http://leo.oise.utoronto.ca/~vsvede Dimensions in Educational Leadership : A Profile Document and the link Organizational Culture Web Walk were fascinating to peruse this weekend. I particularly enjoyed working through "Your Organizational Culture: A Brainstorming Checklist" and "What is my Own Culture?" This site was developed by two graduate students for a computer conferencing class with Dr. Paul Begley at the University of Toronto. This site gave me a start on the reflections for the week's journal assignment and seemed to be aligned to what we've been discussiong in class.
www.ncrel.org/sdrs/areas/issues/educatrs/leadrshp/le100.htm Critical Isuue: Building a Collective Vision
In this article it describes the critical issues leaders in education face in building a collective vision that is clear, compelling, and connected to teaching and learning. Collective vision helps focus attention on what is important, motivates staff and students, and increases the sense of shared responsibility for student learning. This article continues to explain how to create a vision and the leaders role in shaping the school vision. It also states the vision can incorporate values and goals related to equity and justice, respect and appreciation for multiculturalism and diversity.
This article was interesting because it went into great detail of the importance of having a clear vision and mission statement for your school. This could create an enviroment that promotes parent volunteers and community support. A clear vision can help keep the school and the efforts of its staff and students on target.
Who am I as a leader? Do you really want to know yourself? Do you have the qualities to make a valuable leader to your group? Take a minute to look at yourself as a leader. Go to this website and take the leadership self assessment test. This site will ask you to take a survey on the attributes, skills, behavior, knowledge and tools that make up a highly successful leader. It will take some time and deep thinking, but it can give you an idea about your leadership qualities and capabilities.
This website has a variety of different topics to choose from. On the home page, there are categorical topics to choose from. I was particularly interested in the leadership styles sub-topic. The research on leadership styles are that individuals use a based combination of their beliefs, values and preferences, as well as the organizational culture and norms which will encourage or discourage different styles. The website gives seven generalization leadership types. Good website for a variety of different topics.
In Praise of Top-Down Leadership. DuFour, R (2007). The School Administrator. November, pg. 38-42. http://drprestonsedau678.blogspot.com/
Many schools are moving away from the "top-down" model where the central office mandates practices. The article also states that the "bottom-up" approach to school improvement doesn't work. This article is in favor of a "loose and tight" leader. This leadership approach fosters autonomy and creativity within a systematic framework. The article emphasizes the importance with getting tight about the right things. I think that this article provides a nice middle road to being a leader.
Author Dan Chenoweth has identified five characteristics that differentiate great organizational leaders from “toxic” leaders. “Toxic,” refers to the very worst of leaders, those who destroy the value of the company and the spirit of its employees. The great leaders are those who are:
• Ethical: Just, Upright, Honest, Open, Straight Forward, Honorable • Credible: Forward Looking, Inspiring, Visionary • Politically Astute: Knowing how to build coalitions and make compromises so that groups with disparate goals will work together toward a common goal • Competent: Combining education, experience and skills that tell followers that this person knows what they are doing. • Concerned for Organization vs. Concerned for Self
What makes “toxic” leaders so dangerous is that often they share some of those same characteristics!
“Toxic” Leaders Extremely unethical and amoral, credible in beginning but lacked credibility in the end, very politically astute, very competent, could even be visionary and charismatic. Bad Leaders: Narcissistic and self-centered, unethical, not credible, politically astute, sometimes competent, many times not competent, not visionary or charismatic,average leaders, ethical for the most part, some credibility, sometimes too focused on their own self-interests, average competence and political skills, not visionary or charismatic.
Good Leaders: Very ethical, credible, above-average competence, average political skills, sometimes visionary and charismatic.
Great Leaders: Very ethical, extremely credible and competent, excellent political skills, visionary and charismatic.
What kind of leader are you? Take the self-assessment that Kelly posted on the blog and discover your syle of leadership. Cut and paste the following link and get started with your personal evaluation. http://nsba.org/sbot/toolkit/leadSA.html/
A good leader isn't out to impose his or her will on others, and isn't set on a fixed idea of how things should turn out. Instead, they're listening, coordinating, steering, guiding,
A good leader makes room for other people to assist with leadership. They don't micromanage.
A good leader often says, “Tell me what’s on your mind.” “What should we do?” “Where should we be headed?”
A good leader inspires everyone to do better.
A good leader leads by example.
A good leader shares credit where appropriate.
A good leader is able to share about the project in a way that others are called to participate --they can "hear themselves" in the vision.
Excellent stuff so far! Sue, please bring the org. culture checklist on Wed. Kelly, you beat me to it-- I was going to mention the NSBA site in class, so bring that too. Summer, Dufour et al are going to have to convince me that the "bottom up" approach has actually been tried... I look forward to discussing these with each of you tomorrow. David
The article states that there is considerable evidence from Fullan, Philip Schlechty and Richard Elmore that leaving school improvement to each school to resolve on its own doesn't result in more effective schools.
Bustamante, Rebecca "The Culture Audit":A Leadership Tool for Assessment and Strategic Planning in Diverse Schools and Colleges taken from NCPEA National Council of the Professors of Educational Administration (2005)
The article introduces educational leaders to culture audits: to view how schools are doing in meeting the needs of diverse populations according to their policies, programs, and procedures. It includes the following domains of focus: vision/mission, curriculum, community, staff/faculty,students, teaching and learning, conflict, evaluation, students, assessment, and events (celebrations). (The article is based on research on school culture from the National Center for Cultural Competence)
Well, I decided to look at one of my previous resources: Caring Enough to Lead, by Leonard O. Pellicer, and on the back were three other recommendations from Corwin Press books. They all sound like they have something to offer, and I thought I’d share them with you.
The first one is: Sergiovanni, Thomas J. Rethinking Leadership: A Collection of Articles, Second Edition, California: Corwin Press, 2006.
The description of this book is- In the second edition of this revolutionary collection, school leaders are introduced to the craft of moral leadership. Thomas J. Sergiovanni, the leading authority on moral leadership, uncovers how successful leadership practices are often based in values and ideas rather than formal processes. Readers will learn an innovative approach to reframing leadership, while discovering how to build effective learning communities.
The second one is: Blandstein, Alan, Cole, Robert, & Houston, Paul. Out-of-the-Box Leadership, California: Corwin Press, 2006.
The description of this book is- Out-of-the-Box Leadership is the perfect guide to help administrators rethink, reshape, and strengthen their leadership styles and provide confident, focused direction that will help build real success for students and all members of the school community. In this second volume of The Soul of Educational Leadership series, the editors offer creative perspectives on the challenges of reframing leadership practice. Presenting key strategies from leadership experts such as Thomas Sergiovanni and Dennis Sparks, this compact resource combines research, reflective exercises, and day-to-day school leadership procedures for motivating students and providing meaningful cultural change in school communities. An ideal handbook for principals, assistant principals, superintendents, and district administrators, this copublication with AASA and the HOPE Foundation discusses: •Developing high-quality leadership •Inspiring transformative leadership •Embracing leadership alternatives •Evaluating current school reform practices •Meeting the challenges in leadership roles
The third one is: Houston, Paul & Sokolow, Stephen. The Spiritual Dimension of Leadership: 8 Key Principles to Leading More Effectively, Corwin Press.
