Visionary Leadership, Focus on Success for All Students, and a Dash of Humility

Yesterday the AASA named Marc Johnson of Sanger, California the National Superintendent of the Year. I happened to meet Marc a few weeks ago at a superintendents' conference and was very impressed with him. He is passionate, wise, and committed to kids -- and very modest about his accomplishments -- he was able to turn around a failing district in just a few years - and not with millions in federal funding. Read here to learn more.

What Marc did was focus on a limited set of critical results for student achievement and then depend on teacher collaboration to develop solutions. Good teachers want to improve the learning environment for students and they generally know how to do it. Marc Johnson knew this and initiated professional learning communities in Sanger, and then got out of the way.

Teachers collaborated to develop, implement and measure strategies to make every student successful. Now the district is no longer in school improvement and most of the schools are achieving at high levels. The results are magnificent!

What did the teachers do? They identified minimum standards for students to achieve at every grade level and then committed to help every single child achieve those objectives (rather than pushing them to the next grade unprepared).  Through the PLCs they shared best practices and coached each other. They always focused on the kids - not politics - and the school leadership ensured that everything that worked was measured and replicated.

It's not that complicated, but in most districts, there are too many distractions on 'new programs' to perform miracles rather than focusing on the processes that work.

"Bust a Deal and Face the Wheel" - The Craziness of High Stakes Testing!

Sometimes moments in your life become juxtaposed to create a heightened awareness of reality - or -  a new view of it.

I just watched Mad Max - Return to Thunderdome for the umpteenth time and then a few days later during the holidays I listened as my nephew described the depressing situation in his elementary school.  The story thrust a line from the movie into my head - "Bust a deal and face the wheel" uttered by Auntie Entity (Tina Turner).

First, the background. Dan is a gifted special ed teacher who has dedicated his career to helping children, like his mentally disabled brother, achieve the highest levels possible. Yet, it is challenging to say the least. Every day he sees slight progress - he's a professional and recognizes and can measure his students' progress.

Yet, once a year the teachers are forced to administer the state tests. And here's the "deal": if your students pass with adequate yearly progress, the government will leave you alone. But if they don't make the expected progress, and you "bust the deal." you become a failing school and get to "face the wheel" - choosing between longer hours for more drill and kill, getting fired or furloughed, being taken over by a charter organization, etc.

So he is now in a failing school.

Here's the craziness of it all. Our rules around testing in the U.S. seem almost as strange as the rules in Barter Town in the movie, a bureaucracy carved out for a failing system. When Dan tests his kids, they must be tested at their grade level and they must read the test by themselves. Now the population in his school is 25% special education (it is a kind of magnet school) and on top of that, 50% ESL, leaving only 25% of the students without these challenges. He told me of one boy who had just arrived in this country from Africa, who could speak no English, and was directed by the teacher to 'play the game' of marking one circle per question - questions that he could not read!

One test, on one day out of 180 school days, determines the fate of an entire school community. Welcome to Thunderdome! "Two men enter, one man leaves" - 50% drop out rates have some root causes and this is one of them!

Dan is thinking of changing careers, though he really doesn't want to - he loves his students. But for his mental health, he might have to.

We must stop the insanity! Give back the schools to their communities and apply what we know works to make all schools better!

Finally an Answer for School Leaders: Use the Power of Your People!

I recently read a wonderfully uplifting report about a promising new movement in educational transformation. APQC (the American Productivity and Quality Center), a 30 year old organization founded by visionary Jack Grayson that has done incredible work in industry, health care, and government, has completed a pilot study in 11 districts across the U.S. applying their approach to school improvement. The project, called Northstar, brought systematic thinking to district leaders to help them solve costly and time-consuming problems such as reducing utility costs, improving school bus safety, reducing drop-out rates, redesigning curriculum, and freeing up teachers for more instructional time. Their focus is on process improvement and performance management -- in other words, looking at the everyday work of school personnel to uncover opportunities for lowering costs, improving efficiency and effectiveness, and eliminating wasted time. 

