Category: Organizational Change

Sunday Morning Quarterback

Posted on | by Sam

Earlier this week the DC Public Charter School Board released its latest rankings of every charter school operating in the nation’s capital. Some schools earned higher or lower scores than last year — each school is rated either Tier 1, 2 or 3 — but the majority did not change. No surprise there: these things take time, not to mention the fact that our system for evaluating whether a school is high- or low-performing remains imperfect at best.

Still, the report worried me, mostly because of the language charter leaders used to frame their reactions to the rankings. “If your results aren’t good after a fair period of time, you need to lose your right to operate,” said Robert Cane, executive director of Friends of Choice in Urban Schools, or FOCUS. And Naomi DeVeaux, deputy director of the D.C. Public Charter School Board, said this: “You can’t tread water and stay a Tier 2 school. Each school has to continue to become better.”

On one level, my response is, “Well, of course.” No school should be allowed to continually provide a subpar learning environment, and every school should be proactively seeking ways to improve. Yet what I hear in the undercurrents of these comments is an expectation that schools achieve quick results, sustain a linear march to excellence, and operate under a no-excuses culture of expectations. And maybe it’s just coincidence because we’re in DC, but when I hear that kind of language from the top, I think of the Washington Redskins. And when I consider all we need to do to improve the city’s schools, I can’t think of a worse organizational model for systemic change and sustained success.

For those that don’t follow it closely, the Redskins are a storied NFL franchise with a long history of success — just not recently. In fact, since current owner Dan Snyder bought the team in 1999, the Redskins have become a perennial cellar dweller and experienced nearly constant change at the top — seven different head coaches over the past thirteen seasons, to be precise.

This is not exactly a recipe for success. Yet Snyder has spent goo gobs of money over that time, and he clearly, desperately, wants to win. So do the players. So why aren’t the Skins winning? And what does any of this have to do with the DC charter school community?

Simply put, what has plagued the Skins is the impatience of Dan Snyder, and the jittery culture he has established. He overpaid for free agents instead of building through the draft. He failed to consider the ways different pieces come together to form a team — that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. And by hiring and firing coaches whenever things didn’t turn around quickly enough, he ensured that his team would never have time to establish a sustainable, long-term road map for success.

By contrast, consider the approach of the Pittsburgh Steelers, one of the NFL’s oldest and most successful franchises. In my 42 years on earth, the Steelers have won six Super Bowls, and played in eight. Along the way, they’ve also had nine losing seasons.  And yet over that entire period, the Pittsburgh Steelers have maintained a consistent organizational identity. They’ve always built through the draft. And in 42 years, while the rest of the sports world lives and dies on each game, they’ve had just three head coaches: Chuck Noll, Bill Cowher and Mike Tomlin.

Which takes us back to the comments of Robert Cane and Naomi DeVaux, and some lessons from the gridiron we would be wise to apply to the classroom as well: Sometimes, successful organizations do tread water. And always, the mark of a great culture is the extent to which it is aligned around core values and principles, and the extent to which its leaders create a culture of security, not anxiety, by their words and actions.

What are the core values and principles that define the shared vision of the DC Public Charter School community? And when it comes to constructing a path for sustained excellence, how can charter leaders be more like the Steelers — and less like the Redskins? There’s no single answer to those questions, but this much seems clear: when it comes to making hiring or firing decisions based solely on a school’s rating (or a team’s record), I can guarantee what legendary Steelers owner Art Rooney would say: that dog just won’t hunt.

(This article also appeared in the Washington Post.)

The World is . . . a Sisyphean Hill of Policy Smackdowns?

Posted on | by Sam | 3 Comments on The World is . . . a Sisyphean Hill of Policy Smackdowns?

As a former teacher with a MBA, I read a lot of “business books.” And of the titles I’ve read over the past few years, none have characterized the future of public education more presciently than Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat.

You can imagine my surprise, then, when I read an Op-Ed in this weekend’s New York Times in which Friedman abandons the nascent non-hierarchical plains of the twenty-first century for the familiar twentieth-century terrain of command-and-control. Yet there it is – and there he is – writing about the future of school reform, and praising the Obama administration’s Race to the Top program.

First, let’s recall what Friedman described in The World is Flat – the dawn of collaboration and the demise of top-down politics. As he wrote, “We are now just at the beginning of a massive, worldwide change in habits. . . from command and control to connect and collaborate.” In that world, “the most important ability you can develop in a flat world is the ability to ‘learn how to learn,’” and the only way that sort of shift will come about is by “having an abundance of trust.” Friedman quotes a wide range of experts to strengthen his claims, including foreign policy expert Michael Mandelbaum, who, though speaking of geopolitics, might as well have been talking about school reform. “People change as a result of what they notice,” Mandelbaum said, “not just what they are told.”