The description of this book is- Infuse your leadership practice—and your life—with greater purpose and wisdom! This book illuminates many of the core values, beliefs, and principles that can guide, sustain, and inspire leaders during difficult times. These values and principles have underlying spiritual roots. The more aware of them you are, and the more you express them in leadership practice, the more effective you become. The authors offer the following eight key leadership principles to help you become a more enlightened leader: • Intention • Attention • Unique gifts and talents • Gratitude • Unique life lessons • Holistic perspective • Openness • Trust Reap the many rewards of practicing these principles and journey down a path of awareness and insight that will empower you and those you lead to create the best possible future for our children.
Characteristics of Leaders Looking at all the leaders and there accomplishments I see many similar characteristics. They look at the leaders and the laggards and present the characteristics of the leaders. They have a clear vision and are supported by upper management. They are effective communicators with outstanding teamwork and fostering an openness that stimulates innovation and learning. They also provide incentives to change behavior and for personal development. www.entovation.com
This website provides useful information in deciding what makes a good leader. It also points out that different contexts requires different sets of qualities.
The website mentions a list of traits that make a great leader and a list of traits that would create a toxic leader. The dangerous part is that often times these traits overlap between the great and toxic leader
My resource started with a book published by the National Research Council titled “Starting Out Right: A Guide to Promoting Children’s Reading Success”. This publication is a researched based guide to promoting children’s reading success written by a committee on the Prevention of Reading Difficulties in Young Children. Although I recognize the techniques as solutions to addressing individual learning styles of all ages, it focuses on children up to third grade. This book is written with the parent, teacher, and child in mind. Also included in the text are further internet resources, recommended children’s books, and activities for the parent or teacher to do with the child. This resource led me to their National Academies Press (NAP) web site http://www.nap.edu which is a comprehensive location for research based resources on topics in science, engineering, education, and health, just to name a few. Each topic has a section titled “policy, reviews and evaluations”. This makes it fairly simple to determine if the curriculum you are using is data based. The site also offers electronic (PDF) book editions as well as over 200 books for purchase.
National Research Council. (1999) Starting out right: a guide to promoting children’s reading success. National Academy Press: Washington, DC
Leadership Development: The Destruction of "Trust" in the Workplace
In this article it describes the new fad of leadership. It describes the change that has taken palce over the past decade. Character- no longer important, Solid corporate leadership have been replaced with a Hollywood-esque image. Responsibility has been pushed far down the organization chart to the lowest levels. Many responsible managers have been replaced with rude,fast-talking, "buzzword-spouting,"acronym-using facilitators of the latest trendy programs...Leaders in name and title only Employees' perceptions about the corporation's leadership only seem to be important if they ahve an effect on "results". So true!!! Many employees are losing respect for their superiors as well as the corporate system that created them. Many corporate leaders have become so removed from day-to-day operations that they no longer have a clue as to what is really happening!
My resources for the week are The Tao te Ching by Lao Tzu and The Prince by Machiavelli. These pieces of literature speak about leaders in very different ways. The Tao te Ching says a leader should be fair and generous in conflict, not controlling in their governing, and not competitive. Lao Tzu warned that success was as dangerous as failure and hope as hallow as fear. He said that when the master governs the people are hardly aware he exists, next best is the leader who is loved, next is the one who is feared and last is the one who is hated. He also said if you don’t trust people you make them untrustworthy. He also believed that if left alone men would do the right thing. He said that governing is like cooking a small fish, too much poking would spoil it. In contrast, Machiavelli said a leader should be feared rather than loved because people are fickle and their loyalty is fleeting. He would also argue a leader must be aware of the desired outcome and see all actions leading up to this outcome as only a means to the desired end. “Hence it is necessary for a prince wishing to hold his own to know how to do wrong, and to make use of it or not according to necessity.” Sometimes you must do wrong to achieve what is for the greater good. He also argued people were untrustworthy and should be seen as obstacles and rather than as co-workers. Overall, Machiavelli suggested that a leader always maintain “the majesty of his rank”. Whereas Lao Tzu suggested a leader be lowly and nourishing like water. The differences in leadership styles are very interesting. I would recommend these two pieces of literature to anyone.
US News & World Reportand Harvard’s John F. Kennedy Center for Public Leadership again teamed up to honor top leaders of the year, with the definition of leadership being a person “who motivates people to work collaboratively to accomplish great things.” Real principals turn their schools into learning communities. They believe that each individual in the school - staff or student - can achieve great things, and they expect no less.
I plan to do business as a principal of a secondary school as a Real Principal. To have the balance to pull together all parts of a schools role today. With the students, teachers, stockholders, standards, testing, and having students being prepared for the world as a students has the knowledge, skills and attitudes essential to become productive members of society.
Not that many years ago, principals managed their schools. Now they continue to manage the school, but serve as highly effective instructional leaders. District leadership has had to learn and teach instructional leadership, using data to drive instructional decisions, teaching to mastery, differentiating instruction, collaboration, and aligning what is taught to what is tested. Districts have also had to learn to be both open and selective to new instructional programs and strategies.
With high stakes, standards-based tests, the key is to closely align what is taught to what is tested. This often has the effect of narrowing the breadth of subject matter and is a concern for teachers. Students need to learn about many topics that are not tested. Yet the enormous number of tested standards makes it difficult – probably impossible – to have enough time for students to master all tested standards. Whatever the link between assessment and sanctions, credit should be given for continuous improvement and multiple measures should be taken into consideration, not just one test. Stair-step growth over time is the hallmark of a successful school and it should be recognized.
The role of the school has evolved, along with tremendous changes in expectations and responsibilities thrust on teachers and principals. Before the accountability movement, teachers were paid to teach lessons. It was clearly the student’s job to learn the material presented, and the teacher gave chapter tests and quizzes to give students and parent’s feedback on how well the student was doing. That has completely changed. Now, teachers are paid to assure student learning. The teacher now gives frequent quizzes and assessments to determine what to reteach, and to whom. Each child is expected to master everything. Society’s expectation of K-12 education has changed dramatically – from most students going directly into the world of work after high school to the new expectation that every high school graduate be prepared for college, and most students needing some additional post-secondary training and education. Every student is expected to graduate from high school, even though up through the 1950s only half the students finished high school and only a quarter of them went on to college. Now, in a middle class district, 99 percent finish high school and pass the CAHSEE, and 93 percent go on to college. Principal must also provide a clear common vision to their schools and keep everyone focused on that vision over time. To close the achievement gap, research and experience have shown the only thing that really works is uniformly high expectations of every student, on every assignment, in every subject. Every child achieving is a vision that must be the consistent focus of the entire district, with leadership on the part of the school board, superintendent, district staff, principals, teachers, and students. With the back bone of my philosophy from the district mission,” The mission of the Lucia Mar Unified School District is to ensure that all students acquire the knowledge, skills and attitudes essential to become productive members of society."
