments where they work with their colleagues to make what they determine to be necessary changes and see their commitment’s positive influence on student learning.

There’s evidence that, if the opportunity was firmly on the table, many more teachers would be interested. Public Agenda tested a national sample of teachers’ attitudes toward new arrangements and reported the findings in Stand by Me: What Teachers Really Think About Unions, Merit Pay and Other Professional Matters (Farkas, Johnson and Duffet 2003). Fifty-eight percent of teachers were somewhat or very interested “in working in a [chartered] school run and managed by teachers.” Sixty-five percent of these teachers had worked less than five years, and 50 percent had worked more than 25 years.

Of course, there are also reasons why teachers currently don’t take the leap. To ask for something, you need to know about it, and many do not. Plus, among the teachers who are interested, many are afraid of what might happen to their professional reputations if they ask for authority.

Others fear getting only partial, informal authority. In these cases, teachers worry about making the time investment (in school design, school management, and lobbying school district or state leaders to adapt management practices to support teacher autonomy) only to have their authority pulled back. Teachers have seen this happen too many times before when, as the former 22-year Minneapolis Federation of Teachers President Louise Sundin puts it in Zero Change of Passage, “the bureaucracy [asked for innovation, but ultimately]…couldn’t tolerate…differences in delivery or design.”

Still more teachers have trouble imagining the arrangement’s possibilities for their own professional careers and for their students. Just ask Janesville, Wisconsin high school teacher Stephanie Davis.

A highly-qualified teacher, Stephanie got her first teaching job at the 1,780-student Craig High School. Doing everything her district and school leaders asked of her, she applied the skills and knowledge gained from her training for the good of her students. She felt proud to work at Craig, where everyone worked hard to make a great school.

So Stephanie was crushed when, like so many other teachers, she was laid off by the Janesville School District amidst state budget cuts. She hoped for another job in Janesville, and eventually district leaders assigned her to a school chartered by Janesville Public Schools called Tailoring Academics to Guide Our Students (TAGOS Leadership Academy).* But she was furious. TAGOS was known as a place full of “bad” kids. Stephanie thought, “I am a good teacher. How can I do what I was trained to do in a place like that?”

The TAGOS Leadership Academy teachers welcomed Stephanie and explained that their learning program of choice focused on individualizing learning for students, not staying on a specific track. They had requested a colleague like her so she could help realize the goal of getting each student to his or her personal next level of achievement. They had the authority to collaboratively manage the school, they said, and could make whatever changes needed.

At first Stephanie was so focused on how things usually work—and how TAGOS was breaking convention—that she failed to digest her colleagues’ request. “Then we went on winter break, and I had time to reflect on what they were asking of me,” she explained. “Suddenly I got it. I had a real opportunity at TAGOS. My voice mattered. I could lead [my colleagues]—work together with them—to create a learning program that would really change how our students learn!”

“I hadn’t really thought about how prescribed everything I was doing at Craig was,” she continued. “I had to use the prescribed book list, in the prescribed order, at the prescribed pace, using a prescribed budget. There was so little opportunity to tailor what I was doing for the individual students I was working with, whether they were far beyond or far behind. . . Here at TAGOS was a chance to do all the things I thought might work better.”

Stephanie was as nervous as she was excited. She realized that in exchange for such decision-making authority, she and her fellow teachers at TAGOS Leadership Academy would be accountable for the learning program they developed in addition to all of the other choices they made.

“It was a scary idea at first,” she said. “I hadn’t ever pictured myself in this position. But now that I’ve worked with [collective] autonomy, I realize that I was missing out on professional opportunities to [decide with my colleagues] what would work for our students. . . It’s not that I was unhappy at Craig, but this is just a much more satisfying job. I am a much better teacher for having worked in this way.”

Stephanie’s story is worth considering. How many more teachers would flourish and find more satisfaction in their jobs if we made it clear that they could have full, professional authority to make the decisions influencing school success?

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*Note, some teacher groups have hiring autonomy, but TAGOS Leadership Academy teachers do not.