Which leads us to this weekend’s column, and Friedman’s praise for the Obama administration’s support of a vision of “educational reform based on accountability of teachers and principals,” and for an education secretary who trumpets reforms that “have already showed double-digit increases in reading or math in their first year” without realizing the only thing those sorts of numerical gains accurately reflect are the funhouse-mirror state of our modern discourse.

What Friedman seems to have forgotten, and what the Obama administration has repeatedly failed to heed, is that systems as dysfunctional as those in American public education require more than a new set of end goals: they require deep and sustained investments in our collective capacity to imagine and sustain something new – and that sort of change requires two main ingredients: technical expertise and emotional commitment.

Unfortunately, Race to the Top (RTTT) lacks both ingredients: its formulas for technical expertise, such as new teacher evaluation systems (good idea) based significantly on student test scores (bad idea), move the goalposts but ignore the skill levels of the players. As international change expert Michael Fullan points out, RTTT “pays little or no attention to developing the capacity of leaders to improve together or as a system: it is based on a failed theory that teacher quality can be increased by a system of competitive rewards, and it rests on a badly flawed model of management where everyone manages their own unit, is accountable for results, and competes with their peers – creating fiefdoms, silos, and lack of capacity or incentives for professionals to help each other” – in short, the sorts of habits Friedman defines as the key to becoming successful in the flat world of the twenty-first century.

Worse still, programs like RTTT reflect a technocratic insensitivity to the actual rhythms of human beings, and a complete disregard for the necessity of building a shared emotional commitment for the changes we seek (Chicago, anyone?). So whereas attaching a dollar sign to the “recommended” reforms of RTTT was an effective strategy, as was tying each state’s conditional funding under ARRA to its agreement to adopt the common core learning standards, it’s equally true that there are short games and there are long games. And what I loved about The World is Flat was its recognition that to win the long game of the current century, compulsion was fool’s gold; commitment was the gold standard.

In fairness to Mr. Friedman, this point was made long before him. As Plato said, a loooong time ago, “Knowledge, which is acquired under compulsion, obtains no hold on the mind.”

The sooner we heed that advice, the better.

(This article also appeared in the Huffington Post.)

This is what Special Education (in America) Looks Like

Posted on | by Sam

Imagine if the goal in America was to make every teacher a “special ed” teacher – and to give every student specialized attention? I bet we’d see less stigma, more individual and collective capacity to diagnose and meet the needs of each child, and a deeper investment in our nation’s teachers.

If that sounds like a pipe dream, bear one thing in mind — that’s how Finland already does it. Why not us?

Special Education 101 Infographic

USC Rossier Online

 

In Chicago, Imagining a Different Ending

Posted on | by Sam | 6 Comments on In Chicago, Imagining a Different Ending

Now that the teacher strike in Chicago has ended – and the city’s schoolchildren have returned to school – one thing seems unavoidably clear: despite the agreement, Mayor Rahm Emanuel and his city’s public school teachers will remain deeply divided, deeply mistrustful of one another, and deeply entrenched for the foreseeable future.

The good news is that the rest of us can learn something from the mistakes both sides in this particular melodrama have made. In fact, there are cities that have actually transformed their school systems for the better, and done so in a way that left everyone feeling good about (and committed to) the changes. To bring about such a shift, however, the central figures of reform – elected officials and teacher unions – must start thinking very differently about how transformational change occurs, and what it requires.

One place Chicago’s leaders might want to visit is the Canadian province of Ontario, which realized a few years ago that its school system needed some massive remodeling. Unlike Chicago, however, the key figures in Ontario understood that in order to improve their schools they needed to build collective capacity – which meant generating both the emotional commitment and the technical expertise that no amount of individual capacity working alone could ever match.

Educational change expert Michael Fullan was a part of the successful reforms in Ontario. In his book All Systems Go, Fullan explains why it worked: “The gist of the strategy is to mobilize and engage large numbers of people who are individually and collectively committed and effective at getting results relative to core outcomes that society values. It works because it is focused, relentless (i.e., stays the course), operates as a partnership between and across layers, and above all uses the collective energy of the whole group. There is no way of achieving whole-system reform if the vast majority of the people are not working on it together.”