I never know each week where I will find something that will attract my interest. This week, I wanted to get something that would capsulize some of my thoughts about leadership during the past 8 weeks. I have been thinking that good leadership is not complicated, in fact it seems to me that the recipe is simple. The implementation of that recipe is what is difficult. I found my "simple" recipe on the Girl Scouts website. They outline 5 qualities that good leaders have.
This is a realy unique site. I answered a questionaire on how motivated a leader I was. Interesting enough that after this survey I found that I am a not exactly sure about what type of movitated leader I am. Probably true. Other categories of things to check out on this site are Conflict Management, Leadership Styles, Successful Delegation, etc. Well worth the effort to investigate a little about yourself before you become an administrator.
Here is an article that talks about being a leader. It mentions that we lead in every way of our life. We may not recognize what we do as leading, but when we step aside and reflect on the things that we do, we see leadership qualities. For example, some people might have always viewed themselves as a follower and not nessessarily a leader, or just a good listener, however, being a good listener allows one to obtai information and share it later with others=leader.
Summer's comment about local control reminded me of the following article from the last issue of The Atlantic (the URL is at the bottom if you'd prefer to read online):
State of the Union January/February 2008 Atlantic Monthly A modest proposal to fix the schools
by Matt Miller
First, Kill All the School Boards
It wasn’t just the slate and pencil on every desk, or the absence of daily beatings. As Horace Mann sat in a Leipzig classroom in the summer of 1843, it was the entire Prussian system of schools that impressed him. Mann was six years into the work as Massachusetts secretary of education that would earn him lasting fame as the “father of public education.” He had sailed from Boston to England several weeks earlier with his new wife, combining a European honeymoon with educational fact-finding. In England, the couple had been startled by the luxury and refinement of the upper classes, which exceeded anything they had seen in America and stood in stark contrast to the poverty and ignorance of the masses. If the United States was to avoid this awful chasm and the social upheaval it seemed sure to create, he thought, education was the answer. Now he was seeing firsthand the Prussian schools that were the talk of reformers on both sides of the Atlantic.
In Massachusetts, Mann’s vision of “common schools,” publicly funded and attended by all, represented an inspiring democratic advance over the state’s hodgepodge of privately funded and charity schools. But beyond using the bully pulpit, Mann had little power to make his vision a reality. Prussia, by contrast, had a system designed from the center. School attendance was compulsory. Teachers were trained at national institutes with the same care that went into training military officers. Their enthusiasm for their subjects was contagious, and their devotion to students evoked reciprocal affection and respect, making Boston’s routine resort to classroom whippings seem barbaric.
Mann also admired Prussia’s rigorous national curriculum and tests. The results spoke for themselves: illiteracy had been vanquished. To be sure, Prussian schools sought to create obedient subjects of the kaiser—hardly Mann’s aim. Yet the lessons were undeniable, and Mann returned home determined to share what he had seen. In the seventh of his legendary “Annual Reports” on education to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, he touted the benefits of a national system and cautioned against the “calamities which result … from leaving this most important of all the functions of a government to chance.”
Mann’s epiphany that summer put him on the wrong side of America’s tradition of radical localism when it came to schools. And although his efforts in the years that followed made Massachusetts a model for taxpayer-funded schools and state-sponsored teacher training, the obsession with local control—not incidentally, an almost uniquely American obsession—still dominates U.S. education to this day. For much of the 150 or so years between Mann’s era and now, the system served us adequately: during that time, we extended more schooling to more people than any nation had before and rose to superpower status. But let’s look at what local control gives us today, in the “flat” world in which our students will have to compete.
The United States spends more than nearly every other nation on schools, but out of 29 developed countries in a 2003 assessment, we ranked 24th in math and in problem-solving, 18th in science, and 15th in reading. Half of all black and Latino students in the U.S. don’t graduate on time (or ever) from high school. As of 2005, about 70 percent of eighth-graders were not proficient in reading. By the end of eighth grade, what passes for a math curriculum in America is two years behind that of other countries.
Dismal fact after dismal fact; by now, they are hardly news. But in the 25 years since the landmark report A Nation at Risk sounded the alarm about our educational mediocrity, America’s response has been scattershot and ineffective, orchestrated mainly by some 15,000 school districts acting alone, with help more recently from the states. It’s as if after Pearl Harbor, FDR had suggested we prepare for war through the uncoordinated efforts of thousands of small factories; they’d know what kinds of planes and tanks were needed, right?
When you look at what local control of education has wrought, the conclusion is inescapable: we must carry Mann’s insights to their logical end and nationalize our schools, to some degree. But before delving into the details of why and how, let’s back up for a moment and consider what brought us to this pass.
CLICK THE MAP ABOVE to enlarge
130,000 Little Red Schoolhouses
Our system is, more than anything, an artifact of our Colonial past. For the religious dissenters who came to the New World, literacy was essential to religious freedom, enabling them to teach their own beliefs. Religion and schooling moved in tandem across the Colonies. Many people who didn’t like what the local minister was preaching would move on and found their own church, and generally their own school.
This preference for local control of education dovetailed with the broader ethos of the American Revolution and the Founders’ distrust of distant, centralized authority. Education was left out of the Constitution; in the 10th Amendment, it is one of the unnamed powers reserved for the states, which in turn passed it on to local communities. Eventually the United States would have 130,000 school districts, most of them served by a one-room school. These little red schoolhouses, funded primarily through local property taxes, became the iconic symbols of democratic American learning.
Throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries, nothing really challenged this basic structure. Eventually many rural districts were consolidated, and the states assumed a greater role in school funding; since the 1960s, the federal government has offered modest financial aid to poorer districts as well. But neither these steps, nor the standards-based reform movement inspired by A Nation at Risk, brought significant change.
Many reformers across the political spectrum agree that local control has become a disaster for our schools. But the case against it is almost never articulated. Public officials are loath to take on powerful school-board associations and teachers’ unions; foundations and advocacy groups, who must work with the boards and unions, also pull their punches. For these reasons, as well as our natural preference for having things done nearby, support for local control still lingers, largely unexamined, among the public.
No problem left behind
Why is local control such a failure when applied to our schools? After all, political decentralization has often served America well, allowing decisions to be made close to where their impact would be felt. But in education, it has spawned several crippling problems:
No way to know how children are doing. “We’re two decades into the standards movement in this country, and standards are still different by classroom, by school, by district, and by state,” says Tom Vander Ark, who headed the education program at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation from 1999 through 2006. “Most teachers in America still pretty much teach whatever they want.”