Can We Trust Teachers To Successfully Manage Whole Schools? (Kim Farris-Berg) Part 1

Can we trust teachers with authority to manage whole schools? Would teachers even want the opportunity to manage schools? And, when they are in the position to manage schools, will it make any difference in student achievement? Kim Farris-Berg explores these questions in this three-part guest blog .

 Farris-Berg is a Senior Associate with Education Evolving, a policy design shop based in St. Paul, Minnesota, and an independent education policy strategist. Her Twitter handle is @farrisberg.

Everyone knows that many K-12 public schools are not producing desired results. The big question is: how will we improve them? The dominant assertion today is that if we can just get better at telling teachers what to do, and how to do it, then improvement will follow. In this climate, “getting tough” with teachers appears to be the only solution. Fortunately for those of us not fond of one-bet strategies,   other assertions are entering the discussion. One of these assertions is that trusting teachers, and not controlling them, is the key to school success.

Some policymakers and education leaders in states and school districts are granting groups of teachers who request it collective autonomy to make the decisions influencing whole school success. These groups of teachers have the opportunity to choose—even invent—the learning methods and job structures they think will best improve learning for the students in their schools.

My colleagues and I recently studied what teachers in 11 of these groups do with their authority and published our findings in a book called Trusting Teachers with School Success: What Happens When Teachers Call the Shots (R&L Education 2012).

We contemplated for some time how we would determine whether teachers who call the shots make “good” governance decisions. The central question of any improvement strategy is whether it has the potential to achieve superior results. Ideally we’d want to know what strategies prepare students to lead successful lives, from an individual and societal point of view. But there are not any empirical measurements for this sort of “real life” result, so we needed a proxy for evaluating the potential of the choices autonomous teachers make.

We considered numerous research approaches and decided that a reasonable proxy for whether a school has the potential to achieve superior results ought to be associated with the characteristics of high-performing organizations. According to our review of literature, organizations are considered “high-performing” if they achieve results that are better than their peers over a period of time. By inference, their cultural characteristics are associated with success. It makes logical sense that autonomous teachers’ choices are good if they emulate these characteristics.

We gleaned nine cultural characteristics of high-performing organizations from the literature and used the detailed findings about each to develop survey and interview instruments that examined autonomous teachers’ approaches and behaviors in each area. We found that teachers who call the shots do emulate these characteristics and that their most prominent practices flow from their cultivation of the characteristics.

When teachers have collective autonomy to make the decisions influencing school success, they:

     1. Accept ownership. They welcome authority and responsibility for making decisions. When they make the decisions, they are willing to accept accountability for outcomes.

2. Innovate. They take risks to try creative new things, challenge old processes, and continuously adapt. Here’s an example: Autonomous teachers often group students by skill and not by age—that is, if students work in groups at all. Many students direct their own learning in consultation with teachers, even peers, as appropriate.

3. Share purpose. They co-create their schools’ mission, vision, values, and goals. They say this is the reason why they buy in. Purpose statements aren’t just words, but the basis of their collective decision-making. In the 11 schools, teachers’ shared purpose always focused on students as individuals.

4. Collaborate. They participate in collaboration and leadership for the good of the whole school, not just a classroom. Their cultures are characterized by consultation, listening, being open to different opinions, working together, and mutual respect.

5. Lead effectively. Many teachers want to focus on learning and not administration, so they select principals and lead teachers to handle these duties. These leaders are seen as accountable to, and in service to, the group of teachers that is responsible and accountable for school success. Teacher autonomy puts in motion an entirely different structure of accountability.

    6. Function as learners. Their cultures are characterized by a sense of common challenge and discovery, rather than a culture in which experts impart information.

7. Avoid insularity. They are influenced by students, parents, youth culture, and technology trends. They are less influenced by leaders in business, future educational institutions, unions, and school districts. Teachers say these leaders’ decisions are often barriers to their innovations.