Here's what I like about the APQC approach:

• First, it acknowledges that schools are inhabited by passionate and smart teachers, administrators, and staff who really want to do a good job educating children. How many news stories lately highlight that aspect of school personnel? It's not the people who are causing the problems - it's the system, policies, and processes.
• Second, it provides a collaborative process for cross-functional teams to identify top problems to solve, uncover root causes, and create solutions together. No heavy dependency on expert consultants and 'gurus' telling the leaders what pedagogical approach is the best, what technology to use, what software to buy -- no flavor of the month!
• Third, it provides a customizable process that APQC consultants can align with district leaders' and stakeholders priorities and organizational culture. The approach helps districts focus on what's important,  especially under today's budget constraints and high achievement expectations, and drive toward solid solutions that all stakeholders can buy into.
• Fourth, APQC builds capacity for the district to continue the process improvement and performance management approach to 'running the business' after the first few projects are successfully completed.

What I love about all this is the process perspective. Long ago I had the opportunity to hear Dr. Edwards Deming talk about process and I will never forget his memorable admonition to managers at General Motors, where I was working. When talking about all of the problems GM was experiencing, Dr. Deming said: "It's not the workers - they are not the cause of the problem (think, let's fire all of the teachers), they are doing the best they can given the system they are working in. It's up to management to provide a system in which smart people can be successful."

This approach is refreshing given all of the confusion in education today around the 'best program' to adopt. It puts solution development in the hands of the people who do the work, it leverages process and performance data, and it is guru-and technology agnostic! The APQC PPM approach has worked for 30 years in every other line of business -- it's time for school leaders to accept that they can learn something from those who have been successful in every other sector!

Six Impossible Things

The other day I saw the movie Alice in Wonderland and came upon a terrific line spoken by Alice about her father, an innovative capitalist: "Why, everyday I've thought of six impossible things before breakfast!" Near the end of the movie Alice realizes that six things she thought were impossible had all happened! I'm beginning to feel the same way about our national educational landscape. Impossible, or at least, unlikely things are happening that may shape - in a positive way - the re-authorization of the ESEA, also known as the "No Child Left Behind" act as well as The Race To The Top competition. There are obvious political reasons for some of these events and controversy as well, but I think they are signs of a major disruption in the attempt of the federal government, specifically the DOE, to exert more control over local issues.

1. Governor Crist vetoes Florida's bill to tie teacher evaluation to test scores and eliminate tenure. While it is unclear whether the huge opposition to the bill by teachers, students, parents, teachers, and community leaders swayed him, it is clear that grassroots efforts are gaining momentum.
2. Kansas, Vermont, Indiana, Texas, and others have pulled out of Race to the Top for a variety of reasons, but in essence they are refusing to adhere to the Feds' control of local issues by attaching strings to the money.
3. Diane Ravitch, a staunch supporter of charter schools, standards, and accountability using standardized testing, has reversed her point of view based on data showing that these 'innovations' aren't working. Her new book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System is now number 17 on the NYT bestseller list after a little over a month. Her Facebook fan base is growing fast!
4. Diane is being listened to as she makes her way across the country and it is the grassroots - teachers, administrators, parents - who are coming to hear her. They finally have someone on their side.
5. Arne Duncan is doing a series of town hall meetings on CNN. He's saying all the right things and admitting that there are serious flaws in NCLB. Could it be he's floating trial balloons for big changes or is this just another politician telling us what we want to hear with no plans to "walk the talk"?
6. The DOE is funding consortia across several states to create more balanced assessments ($350 million). Hopefully they will look at more than just test scores. The largest consortia has Linda Darling Hammond as their chief advisor. That is reassuring. As Obama's chief education advisor during his campaign, she was the logical choice for Secretary of Education but was pushed out. Maybe now she can have some influence.

In some ways none of these events are impossible...but they may represent a groundswell back to sanity in education policy decision-making...letting the professionals in the field start making some headway in fixing so much of what is wrong.

New York Times Thinly Veiled Support of Charters Is Wrong

Today the New York Times published an editorial titled "Who Grades the Graders" and in its first paragraph proposes that a more complex form of evaluating teachers is needed, including rethinking the role of principals and superintendents.

I agree with that sentiment, but the editorial says little about principal's role in evaluation and nothing about superintendents. Instead it focuses on a study by the Center for American Progress about the effectiveness of teacher evaluation in 5 charter schools representing the three major charter school operators. The NYT once again is pushing the charter school solution for American education rather than a broader view about best practices evident in mainstream public schools as well.

Many education leaders believe in a view of teacher evaluation that insists on multiple measures and focuses the conversation on teacher development rather than a punitive approach to simply weed out bad teachers. Principals and superintendents do have important roles here, especially around providing the time and resources for this to be implemented.