If you thought President Bush’s 2001 No Child Left Behind legislation was fixing these problems, think again. True, NCLB requires states to establish standards in core subjects and to test children in grades 3–8 annually, with the aim of making all students “proficient” by 2014. But by leaving standards and definitions of “proficiency” to state discretion, it has actually made matters worse. The Proficiency Illusion, a report released in October by the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, details how. “‘Proficiency’ varies wildly from state to state, with ‘passing scores’ ranging from the 6th percentile to the 77th,” the researchers found:
Congress erred big-time when NCLB assigned each state to set its own standards and devise and score its own tests … this study underscores the folly of a big modern nation, worried about its global competitiveness, nodding with approval as Wisconsin sets its eighth-grade reading passing level at the 14th percentile while South Carolina sets its at the 71st percentile.
The lack of uniform evaluation creates a “tremendous risk of delusion about how well children are actually doing,” says Chris Cerf, the deputy chancellor of schools in New York City. That delusion makes it far more difficult to enact reforms—and even to know where reforms are needed. “Schools may get an award from their state for high performance, and under federal guidelines they may be targeted for closure for low performance,” Vander Ark says. This happens in California, he told me, all the time.
Stunted R&D. Local control has kept education from attracting the research and development that drives progress, because benefits of scale are absent. There are some 15,000 curriculum departments in this country—one for every district. None of them can afford to invest in deeply understanding what works best when it comes to teaching reading to English-language learners, or using computers to develop customized strategies for students with different learning styles. Local-control advocates would damn the federal government if it tried to take on such things. Perhaps more important, the private sector generally won’t pursue them, either. Purchasing decisions are made by a complex mix of classroom, school, and school board officials. The more complicated and fragmented the sale that a company has to make, the less willing it is to invest in product research and development.
Incompetent school boards and union dominance. “In the first place, God made idiots,” Mark Twain once wrote. “This was for practice. Then He made School Boards.” Things don’t appear to have improved much since Twain’s time. “The job has become more difficult, more complicated, and more political, and as a result, it’s driven out many of the good candidates,” Vander Ark says. “So while teachers’ unions have become more sophisticated and have smarter people who are better-equipped and -prepared at the table, the quality of school-board members, particularly in urban areas, has decreased.” Board members routinely spend their time on minor matters, from mid-level personnel decisions to bus routes. “The tradition goes back to the rural era, where the school board hired the schoolmarm and oversaw the repair of the roof, looked into the stove in the room, and deliberated on every detail of operating the schools,” says Michael Kirst, an emeritus professor of education at Stanford University. “A lot of big-city school boards still do these kinds of things.” Because of Progressive-era reforms meant to get school boards out of “politics,” most urban school districts are independent, beyond the reach of mayors and city councils. Usually elected in off-year races that few people vote in or even notice, school boards are, in effect, accountable to no one.
Local control essentially surrenders power over the schools to the teachers’ unions. Union money and mobilization are often decisive in board elections. And local unions have hefty intellectual and political backing from their state and national affiliates. Even when they’re not in the unions’ pockets, in other words, school boards are outmatched.
The unions are adept at negotiating new advantages for their members, spreading their negotiating strategies to other districts in the state, and getting these advantages embodied in state and sometimes federal law as well. This makes it extraordinarily difficult for superintendents to change staffing, compensation, curriculum, and other policies. Principals, for their part, are compliance machines, spending their days making sure that federal, state, and district programs are implemented. Meanwhile, common-sense reforms, like offering higher pay to attract teachers to underserved specialties such as math, science, and special education, can’t get traction, because the unions say no.
Financial inequity. The dirty little secret of local control is the enormous tax advantage it confers on better-off Americans: communities with high property wealth can tax themselves at low rates and still generate far more dollars per pupil than poor communities taxing themselves heavily. This wasn’t always the case: in the 19th century, property taxes were rightly seen as the fairest way to pay for education, since property was the main form of wealth, and the rich and poor tended to live near one another. But the rise of commuter suburbs since World War II led to economically segregated communities; today, the spending gap between districts can be thousands of dollars per pupil.
But local taxes represent only 44 percent of overall school funding; the spending gaps between states, which contribute 47 percent of total spending, account for most of the financial inequity. Perversely, Title I, the federal aid program enacted in the 1960s to boost poor schools, has widened the gaps, because it distributes money largely according to how much states are already spending.
what would horace do?
I asked Marc Tucker, the head of the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce (a 2006 bipartisan panel that called for an overhaul of the education system), how he convinces people that local control is hobbling our schools. He said he asks a simple question: If we have the second-most-expensive K–12 system of all those measured by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, but consistently perform between the middle and the bottom of the pack, shouldn’t we examine the systems of countries that spend less and get better results? “I then point out that the system of local control that we have is almost unique,” Tucker says. “One then has to defend a practice that is uncharacteristic of the countries with the best performance.
“It’s an industrial-benchmarking argument,” he adds.
Horace Mann wouldn’t have used this jargon, but his thinking was much the same. In his time, the challenge was to embrace a bigger role for the state; today, the challenge is to embrace a bigger role for the federal government in standards, funding, and other arenas.
The usual explanation for why national standards won’t fly is that the right hates “national” and the left hates “standards.” But that’s changing. Two Republican former secretaries of education, Rod Paige and William Bennett, now support national standards and tests, writing in The Washington Post: “In a world of fierce economic competition, we can’t afford to pretend that the current system is getting us where we need to go.” On the Democratic side, John Podesta, a former chief of staff to President Clinton and the current president of the Center for American Progress (where I’m a senior fellow), told me that he believes the public is far ahead of the established political wisdom, which holds that the only safe way to discuss national standards is to stipulate that they are “optional” or “voluntary”—in other words, not “national” at all.
Recent polling suggests he’s right. Two surveys conducted for the education campaign Strong American Schools, which I advised in 2006, found that a majority of Americans think there should be uniform national standards. Most proponents suggest we start by establishing standards and tests in grades 3–12 in the core subjects—reading, math, and science—and leave more-controversial subjects, such as history, until we have gotten our feet wet.
According to U.S. Department of Education statistics, the federal government accounts for 9 percent, or $42 billion, of our K–12 spending. If we’re serious about improving our schools, and especially about raising up the lowest, Uncle Sam’s contribution must rise to 25 or 30 percent of the total (a shift President Nixon considered). Goodwin Liu, a University of California at Berkeley law professor who has studied school financing, suggests that a higher federal contribution could be used in part to bring all states up to a certain minimum per-pupil funding. It could also, in my view, fund conditional grants to boost school performance. For example, federal aid could be offered to raise teachers’ salaries in poor schools, provided that states or districts take measures such as linking pay to performance and deferring or eliminating tenure. Big grants might be given to states that adopt new national standards, making those standards “voluntary” but hard to refuse. The government also needs to invest much more heavily in research. It now spends $28 billion annually on research at the National Institutes of Health, but only $260 million—not even 1 percent of that amount—on R&D for education.