8. Engage and motivate one another and their students. They put students in a position to be active, ongoing learners.

9. Assess performance. They set and measure progress toward goals and act upon results to improve performance. They use peer evaluation and encourage coaching and mentoring colleagues to ensure continuous improvement. They focus on students’ individual learning growth and expect students to achieve in areas beyond academics.

These promising results suggest it’s time to trust teachers. The next question is, would teachers be interested in the opportunity to call the shots? Part II will explore the answer.

Legacies of the Civil Rights Era: Accountability and Attention to Poverty (John Spencer)

John P. Spencer is a former high school social studies teacher and an associate professor in the Education department at Ursinus College in Pennsylvania. He is the author of In the Crossfire: Marcus Foster and the Troubled History of American School Reform.

 The past decade has brought a steady stream of commentary on how education is the “civil rights issue of our time,” most recently from Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. But education has been a civil rights issue for decades—and not just in Brown v. Board of Education or Little Rock, but in urban communities with low-performing schools.

Revisiting the 1960s shows us that the civil rightsera left a dual legacy in school reform, half of which echoes loudly today and half of which is too often ignored. The part that still echoes is an ethos of accountability: sixties-era activists and educators helped to pioneer the idea that urban schools should be held accountable for student achievement. The part that is being ignored is a recognition that achievement is also powerfully shaped by what goes on outside of schools—especially the effects of poverty. Unfortunately, neglect of the latter lesson is seriously undermining the potentially useful impact of the former one.

The movement for “community control” of urban schools in the late 1960s is a striking example of how the activism of the civil rights era prefigured the current accountability agenda, in spirit if not in terms of specific policies and approaches. The battle lines of community control will sound familiar to anyone following recent controversies over charter schools, “parent trigger” laws, and the like: on one side, black parents and community activists fed up with low-performing schools and eager to take charge of them; on the other, teachers unions and school bureaucracies. In the most famous case, in Ocean Hill-Brownsville, Brooklyn, the activists managed to fire unionized teachers, sparking a bitter and prolonged strike. (The teachers were reinstated.)

The community control movement shifted the spotlight from problems in communities to problems with schools. Since the early 1960s, explanations for low achievement in urban schools had focused on the idea that black students, many of whom had migrated from the rural South, were “culturally deprived” and caught in a self-defeating “culture of poverty.” It was a liberal idea at the time—a way of saying urban students were struggling not because they were black (as racists had insisted) but because they were poor. In the late 1960s, though, civil rights activists vehemently rejected the cultural deprivation argument as a form of racism. They believed the problem was low expectations in schools. Dwelling on the impoverished background of the students was, as one critic said in a newly coined phrase, “blaming the victim.”

We hear a similar argument today: to emphasize the effects of poverty is to make excuses. Reformers may make this argument in various ways and for various reasons (with some standing to benefit from emphasizing the deficiencies of schools that in turn become candidates for privatization); but with the language of “no excuses,” they all tap into the unrealized expectations of the civil rights era. Unfortunately, the advocates of holding schools accountable tend to neglect or dismiss an equally important legacy of the 1960s, to the detriment of their professed goal of eliminating achievement gaps: the Coleman Report (1966) and nearly five decades of subsequent research showing that socioeconomic status, cultural capital and other non-school factors have even more impact on academic achievement than do teachers and schools.

How to focus on those external factors while maintaining high expectations of schools? One example from the 1960s was the leadership of African American educator Marcus Foster. Foster earned acclaim as a principal in Philadelphia and superintendent in Oakland, before being assassinated by the Symbionese Liberation Army in 1973 in a bizarre protest against an allegedly racist school system.

Foster exemplified the accountability ethos of the civil rights era: “Inner city folks . . . want people in there who get the job done, who get youngsters learning no matter what it takes,” he once wrote. “They won’t be interested in beautiful theories that ex­plain why the task is impossible.” But Foster did not win awards for improving achievement in struggling schools by pitting communities against educators; he got communities and schools to work together—and to insist upon accountability from taxpayers and political and economic institutions, too. On one occasion, for example, he closed the Oakland schools and transported thirty busloads of Oaklanders to the state capitol to seek more support for needy urban students—resulting not only in more money but in “three-thousand folks of all persuasions saying, ‘We stand together for schools.’”