If the morality play in the Windy City had played out differently, each side would have heeded a different part of Fullan’s advice. Mayor Emanuel would have recognized the importance of fostering a deeper emotional commitment from the folks most responsible for seeing the reforms through – his city’s teachers. He would have realized the futility of pointing out that Chicago had one of the shortest school days in the country while also denigrating his city’s educators and putting them on the defensive from the moment he took office. And he would have genuinely welcomed educators into the process of reimagining what Chicago’s schools should look like. In short, he would have done what our civic leaders are supposed to do: foster eclectic coalitions that bring people together in a spirit of partnership to work towards a common goal.

By the same token, in a parallel world Chicago‘s teachers would have realized that a deeper level of technical expertise is required in modern American classrooms. They would have been the first to call for a longer school day – and they would have made sure the extra time was used wisely. They would have been the first to demand a better system of evaluation – and they would have made sure it actually helped teachers improve the quality of their professional practice. And they would have been the first to acknowledge the value of empowering each school principal to build his or her own teaching staff. In short, they would have done what our educators are supposed to do: help the rest of us understand what great teaching and learning actually looks like – and requires.

Instead, what we see in Chicago is a mayor primarily focused on the technical aspects of school reform, and a teaching force primarily driven by emotion. Ontario instructs us that it doesn’t need to be this way. But it will, in Chicago and elsewhere, until we heed some simple advice: How we speak, not just what we say, matters greatly. And until the tenor of our national conversation reflects a deep awareness of, and commitment to, working together to achieve results, our efforts at developing collective capacity will remain, in Chicago and elsewhere, agonizingly out of reach.

(This article also appeared in the Huffington Post.)

The World is Watching Chicago, Once Again

Posted on | by Sam

In 1968, student protesters stationed outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago broke into a spontaneous chant that quickly crystallized the tenor of the times: “The whole world is watching!”

It’s ironic, then, that one day after this year’s Democratic National Convention, rumors of a city-wide teacher strike in Chicago are reaching a similarly feverous pitch.

As they do, I want to borrow that famous line from 1968 and re-purpose it for 2012. The whole world should be watching, once again, because the issues at stake in Chicago are the same issues at stake in our ongoing efforts to improve American public education. In short, what’s happening in Chicago is extremely important, extremely rare, and not entirely discouraging.

It’s extremely important because you have a Democratic mayor pushing reforms that his city’s teachers — the majority of who are also Democrats — are pushing back against. The mayor wants merit pay and a longer school day. The teachers want a more balanced set of courses, including the arts, music and foreign languages. The mayor wants 50% of a teacher’s formal evaluation to be based on student reading and math scores. The teachers counter that if you enact a policy like that, the only thing your extended day will get you is more test prep and more concerted efforts to game the system. In that sense, the fight in Chicago isn’t purely about teacher contracts — it’s also about conflicting visions of how you create the optimal conditions for teaching and learning.

It’s extremely rare because it hasn’t happened in a quarter-century — and yet 90% of Chicago’s teachers, and 98% of the teachers that voted, indicated their support for a strike. That tells you just how strongly Windy City teachers feel. And regardless of what one thinks about teacher unions, surely we can all agree that having teachers more directly engaged in core questions about education reform is a good idea.

And finally, it’s not entirely discouraging. The most recent reports I’ve read suggest that a deal is close to being reached. If that’s true, I’d characterize the Chicago showdown of 2012 as our latest reminder of what democracy actually looks like when it works — messy, frustratingly slow, and contentious. And yet, at the same time, when we honor individual and collective processes for making our opinions felt and known, it’s also the best chance we’ve got to ensure that when decisions are made, they are done so with the fullest possible knowledge of what “we the people” wish to see.

Tune in if you can.

(This article also appeared on CNN’s education blog, Schools of Thought.)

Reimagining Our Schools, NOW

Posted on | by Sam | 1 Comment on Reimagining Our Schools, NOW

It’s a presidential election season, which means we can all be sure of two things: conversations about education will take a backseat to more “pressing” issues like the economy and foreign policy, and Congress will once again do nothing to address our desperate need for a new federal education policy.

However, just because our elected officials can’t get the job done doesn’t mean the rest of us are powerless to be the change we wish to see in the world. In fact, local educators could do a lot to sidestep national policymakers by committing to do just three things this coming school year:

1.   Be Visionary – Almost every school in America has a mission statement to guide its short-term decisions. Almost no school in America has a vision statement to guide its long-term aspirations. Is it any wonder that educators feel overwhelmed by the day-to-day responsibilities of their work?

One of the defining characteristics of any transformational organization – whether it’s an elementary school or a Fortune 500 company – is an ability to manage the creative tension between a distant vision and an up-close focus. As educators, that means it’s essential we keep an eye on the daily progress of our students in subjects like reading and math. And it means articulating a long-range goal to which we aspire, and being mindful of which decisions will get us there – and which will take us off course.