What of school boards? In an ideal world, we would scrap them—especially in big cities, where most poor children live. That’s the impulse behind a growing drive for mayoral control of schools. New York and Boston have used mayoral authority to sustain what are among the most far-reaching reform agendas in the country, including more-rigorous curricula and a focus on better teaching and school leadership. Of course, the chances of eliminating school boards anytime soon are nil. But we can at least recast and limit their role.
In all of these efforts, we must understand one paradox: only by transcending local control can we create genuine autonomy for our schools. “If you visit schools in many other parts of the world,” Marc Tucker says, “you’re struck almost immediately … by a sense of autonomy on the part of the school staff and principal that you don’t find in the United States.” Research in 46 countries by Ludger Woessmann of the University of Munich has shown that setting clear external standards while granting real discretion to schools in how to meet them is the most effective way to run a system. We need to give schools one set of national expectations, free educators and parents to collaborate locally in whatever ways work, and get everything else out of the way.
Nationalizing our schools even a little goes against every cultural tradition we have, save the one that matters most: our capacity to renew ourselves to meet new challenges. Once upon a time a national role in retirement funding was anathema; then suddenly, after the Depression, we had Social Security. Once, a federal role in health care would have been rejected as socialism; now, federal money accounts for half of what we spend on health care. We started down this road on schooling a long time ago. Time now to finish the journey.
The URL for this page is http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200801/miller-education.
Summer's comment about local control reminded me of the following article from the last issue of The Atlantic (the URL is at the bottom if you'd prefer to read online):
State of the Union January/February 2008 Atlantic Monthly A modest proposal to fix the schools
by Matt Miller
First, Kill All the School Boards
It wasn’t just the slate and pencil on every desk, or the absence of daily beatings. As Horace Mann sat in a Leipzig classroom in the summer of 1843, it was the entire Prussian system of schools that impressed him. Mann was six years into the work as Massachusetts secretary of education that would earn him lasting fame as the “father of public education.” He had sailed from Boston to England several weeks earlier with his new wife, combining a European honeymoon with educational fact-finding. In England, the couple had been startled by the luxury and refinement of the upper classes, which exceeded anything they had seen in America and stood in stark contrast to the poverty and ignorance of the masses. If the United States was to avoid this awful chasm and the social upheaval it seemed sure to create, he thought, education was the answer. Now he was seeing firsthand the Prussian schools that were the talk of reformers on both sides of the Atlantic.
In Massachusetts, Mann’s vision of “common schools,” publicly funded and attended by all, represented an inspiring democratic advance over the state’s hodgepodge of privately funded and charity schools. But beyond using the bully pulpit, Mann had little power to make his vision a reality. Prussia, by contrast, had a system designed from the center. School attendance was compulsory. Teachers were trained at national institutes with the same care that went into training military officers. Their enthusiasm for their subjects was contagious, and their devotion to students evoked reciprocal affection and respect, making Boston’s routine resort to classroom whippings seem barbaric.
Mann also admired Prussia’s rigorous national curriculum and tests. The results spoke for themselves: illiteracy had been vanquished. To be sure, Prussian schools sought to create obedient subjects of the kaiser—hardly Mann’s aim. Yet the lessons were undeniable, and Mann returned home determined to share what he had seen. In the seventh of his legendary “Annual Reports” on education to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, he touted the benefits of a national system and cautioned against the “calamities which result … from leaving this most important of all the functions of a government to chance.”
Mann’s epiphany that summer put him on the wrong side of America’s tradition of radical localism when it came to schools. And although his efforts in the years that followed made Massachusetts a model for taxpayer-funded schools and state-sponsored teacher training, the obsession with local control—not incidentally, an almost uniquely American obsession—still dominates U.S. education to this day. For much of the 150 or so years between Mann’s era and now, the system served us adequately: during that time, we extended more schooling to more people than any nation had before and rose to superpower status. But let’s look at what local control gives us today, in the “flat” world in which our students will have to compete.
The United States spends more than nearly every other nation on schools, but out of 29 developed countries in a 2003 assessment, we ranked 24th in math and in problem-solving, 18th in science, and 15th in reading. Half of all black and Latino students in the U.S. don’t graduate on time (or ever) from high school. As of 2005, about 70 percent of eighth-graders were not proficient in reading. By the end of eighth grade, what passes for a math curriculum in America is two years behind that of other countries.
Dismal fact after dismal fact; by now, they are hardly news. But in the 25 years since the landmark report A Nation at Risk sounded the alarm about our educational mediocrity, America’s response has been scattershot and ineffective, orchestrated mainly by some 15,000 school districts acting alone, with help more recently from the states. It’s as if after Pearl Harbor, FDR had suggested we prepare for war through the uncoordinated efforts of thousands of small factories; they’d know what kinds of planes and tanks were needed, right?
When you look at what local control of education has wrought, the conclusion is inescapable: we must carry Mann’s insights to their logical end and nationalize our schools, to some degree. But before delving into the details of why and how, let’s back up for a moment and consider what brought us to this pass.
CLICK THE MAP ABOVE to enlarge
130,000 Little Red Schoolhouses
Our system is, more than anything, an artifact of our Colonial past. For the religious dissenters who came to the New World, literacy was essential to religious freedom, enabling them to teach their own beliefs. Religion and schooling moved in tandem across the Colonies. Many people who didn’t like what the local minister was preaching would move on and found their own church, and generally their own school.
This preference for local control of education dovetailed with the broader ethos of the American Revolution and the Founders’ distrust of distant, centralized authority. Education was left out of the Constitution; in the 10th Amendment, it is one of the unnamed powers reserved for the states, which in turn passed it on to local communities. Eventually the United States would have 130,000 school districts, most of them served by a one-room school. These little red schoolhouses, funded primarily through local property taxes, became the iconic symbols of democratic American learning.
Throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries, nothing really challenged this basic structure. Eventually many rural districts were consolidated, and the states assumed a greater role in school funding; since the 1960s, the federal government has offered modest financial aid to poorer districts as well. But neither these steps, nor the standards-based reform movement inspired by A Nation at Risk, brought significant change.
Many reformers across the political spectrum agree that local control has become a disaster for our schools. But the case against it is almost never articulated. Public officials are loath to take on powerful school-board associations and teachers’ unions; foundations and advocacy groups, who must work with the boards and unions, also pull their punches. For these reasons, as well as our natural preference for having things done nearby, support for local control still lingers, largely unexamined, among the public.
No problem left behind
Why is local control such a failure when applied to our schools? After all, political decentralization has often served America well, allowing decisions to be made close to where their impact would be felt. But in education, it has spawned several crippling problems:
No way to know how children are doing. “We’re two decades into the standards movement in this country, and standards are still different by classroom, by school, by district, and by state,” says Tom Vander Ark, who headed the education program at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation from 1999 through 2006. “Most teachers in America still pretty much teach whatever they want.”