Foster’s accomplishments in the 1960s, including his call for broader societal support, are echoed today—though not often enough—in such efforts as the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education, which calls for school reform to be combined with policies aimed at improving the health, the early childhood learning, and the out-of-school experiences of underachieving children. Not using poverty as an excuse to blame the victim is an important lesson from the 1960s. But it’s only half the story for those who truly hope to make equal education a civil right.

Reframing Shame: How and When Blame for Student Low Achievement Shifted

The shame that many teachers and principals feel at being made responsible for a school’s low academic performance is a recent phenomenon. Historically, policy elites and educators explained poor academic performance of groups and individual students by pointing to ethnic and racial discrimination, poverty, immigrants’ cultures, family deficits, and students’ lack of effort. School leaders would say that they could hardly be blamed for reversing conditions over which they had little control. Until the past quarter-century, demography as destiny was the dominant explanation for unequal school outcomes.

Things began to change by the mid-1970s. Other explanations for low academic performance among different groups of students gained traction: The school—not racism, poverty, family, culture, or even language differences–caused disadvantages in students. This explanation grew from research studies of urban elementary schools with high percentages of poor and minority students that did far better on national tests than researchers would have been predicted from their racial and socioeconomic status.

These high-flying ghetto and barrio schools had common features: staff’s belief that all urban children could learn; the principal of the school was an instructional leader; staff established high academic standards with demanding classroom lessons, frequent testing, and an orderly school (PDF el_197910_edmonds-2).  These “effective schools” proved to many skeptics that high poverty urban schools could be successful, as measured by tests. Students’ race, ethnicity, and social class did not doom a school to failure. And most important, that committed and experienced staff working closely together could make a decided academic difference in the lives of impoverished children of color. No longer could teachers and administrators blame students and their families for failing. Now, it was the responsibility of school staff to insure student success.

This fundamental swing in blame for the causes of inequities in outcomes are captured in the words of national leaders who often  admonish teachers and administrators to avoid the “soft bigotry of low expectations.” This reversal of responsibility for inequitable outcomes has shifted the burden for academic success completely from students’ shoulders to those of their teachers, principals, and superintendents.

While most of us cherish the egalitarian thought—enshrined in NCLB that all students will test proficient by 2014–research studies and the facts of daily experience should give us pause before nodding in agreement. Perhaps this total equality in results may occur in heaven but not on earth where variability in families’ behaviors and students’ talents, motivation, interests, and skills remain stubborn facts.

Thus, within a few decades, a 180-degree shift in responsibility for chronic academic failure has occurred. Neither extreme, however, squares with the facts. Responsibility rests with both community and district, both school and family, both teachers and students.

Blaming others may be momentarily satisfying but unhelpful in either improving schools or motivating students to do their best. On the one hand, expecting a school staff to have the full responsibility for students’ academic results neglects the long history of research and daily experience of students who come to school unready to learn. Family income, parental education and interest, health, neighborhood, and other factors influence what happens to growing children even before they enter kindergarten. If there is one fact researchers have established over and over it is that family income and education play a large role in children’s behavioral and academic performance in schools.

Striking a balance between documented facts of inequities among students when they appear at the schoolhouse door and documented facts of some educators’ shabby inaction while other educators turn basket-case schools into high-fliers is essential. But it is hard to strike this balance in the current unforgiving climate of state and federal accountability rules that name, blame, and shame districts and schools for gaps in achievement, high drop out rates, and low graduation numbers (SAN11-01).

In the current frenzied climate of state and federal penalties for low performance, what students bring to school, both their strengths and weaknesses, are seldom mentioned publicly because of policymakers’ and educators’ fear of being called racist, making excuses, or having low expectations. The dominant one-liner repeated again and again is that efficient, well-managed schools and districts are accountable for students’ academic success.