But this isn't happening just in charter schools.

One of the leaders in teacher development is the New Teacher Center which mentors and coaches over 49,000 teachers across the country. The involvement of organizations like NTC, who work in thousands of mainstream public schools, in the re-authorization of ESEA is critical if the Feds are to create a balanced view of teacher development and evaluation.

In fact, Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island is proposing the Teacher and Principal Improvement Act, which would amend the ESEA Title II to include more comprehensive developmental evaluation processes for teachers. One statistic quoted in a description of Reed's proposal states that the cost of replacing teachers who leave the profession is $7,300,000,000 annually! Firing bad teachers isn't the key issue, it's developing new teachers so they will be more successful and stay.

But we need to go one step further in teacher evaluation by focusing on the work of students as well. The Schlechty Center's work with thousands of educators provides methodology for using a collegial  coaching process for looking at the quality of student work as evidence of effective teaching. By examining the design of learning activities and resulting student products, teachers are evaluated by the success of their customers - their students - who are depending on schools to enable them to be productive and responsible members of our society, in their work and in their civic duties.  This broader, student-centered approach, could fundamentally and positively impact teacher development and retention, as well as the quality of American public schools. We don't need charters to make this happen for all children.

Is The Administration Finally Admitting Change Is Needed?

The Obama administration is revising NCLB - finally there is sensibility in Washington. Maybe. The good news is the expansion of standards to include science and social studies, not just math and ELA. Also positive is the plan to back off AYP and, rather, set goals for college or career readiness for graduating students. Another positive aspect is the focus on principal quality in addition to ensuring the effectiveness of teachers.

However, there's still the goal of using testing as the measure of success with a heavy hand by the federal government on ensuring compliance to standards. Even with new national standards that reflect higher-order thinking versus memorizing facts and formulas, schools will still be held accountable by the federal government, rather than their state government, or better yet, their community. Even with the decrease in the number of poor performing schools being punished, the federal government is still meddling in local issues. Providing grants and funding for innovation and improved results is a great role for the Feds but using test scores as the only measure of success is just wrong. Awarding the dollars in return for compliance to unproven reform practices (e.g, more charters, firing staff, closing schools) is even more deadly to public education in this country.

Local communities - politicians, business leaders, formal and informal social groups - need to take back control. Some districts and states are refusing to compromise local control and principles by not applying for Race to the Top funding. We need to see more community and state leaders have the courage to just say "no" to the money if it means implementing questionable improvement practices, that are more like punishment than rewards.

Like Rip Van Winkle, Not Much Has Changed

With this first posting I rekindle a passionate flame that was extinguished 30 years ago when I gave up and left teaching. As I re-entered the field of public education as director of an $80 million Cisco school transformation project after Hurricane Katrina, I noticed that not much had changed since 1980, and in fact, things were much worse. Sure, standards were introduced, and that was a good thing after the swirling confusion of the open classroom era in the '70's, but now they have been taken to the extreme, enforced by mindless, rote lessons and meaningless high stakes tests. As I've visited classrooms across the country, I see teachers who are held hostage in a swamp of senseless bureaucratic rules imposed from way above the community schools in which they teach. Administrators' feel trapped as well as needed funding is held up as bait to lure them into compliance. This is exactly the system I left, only worse.

However, there are also rays of hope all around the country. We saw it in our Cisco 21S project districts in Mississippi and Louisiana. We met teachers, administrators, and school boards who really wanted to design a new way for kids to learn and for administrators to lead. We met visionary, seasoned practitioners like Phil Schlechty and Larry Rosenstock who, unlike me, never gave up the vision that we all had in the 70's and that still has only been achieved in pockets of innovation.

I hope to use this blog to spark educational change.

I believe we can design better schools, but not without fundamentally changing the way they are managed. A system approach to change is needed. After 30 years of working in the business world, I've learned a lot about system change and organizational design. I hope to contribute my experience and ideas as part of a larger movement that has started from the ground up rather than the top down. The top is driving American education out of business and the only ones left behind will be the poor and those without any other choices.

As I did in the 70's, I expect to get into some trouble by questioning the status quo. But I don't really care - the goal is too important! Our children's, and our country's, futures are at stake.

Peg "Sparkie" Maddocks (a name given to me by my golf buddies for my ability to make sparks appear on golf tees!)