If you thought President Bush’s 2001 No Child Left Behind legislation was fixing these problems, think again. True, NCLB requires states to establish standards in core subjects and to test children in grades 3–8 annually, with the aim of making all students “proficient” by 2014. But by leaving standards and definitions of “proficiency” to state discretion, it has actually made matters worse. The Proficiency Illusion, a report released in October by the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, details how. “‘Proficiency’ varies wildly from state to state, with ‘passing scores’ ranging from the 6th percentile to the 77th,” the researchers found:
Congress erred big-time when NCLB assigned each state to set its own standards and devise and score its own tests … this study underscores the folly of a big modern nation, worried about its global competitiveness, nodding with approval as Wisconsin sets its eighth-grade reading passing level at the 14th percentile while South Carolina sets its at the 71st percentile.
The lack of uniform evaluation creates a “tremendous risk of delusion about how well children are actually doing,” says Chris Cerf, the deputy chancellor of schools in New York City. That delusion makes it far more difficult to enact reforms—and even to know where reforms are needed. “Schools may get an award from their state for high performance, and under federal guidelines they may be targeted for closure for low performance,” Vander Ark says. This happens in California, he told me, all the time.
Stunted R&D. Local control has kept education from attracting the research and development that drives progress, because benefits of scale are absent. There are some 15,000 curriculum departments in this country—one for every district. None of them can afford to invest in deeply understanding what works best when it comes to teaching reading to English-language learners, or using computers to develop customized strategies for students with different learning styles. Local-control advocates would damn the federal government if it tried to take on such things. Perhaps more important, the private sector generally won’t pursue them, either. Purchasing decisions are made by a complex mix of classroom, school, and school board officials. The more complicated and fragmented the sale that a company has to make, the less willing it is to invest in product research and development.
Incompetent school boards and union dominance. “In the first place, God made idiots,” Mark Twain once wrote. “This was for practice. Then He made School Boards.” Things don’t appear to have improved much since Twain’s time. “The job has become more difficult, more complicated, and more political, and as a result, it’s driven out many of the good candidates,” Vander Ark says. “So while teachers’ unions have become more sophisticated and have smarter people who are better-equipped and -prepared at the table, the quality of school-board members, particularly in urban areas, has decreased.” Board members routinely spend their time on minor matters, from mid-level personnel decisions to bus routes. “The tradition goes back to the rural era, where the school board hired the schoolmarm and oversaw the repair of the roof, looked into the stove in the room, and deliberated on every detail of operating the schools,” says Michael Kirst, an emeritus professor of education at Stanford University. “A lot of big-city school boards still do these kinds of things.” Because of Progressive-era reforms meant to get school boards out of “politics,” most urban school districts are independent, beyond the reach of mayors and city councils. Usually elected in off-year races that few people vote in or even notice, school boards are, in effect, accountable to no one.
Local control essentially surrenders power over the schools to the teachers’ unions. Union money and mobilization are often decisive in board elections. And local unions have hefty intellectual and political backing from their state and national affiliates. Even when they’re not in the unions’ pockets, in other words, school boards are outmatched.
The unions are adept at negotiating new advantages for their members, spreading their negotiating strategies to other districts in the state, and getting these advantages embodied in state and sometimes federal law as well. This makes it extraordinarily difficult for superintendents to change staffing, compensation, curriculum, and other policies. Principals, for their part, are compliance machines, spending their days making sure that federal, state, and district programs are implemented. Meanwhile, common-sense reforms, like offering higher pay to attract teachers to underserved specialties such as math, science, and special education, can’t get traction, because the unions say no.
Financial inequity. The dirty little secret of local control is the enormous tax advantage it confers on better-off Americans: communities with high property wealth can tax themselves at low rates and still generate far more dollars per pupil than poor communities taxing themselves heavily. This wasn’t always the case: in the 19th century, property taxes were rightly seen as the fairest way to pay for education, since property was the main form of wealth, and the rich and poor tended to live near one another. But the rise of commuter suburbs since World War II led to economically segregated communities; today, the spending gap between districts can be thousands of dollars per pupil.
But local taxes represent only 44 percent of overall school funding; the spending gaps between states, which contribute 47 percent of total spending, account for most of the financial inequity. Perversely, Title I, the federal aid program enacted in the 1960s to boost poor schools, has widened the gaps, because it distributes money largely according to how much states are already spending.
what would horace do?
I asked Marc Tucker, the head of the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce (a 2006 bipartisan panel that called for an overhaul of the education system), how he convinces people that local control is hobbling our schools. He said he asks a simple question: If we have the second-most-expensive K–12 system of all those measured by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, but consistently perform between the middle and the bottom of the pack, shouldn’t we examine the systems of countries that spend less and get better results? “I then point out that the system of local control that we have is almost unique,” Tucker says. “One then has to defend a practice that is uncharacteristic of the countries with the best performance.
“It’s an industrial-benchmarking argument,” he adds.
Horace Mann wouldn’t have used this jargon, but his thinking was much the same. In his time, the challenge was to embrace a bigger role for the state; today, the challenge is to embrace a bigger role for the federal government in standards, funding, and other arenas.
The usual explanation for why national standards won’t fly is that the right hates “national” and the left hates “standards.” But that’s changing. Two Republican former secretaries of education, Rod Paige and William Bennett, now support national standards and tests, writing in The Washington Post: “In a world of fierce economic competition, we can’t afford to pretend that the current system is getting us where we need to go.” On the Democratic side, John Podesta, a former chief of staff to President Clinton and the current president of the Center for American Progress (where I’m a senior fellow), told me that he believes the public is far ahead of the established political wisdom, which holds that the only safe way to discuss national standards is to stipulate that they are “optional” or “voluntary”—in other words, not “national” at all.
Recent polling suggests he’s right. Two surveys conducted for the education campaign Strong American Schools, which I advised in 2006, found that a majority of Americans think there should be uniform national standards. Most proponents suggest we start by establishing standards and tests in grades 3–12 in the core subjects—reading, math, and science—and leave more-controversial subjects, such as history, until we have gotten our feet wet.
According to U.S. Department of Education statistics, the federal government accounts for 9 percent, or $42 billion, of our K–12 spending. If we’re serious about improving our schools, and especially about raising up the lowest, Uncle Sam’s contribution must rise to 25 or 30 percent of the total (a shift President Nixon considered). Goodwin Liu, a University of California at Berkeley law professor who has studied school financing, suggests that a higher federal contribution could be used in part to bring all states up to a certain minimum per-pupil funding. It could also, in my view, fund conditional grants to boost school performance. For example, federal aid could be offered to raise teachers’ salaries in poor schools, provided that states or districts take measures such as linking pay to performance and deferring or eliminating tenure. Big grants might be given to states that adopt new national standards, making those standards “voluntary” but hard to refuse. The government also needs to invest much more heavily in research. It now spends $28 billion annually on research at the National Institutes of Health, but only $260 million—not even 1 percent of that amount—on R&D for education.