This situation pains those federal, state, and local policymakers and reformers who want to address those socioeconomic structures in the larger society that contribute to economic inequalities and students’ disadvantages such as tax policies favoring the wealthy, residential segregation, lack of health insurance, immigration policies, and discriminatory employment practices but find it hard to do in a political climate where top-down, business-driven reforms that blame teachers and their unions and use test scores to determine futures of teachers and schools blow like gale-force storms.

In such a climate, entrepreneurial reformers, federal policymakers, and wealthy donors direct attention to only fixing schools, a strategy that is both politically attractive and economically inexpensive compared to the uproar that would occur from attacking those who enjoy privileges from leaving those policies and structures untouched.

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Can Superintendents Raise Test Scores?

John Deasy, who was appointed superintendent of the 672,000-student Los Angeles district in January, will be evaluated … on improvement in the graduation rate, student proficiency and attendance. But he also has the opportunity to earn up to $30,000 in bonuses if the district sees an 8 or more percentage point increase in 3rd-grade scores on the state’s reading test, the percentage of students scoring proficient or advanced in 9th-grade algebra, and the four-year-graduation rate….

Jean-Claude Brizard, the chief executive officer of the 409,000-student Chicago schools, will be evaluated on such performance measures as: increasing the percentage of high schoolers who graduate within five years from 55.8 to 60 percent; improving from 27 to 35 percent the share of high schoolers who earn at least a 20 out of 36 on the ACT college entrance exam, and increasing the percentage of students passing the state standardized test for 3rd-grade reading from 57.8 to 70 percent….

Because school boards and mayors assume that measures of good schools can be found  in rising test scores, high school graduation rates, and college admissions, they hire superintendents to be instructional leaders, astute managers, and wily politicians to carry out board mandates and ensure that desired improvements occur. They also push out superintendents–just ask Chicago’s Jean-Claude Brizard who just left days ago after 17 months in office.

So superintendent contracts include clauses on raising test  scores. But can they do so? The literature on the superintendency, with few exceptions, answers  “yes” to the question.  When writers, policy makers, and administrators mention successful school chiefs they point to increasing scores on standardized achievement tests, high percentages of graduates entering college, and National Merit Scholarship finalists (SuperintendentLeadership)

Yet when superintendents are asked how they get scores or graduation rates to go up, the question is often answered with a wink or a shrug of the shoulders. Even among most researchers and administrators who write and grapple with this question of whether superintendents can improve test scores, there is no explicit model of effectiveness.

How exactly does a school chief who is completely dependent on an elected school board, district office staff that prior superintendents appointed, a cadre of principals in schools whom he or she may see monthly, and teachers who shut their doors once class begins–raise test scores, decrease dropouts, and increase college attendance? Without some model by which a superintendent can be shown to have causal effects, test scores going up or down remain a mystery, a matter of luck that the results occurred during that school chief’s tenure.

Many school chiefs, of course, believe they can improve student achievement. They have in their heads what I call the Rambo or Michelle Rhee model of superintending. Strong leader + clear reform plan + swift reorganization + urgent mandates + crisp incentives and penalties =  desired student outcomes. Think former New York City Chancellor Joel Klein, ex-Miami-Dade Superintendent Rudy Crew, and Alan Bersin in San Diego.

There are, of course, other models that are less heroic and mirror more accurately the complex, entangled world of moving policy to classroom practice through a school board, superintendent, principals, teachers, students, and parents. One model depicts indirect influence where superintendents shape a district culture of improvement, spend time on instructional issues, train principals to run schools, and work closely with teachers in supporting and prodding them to take on new challenges in their classrooms. Think Carl Cohn in Long Beach (CA), Tom Payzant in Boston (MA) and Laura Schwalm in Garden Grove (CA). Such an indirect approach is less mythical, takes a decade or more, and is less dependent upon the superintendent being Superman or Wonder Woman.