As an example, consider Science Leadership Academy, a public high school in Philadelphia with a mission of “providing a rigorous, college-preparatory curriculum with a focus on science, technology, mathematics and entrepreneurship.” SLA’s mission clarifies the curricular focus of the school, but it tells us little about what shapes its philosophy of learning. For that, you need to consider its vision: to consistently ask and answer three questions – “How do we learn? What can we create? And what does it mean to lead?”

That extra layer of specificity is helpful not just to prospective parents, but also to SLA students, staff and administrators. And while educators are right to feel that the last ten years of federal education policy have narrowed their work to little more than basic-skills literacy and numeracy, there’s nothing preventing schools from taking the time to dream bigger.

2.   Be Specific About What Matters Most – Everyone agrees that in an ideal school, young people acquire the skills and habits to develop not just intellectually, but also socially and emotionally. According to our lawmakers, however, the mark of a successful school is still disproportionately based on reading and math scores. That’s ridiculous – but so are we if we refuse to take the time to explicitly identify which additional skills and habits we want students to practice and acquire.

This sort of work occurs informally in most schools, which hold generalized values for things like character, collaboration and empathy. Sometimes these words may appear on a wall;  other times they may get discussed during an advisory class. But there’s a big difference between implicitly valuing something in a person and explicitly committing to ensure that a person embodies those values.

The good news is that in a lot of schools, this sort of work has already begun. At the Project School in Indiana, educators work every day to nurture three sets of habits in their students: mind, heart and voice. And at the MC2 school in New Hampshire, students are assessed by their ability to master seventeen habits of lifelong learning – habits with specific rubrics and sub-skills that build a clear map for personal growth and evaluation.

Imagine if every school took the time to decide which skills and habits were most important to them, and then went the extra step by deciding how to measure what matters most?

3.   Be Comprehensive – It is both necessary and insufficient to craft a shared vision or identify which skills are most important for a young person’s overall learning and growth. What distinguishes transformational schools from the rest is their commitment to align everything they do – from student assessment to teacher evaluation to parent inclusion – around what they aspire to become.

This is not a code our elected lawmakers are likely to crack anytime soon. So let’s stop waiting. Let’s use the coming school year to take back our profession by raising it to a different standard of clarity and possibility. And let’s start holding ourselves accountable to a vision that actually reflects what we know is required to leave no child behind.

How Should Teachers Spell R-E-S-P-E-C-T?

Posted on | by Sam | 1 Comment on How Should Teachers Spell R-E-S-P-E-C-T?

For the past several years, conversations about American public education – and how to improve it – have grown increasingly loud and contentious. In fact, there’s only one issue on which it seems all sides can agree: when it comes to the learning environment, nothing matters more than a great teacher.

It’s ironic, then, that as a society we act as though nothing matters less. We internalize the notion that “Those who can’t, teach.” We speak in two-dimensional terms that portray educators as either mythical saviors or selfish laggards. And we accept the notion that the best way to address the needs of our poorest children is to temporarily drop our smartest, most inexperienced educators into the center of communities that are not their own.

Ted Sizer, the man whose Horace series of books portrayed teachers in rich, three-dimensional terms, put it this way: “Americans underrate the craft of teaching.  We treat it mechanistically.  We expect to know how to teach fractions as though one needed only formulaic routine to do so, a way to plug in.  We talk about ‘delivering a service’ to students by means of ‘instructional strategies’; our metaphors arise from the factory and issue from the military manual. Education is apparently something someone does to somebody else.  Paradoxically, while we know that we don’t learn very well that way, nor want very much to have someone else’s definition of ‘service’ to be ‘delivered’ to us, we accept these metaphors for the mass of children.  We thus underrate the mystery, challenge, and complexity of learning and, as a result, operate schools that are extraordinarily wasteful.”

To be sure, part of the blame for this atmosphere of ignorance rests outside the schoolhouse door; but the remainder rests with teachers ourselves. If others do not fully appreciate the mystery and challenge of what we do every day, it is partly because we have failed to communicate the magic of that mystery outside of our own inner circle. And if the field we love has become wrongly obsessed with a single measure of student progress, our collective silence has extended the length of that particular fool’s errand.

The good news is that educators are starting to demonstrate how we can invest in the creation of a long-term teaching profession – not a short-term teaching force. More than half the states are rethinking how they grant teacher licenses to make the process more action-oriented. Solution-minded networks of educators are gathering at conferences like EduCon and #140edu to start crafting a different public narrative of what schools should be doing for students. And organizations like the National Board of Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) are sharing videos that document what powerful teaching & learning really looks like – and requires.