What of school boards? In an ideal world, we would scrap them—especially in big cities, where most poor children live. That’s the impulse behind a growing drive for mayoral control of schools. New York and Boston have used mayoral authority to sustain what are among the most far-reaching reform agendas in the country, including more-rigorous curricula and a focus on better teaching and school leadership. Of course, the chances of eliminating school boards anytime soon are nil. But we can at least recast and limit their role.
In all of these efforts, we must understand one paradox: only by transcending local control can we create genuine autonomy for our schools. “If you visit schools in many other parts of the world,” Marc Tucker says, “you’re struck almost immediately … by a sense of autonomy on the part of the school staff and principal that you don’t find in the United States.” Research in 46 countries by Ludger Woessmann of the University of Munich has shown that setting clear external standards while granting real discretion to schools in how to meet them is the most effective way to run a system. We need to give schools one set of national expectations, free educators and parents to collaborate locally in whatever ways work, and get everything else out of the way.
Nationalizing our schools even a little goes against every cultural tradition we have, save the one that matters most: our capacity to renew ourselves to meet new challenges. Once upon a time a national role in retirement funding was anathema; then suddenly, after the Depression, we had Social Security. Once, a federal role in health care would have been rejected as socialism; now, federal money accounts for half of what we spend on health care. We started down this road on schooling a long time ago. Time now to finish the journey.
The URL for this page is http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200801/miller-education.
Principal of Small School Finds the Time to Inspire This is just a simple story of one way a principal found to inspire a student. This principal works in a very small middle school. For those of us who will find ourselves as leaders of much larger schools we may not be able to inspire every student individually. However, we can structure our school to be “places of inspiration”, where students and staff will look forward to coming to school each day. I believe that the principal has a tremendous amount of power to set this tone.
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http://leo.oise.utoronto.ca/~vsvede Dimensions in Educational Leadership : A Profile Document and the link Organizational Culture Web Walk were fascinating to peruse this weekend. I particularly enjoyed working through "Your Organizational Culture: A Brainstorming Checklist" and "What is my Own Culture?" This site was developed by two graduate students for a computer conferencing class with Dr. Paul Begley at the University of Toronto. This site gave me a start on the reflections for the week's journal assignment and seemed to be aligned to what we've been discussiong in class.
www.ncrel.org/sdrs/areas/issues/educatrs/leadrshp/le100.htm
Critical Isuue: Building a Collective Vision
In this article it describes the critical issues leaders in education face in building a collective vision that is clear, compelling, and connected to teaching and learning. Collective vision helps focus attention on what is important, motivates staff and students, and increases the sense of shared responsibility for student learning. This article continues to explain how to create a vision and the leaders role in shaping the school vision. It also states the vision can incorporate values and goals related to equity and justice, respect and appreciation for multiculturalism and diversity.
This article was interesting because it went into great detail of the importance of having a clear vision and mission statement for your school. This could create an enviroment that promotes parent volunteers and community support. A clear vision can help keep the school and the efforts of its staff and students on target.
http://nsba.org/sbot/toolkit/leadSA.html/
Who am I as a leader? Do you really want to know yourself? Do you have the qualities to make a valuable leader to your group? Take a minute to look at yourself as a leader. Go to this website and take the leadership self assessment test. This site will ask you to take a survey on the attributes, skills, behavior, knowledge and tools that make up a highly successful leader. It will take some time and deep thinking, but it can give you an idea about your leadership qualities and capabilities.
http://changingminds.org/disciplines/leadership/styles/leadership_styles.htm
This website has a variety of different topics to choose from. On the home page, there are categorical topics to choose from. I was particularly interested in the leadership styles sub-topic. The research on leadership styles are that individuals use a based combination of their beliefs, values and preferences, as well as the organizational culture and norms which will encourage or discourage different styles. The website gives seven generalization leadership types. Good website for a variety of different topics.
In Praise of Top-Down Leadership. DuFour, R (2007). The School Administrator. November, pg. 38-42. http://drprestonsedau678.blogspot.com/
Many schools are moving away from the "top-down" model where the central office mandates practices. The article also states that the "bottom-up" approach to school improvement doesn't work. This article is in favor of a "loose and tight" leader. This leadership approach fosters autonomy and creativity within a systematic framework. The article emphasizes the importance with getting tight about the right things. I think that this article provides a nice middle road to being a leader.
http://www.expertmagazine.com/artman/publish/article_791.shtml
Author Dan Chenoweth has identified five characteristics that differentiate great organizational leaders from “toxic” leaders. “Toxic,” refers to the very worst of leaders, those who destroy the value of the company and the spirit of its employees. The great leaders are those who are:
• Ethical: Just, Upright, Honest, Open, Straight Forward, Honorable
• Credible: Forward Looking, Inspiring, Visionary
• Politically Astute: Knowing how to build coalitions and make compromises so that groups with disparate goals will work together toward a common goal
• Competent: Combining education, experience and skills that tell followers that this person knows what they are doing.
• Concerned for Organization vs. Concerned for Self
What makes “toxic” leaders so dangerous is that often they share some of those same characteristics!
“Toxic” Leaders
Extremely unethical and amoral, credible in beginning but lacked credibility in the end, very politically astute, very competent, could even be visionary and charismatic.
Bad Leaders:
Narcissistic and self-centered, unethical, not credible, politically astute, sometimes competent, many times not competent, not visionary or charismatic,average leaders,
ethical for the most part, some credibility, sometimes too focused on their own self-interests, average competence and political skills, not visionary or charismatic.
Good Leaders:
Very ethical, credible, above-average competence, average political skills, sometimes visionary and charismatic.
Great Leaders:
Very ethical, extremely credible and competent, excellent political skills, visionary and charismatic.
What kind of leader are you? Take the self-assessment that Kelly posted on the blog and discover your syle of leadership. Cut and paste the following link and get started with your personal evaluation. http://nsba.org/sbot/toolkit/leadSA.html/
http://money.cnn.com/2007/09/17/magazines/fortune/annie-smarterfaster.fortune/index.htm
Do you have what it takes to be a great leader?
Here are some thoughts I have about the topic:
A good leader isn't out to impose his or her will on others, and isn't set on a fixed idea of how things should turn out. Instead, they're listening, coordinating, steering, guiding,
A good leader makes room for other people to assist with leadership. They don't micromanage.
A good leader often says, “Tell me what’s on your mind.” “What should we do?” “Where should we be headed?”
A good leader inspires everyone to do better.
A good leader leads by example.
A good leader shares credit where appropriate.
A good leader is able to share about the project in a way that others are called to participate --they can "hear themselves" in the vision.
Excellent stuff so far! Sue, please bring the org. culture checklist on Wed. Kelly, you beat me to it-- I was going to mention the NSBA site in class, so bring that too. Summer, Dufour et al are going to have to convince me that the "bottom up" approach has actually been tried...