Whether school chiefs or their boards have a Rambo model, one of indirect influences, or other models in their minds, some theory exists to explain how they have an impact on student academic performance. Without some explanation for how they influence district office administrators, principals, teachers, and students to perform better than they have, most school chiefs have to figure out their own personal cause-effect model or rely upon chance.

Some superintendents, for example, figure that working 60-70-hour weeks insures that there will be payoff in student improvements. Other superintendents figure that showering the district with reforms will eventually produce some results that might improve student performance. And even other superintendents size up the situation as mysterious; they hope that they will get lucky and the students tested next year will make higher scores than this year’s group. The lack of attention to linkages between superintendent actions and student outcomes prompts those in office to keep their fingers crossed behind their backs.

What is needed are GPS navigation systems imprinted in school board members’ and superintendents’ heads that contains the following:

*A map of the political, managerial, and instructional roles superintendents perform, public schools’ competing purposes, and the constant political responsiveness of school boards to constituencies that inevitably create persistent conflicts.

*a clear cause-effect model of how superintendents influence others to do what has to be done,

*a practical and public definition of what will constitute success for school boards and superintendents.

Such a navigation system and map are steps in the direction of accurately answering the question of whether superintendents can raise test scores.

“Dynamic Conservatism” and Stability in Teaching

Why has the act of teaching in public schools (including charters) that serve wealthy, middle-class and poor children looked so familiar to generation after generation of journalists, researchers, parents and grandparents who enter classrooms? In short, why has there been so much continuity in teaching over the decades?

Surely, things have changed in classrooms. Desktops and laptops are prevalent in schools; teachers use the Internet for videos in lessons; students give PowerPoint presentations; teachers take immediate polls of student answers to multiple choice questions with clickers; new textbooks, some of which are online. Yet amid those changes, there is a commonness in the unfolding of a lesson, the activities that teachers direct students to do, and Q & A that characterizes the back-and-forth between teacher and students. How to explain that familiar continuity in teaching?

The organizational concept of “dynamic conservatism” involving both continuity and change to maintain a tenuous balance in classrooms and schools comes into play here. Institutions often fight and embrace change in order to remain the same. Families, hospitals, companies, courts, city and state bureaucracies, and the military frequently respond to major reforms by adopting those parts of changes that will sustain stability.

Consider, for example, school districts where administrators add new courses on critical thinking to meet reformers’ demand for 21^st century skills. Or teachers urging students to bring their laptops to class to do Internet searches, take notes, and work in teams to make PowerPoint presentations to class. These teachers have made changes in how they teach while maintaining their usual order of tasks and activities in lessons. They “hugged the middle” between traditional and non-traditional ways of teaching. [i]

Reform-driven policymakers, however, dead-set on redesigning classrooms and schools scorn hybrid teaching practices. They want transformation, not some cosmetic changes. Institutional stability is dysfunctional, they argue. It keeps worthy fundamental changes at arm’s length. Such policymakers see schools as complicated organizations that need a good dose of castor-oil rationality where incentives and fear, not habits from a bygone era, drive employees to do the right thing in schools and classrooms. [ii]

When policymakers intent on improving schools err in viewing schools as complicated rather than complex systems, hurdles multiply quickly to frustrate the turning of reforms into practice. Too many decision-makers lack understanding of “dynamic conservatism” in complex organizations or understand it and choose to ignore it because they see these systems as ineffective, even pathologically unworkable, and in need of re-engineering.

In adopting reforms that will jolt the system sufficiently to substantially alter teaching and learning, policymakers have mistakenly grafted practices borrowed from business organizations onto schools (e.g., zero-based budgeting in the 1970s; “management by objectives” and “restructuring schools” in the 1980s; pay-for-performance and loosening credential requirements in the 1990s and since).

No surprise, then, that policymakers treating complicated systems as complex ones in adopting and implementing school reforms–have triggered both active and passive parent, student, teacher and administrator resistance.