And then there’s the Department of Education, which is trying to better integrate the voices and perspectives of teachers into its policymaking through the Teacher Ambassador RESPECT Program. Fellows spend a year learning about federal programs and policies, and witnessing the process by which they are designed and implemented. These teachers are then asked to share their expertise with federal staff and serve as a bridge between the work of the Department and the wishes of the field.

Gregory Mullenholz, a fifth grade Teacher from Montgomery County, Maryland, spent the 2011-2012 school year as a Fellow in Washington. To him, it’s all part of a larger effort to “change the conversation around teaching. Rather than accepted martyrdom, this is about elevating the profession. Teachers cannot sit back and hope change happens to them; we have to lead the transformation. Districts need higher quality professional development that is aligned with higher-quality evaluations. And as a profession, we cannot accept the fact that we have a shelf-life, that there comes a point where it is no longer financially sustainable to teach and we have to go get a “real job” to support our families. We have to hold our profession to a higher standard.”

Claire Jellinek, Mullenholz’s colleague in the class of 2011-2012 fellows, agrees: “Certainly one of the most significant things I’ve learned is that creating policy is a process,” she said. “That means it’s on us to help spark the conversations that need to happen to effect meaningful change.”

If he were still alive, Ted Sizer would agree. “It is a radical idea that all children grow at the same rate and in the same way and thus can thereby be accurately classified and ‘graded’ in narrow, standardized ways,” he cautioned. “It is a radical idea that the power of a child’s mind can be plumbed by a single test and reduced to a small clutch of numbers. It is a radical idea that people of any age can learn well in crowded, noisy, and ill-equipped places. It is a radical idea that serious learning can best emerge from a student’s exposure to short blasts of ‘delivered’ content, each of less than an hour in length, and unified by no coherent set of common ideas. And it is a radical idea that a child can learn what is needed to live well in a complex society with schooling that encompasses barely half the days of a calendar year, and that ignores the opportunities —or lack of opportunities— available to each child.”

Fellow teachers – how will we contribute to a different sort of conversation about what it is we do and raise the standards of our own profession at the same time? What stories must we tell, and what innovations must we help create?

The waiting is over. It’s time to be the change.

Are Parent Trigger Laws a Good Idea?

Posted on | by Sam

It’s hard not to feel excited for the group of parents who successfully took over their California community’s school, and who now are dreaming of bigger things. “Our children will now get the education they deserve,” said Doreen Diaz, whose daughter attends Desert Trails Elementary in Adelanto. “We are on the way to making a quality school for them, and there’s no way we will back down.”

It’s equally hard to feel confident that this story will have the ending Ms. Diaz and others envision. For starters, any proposed changes at the school won’t take place until 2013. What happens when the majority of parents who spearheaded the campaign move onto the local middle school? Will a majority of the parents who opposed the trigger seek to switch the school’s focus a second time? And with something as complex as creating a healthy school in an environment beset by poverty — 100% of the school’s students are eligible for the free lunch program — how can the members of this community become fluent around issues of teaching and learning to make thoughtful choices about the future direction of their school?

A few months back, I suggested that this debate could provide an opportunity for the nation to step up its game in two areas — making effective group decisions and understanding how people learn — via a massive national book club (hello, Oprah?).

Clearly, this will never happen. But here’s something that must: a series of well-facilitated community conversations and meetings that help all residents of the Desert Trails attendance zone imagine their ideal school, and then work backwards to make that ideal real.

A great starting point would be to ask everyone in Adelanto to share the story of the most powerful learning experience of their lives — and then to stitch those stories together in order to build a school that is designed to create those types of experiences for all kids. I’ve been gathering people’s learning stories for years now, and they all point to a small set of core conditions that any good school must possess.

In fact, I can guarantee that the sort of place the parents of Desert Trails seek will need to be challenging, engaging and supportive, and that what kids learn will need to feel relevant to their lives and be as hands-on as possible. That means any proposal disproportionately concerned with raising kids’ test scores should be rejected outright, as should any proposal that doesn’t offer kids a balanced curriculum that includes physical education, the arts, and an approach to learning that gets kids outside of the classroom and into their communities. It means throwing out any proposal that isn’t clear about how it will equally foster a child’s intellectual, social and emotional growth. It means ignoring any proposal that doesn’t directly address how it will provide wraparound services for the children and families of Adelanto, whose needs extend far beyond the schoolhouse door. And it means tossing any plan that isn’t explicit about how it will provide all of these resources in a community where school funding is still determined by local property taxes.

In other words, anything is possible — and this thing in particular is really, really hard.