Analyzing the idea of “dynamic conservatism” at work in complex systems leads to a deeper understanding of why teaching over the past century has been a mix of old and new, both continuity and change. Change occurs all the time in schools and classrooms but not at the scope, pace, and schedule reform-driven policymakers lay out in their designs for reform. Sadly, such policymakers fail to understand the complex interaction between stability and change in nearly all organizations. In this failure of understanding lurks the many errors that decision-makers make in repeated efforts to transform schooling, teaching, and learning.

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[i] Donald Schon, Beyond the Stable State: Public and Private Learning in a Changing Society (New York: Norton, 1973). See Larry Cuban, Hugging the Middle: How Teachers Teach in an Era of Testing and Accountability (New York: Teachers College Press, 2009).

[ii] John Chubb and Terry Moe, Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1990). Frederick Hess, Spinning Wheels: The Politics of Urban School Reform (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1999).

Yet Again: Principals as Instructional Leaders

The constant chatter that principals should be innovative and tough-minded instructional leaders, on-top-of-everything CEOs, and smooth political tacticians reminds me of a photo* sent to me by a fellow blogger in Turkey.

I have written numerous times on the DNA of principaling and how  three roles–managing, instructing, and politicking–are essential to the daily work of principals. Researchers have observed elementary and secondary principals over the past century and documented time and again that most of their daily activities (at least half) are spent in administrative tasks. Managing a building, staff, children and youth, parents, central office officials, external agencies and companies doing business with the school consumes big chunks of time. And that is just to keep the place working and on course for teachers to teach and students to learn.

Principals reading the last paragraph would probably nod in agreement and could add activities that I omitted.

Of course, facts have little to do with ideology and the latest reform. For the past few decades, but especially since the federal law, No Child Left Behind, was passed, reform-minded academics and principal associations have advocated that the instructional leader is the primary role that principals  have to perform if schools are to do well academically–especially in urban districts where poor performance is pervasive. The key to  registering higher test scores, promoters of instructional leadership claim, is for the principal to lead teachers in designing the instructional program, coach teachers, do drop-in visits daily to classrooms, teach an occasional lesson, and evaluate how well (or poorly) teachers do over the 180 days of instruction. But as the photo of the rocket strapped to the Basset Hound says: “not everything new and shiny works.”

A recent report ( Shadow Study Miami-Dade Principals) of what 65 principals did each day during one week in 2008 in Miami-Dade county (FLA) shows that even under NCLB pressures for academic achievement and the widely accepted (and constantly spouted) ideology of instructional leadership, Miami-Dade principals spend most of their day in managerial tasks that influence the climate of the school but may or may not affect daily instruction. What’s more, those principals who spend the most time on organizing and managing the instructional program have test scores and teacher and parental satisfaction results  that are higher than those principals who spend time coaching teachers and popping into classroom lessons.

The researchers shadowed these elementary and secondary principals and categorized their activities minute-by-minute through self-reports, interviews, and daily logs kept by the principals.

In the academic language of the study:

The authors find that time spent on Organization Management activities is associated with positive school outcomes, such as student test score gains and positive teacher and parent assessments of the instructional climate, whereas Day-to-Day Instruction activities are marginally or not at all related to improvements in student performance and often have a negative relationship with teacher and parent assessments. This paper suggests that a single-minded focus on principals as instructional leaders operationalized through direct contact with teachers may be detrimental if it forsakes the important role of principals as organizational leaders (p. iv)

Two things jump out of this study for me. First, the results of shadowing principals in 2008 mirror patterns in principal work that researchers have found since the 1920s although the methodologies of time-and-motion studies have changed. Second, there is an association–a correlation, by no means a cause-effect relationship–between principals who spend more time managing the organization and climate of the school than those principals who spend time in direct contact with teachers in classrooms.

One study, of course, will not lower the volume or temper the rhetoric of principal-as-instructional-leader. But that study does bring into perspective that putting goggles and a rocket on a Basset Hound won’t make it fly any more than hyping the role of instructional leadership will make principals better at their jobs.

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*Tony Gurr a blogger who is an educational consultant in Ankara, Turkey, sent me a range of graphics that included this photo. No source was provided.