I look forward to discussing these with each of you tomorrow. David
The article states that there is considerable evidence from Fullan, Philip Schlechty and Richard Elmore that leaving school improvement to each school to resolve on its own doesn't result in more effective schools.
Bustamante, Rebecca "The Culture Audit":A Leadership Tool for Assessment and Strategic Planning in Diverse Schools and Colleges taken from NCPEA National Council of the Professors of Educational Administration (2005)
The article introduces educational leaders to culture audits: to view how schools are doing in meeting the needs of diverse populations according to their policies,
programs, and procedures. It includes the following domains of focus: vision/mission, curriculum, community, staff/faculty,students, teaching and learning, conflict, evaluation, students, assessment, and events (celebrations). (The article is based on research on school culture from the National Center for Cultural Competence)
Well, I decided to look at one of my previous resources: Caring Enough to Lead, by Leonard O. Pellicer, and on the back were three other recommendations from Corwin Press books. They all sound like they have something to offer, and I thought I’d share them with you.
The first one is:
Sergiovanni, Thomas J. Rethinking Leadership: A Collection of Articles, Second Edition, California: Corwin Press, 2006.
The description of this book is-
In the second edition of this revolutionary collection, school leaders are introduced to the craft of moral leadership. Thomas J. Sergiovanni, the leading authority on moral leadership, uncovers how successful leadership practices are often based in values and ideas rather than formal processes. Readers will learn an innovative approach to reframing leadership, while discovering how to build effective learning communities.
The second one is:
Blandstein, Alan, Cole, Robert, & Houston, Paul. Out-of-the-Box Leadership, California: Corwin Press, 2006.
The description of this book is-
Out-of-the-Box Leadership is the perfect guide to help administrators rethink, reshape, and strengthen their leadership styles and provide confident, focused direction that will help build real success for students and all members of the school community. In this second volume of The Soul of Educational Leadership series, the editors offer creative perspectives on the challenges of reframing leadership practice. Presenting key strategies from leadership experts such as Thomas Sergiovanni and Dennis Sparks, this compact resource combines research, reflective exercises, and day-to-day school leadership procedures for motivating students and providing meaningful cultural change in school communities.
An ideal handbook for principals, assistant principals, superintendents, and district administrators, this copublication with AASA and the HOPE Foundation discusses:
•Developing high-quality leadership
•Inspiring transformative leadership
•Embracing leadership alternatives
•Evaluating current school reform practices
•Meeting the challenges in leadership roles
The third one is:
Houston, Paul & Sokolow, Stephen. The Spiritual Dimension of Leadership: 8 Key Principles to Leading More Effectively, Corwin Press.
The description of this book is-
Infuse your leadership practice—and your life—with greater purpose and wisdom! This book illuminates many of the core values, beliefs, and principles that can guide, sustain, and inspire leaders during difficult times. These values and principles have underlying spiritual roots. The more aware of them you are, and the more you express them in leadership practice, the more effective you become. The authors offer the following eight key leadership principles to help you become a more enlightened leader:
• Intention
• Attention
• Unique gifts and talents
• Gratitude
• Unique life lessons
• Holistic perspective
• Openness
• Trust
Reap the many rewards of practicing these principles and journey down a path of awareness and insight that will empower you and those you lead to create the best possible future for our children.
Characteristics of Leaders
Looking at all the leaders and there accomplishments I see many similar characteristics. They look at the leaders and the laggards and present the characteristics of the leaders. They have a clear vision and are supported by upper management. They are effective communicators with outstanding teamwork and fostering an openness that stimulates innovation and learning. They also provide incentives to change behavior and for personal development.
www.entovation.com
TeamTechnology.co.uk "Leadership Qualities"
This website provides useful information in deciding what makes a good leader. It also points out that different contexts requires different sets of qualities.
The website mentions a list of traits that make a great leader and a list of traits that would create a toxic leader. The dangerous part is that often times these traits overlap between the great and toxic leader
This article was presented by TeamTechnology.
My resource started with a book published by the National Research Council titled “Starting Out Right: A Guide to Promoting Children’s Reading Success”. This publication is a researched based guide to promoting children’s reading success written by a committee on the Prevention of Reading Difficulties in Young Children. Although I recognize the techniques as solutions to addressing individual learning styles of all ages, it focuses on children up to third grade. This book is written with the parent, teacher, and child in mind. Also included in the text are further internet resources, recommended children’s books, and activities for the parent or teacher to do with the child.
This resource led me to their National Academies Press (NAP) web site http://www.nap.edu which is a comprehensive location for research based resources on topics in science, engineering, education, and health, just to name a few. Each topic has a section titled “policy, reviews and evaluations”. This makes it fairly simple to determine if the curriculum you are using is data based. The site also offers electronic (PDF) book editions as well as over 200 books for purchase.
National Research Council. (1999) Starting out right: a guide to promoting children’s reading success. National Academy Press: Washington, DC
Although I posted on individual learning styles in education and not leadership, the resource is a powerful data based resource. Check it out. ^
Leadership Development: The Destruction of "Trust" in the Workplace
In this article it describes the new fad of leadership. It describes the change that has taken palce over the past decade. Character- no longer important, Solid corporate leadership have been replaced with a Hollywood-esque image. Responsibility has been pushed far down the organization chart to the lowest levels. Many responsible managers have been replaced with rude,fast-talking, "buzzword-spouting,"acronym-using facilitators of the latest trendy programs...Leaders in name and title only
Employees' perceptions about the corporation's leadership only seem to be important if they ahve an effect on "results". So true!!! Many employees are losing respect for their superiors as well as the corporate system that created them. Many corporate leaders have become so removed from day-to-day operations that they no longer have a clue as to what is really happening!
My resources for the week are The Tao te Ching by Lao Tzu and The Prince by Machiavelli. These pieces of literature speak about leaders in very different ways. The Tao te Ching says a leader should be fair and generous in conflict, not controlling in their governing, and not competitive. Lao Tzu warned that success was as dangerous as failure and hope as hallow as fear. He said that when the master governs the people are hardly aware he exists, next best is the leader who is loved, next is the one who is feared and last is the one who is hated. He also said if you don’t trust people you make them untrustworthy. He also believed that if left alone men would do the right thing. He said that governing is like cooking a small fish, too much poking would spoil it. In contrast, Machiavelli said a leader should be feared rather than loved because people are fickle and their loyalty is fleeting. He would also argue a leader must be aware of the desired outcome and see all actions leading up to this outcome as only a means to the desired end. “Hence it is necessary for a prince wishing to hold his own to know how to do wrong, and to make use of it or not according to necessity.” Sometimes you must do wrong to achieve what is for the greater good. He also argued people were untrustworthy and should be seen as obstacles and rather than as co-workers. Overall, Machiavelli suggested that a leader always maintain “the majesty of his rank”. Whereas Lao Tzu suggested a leader be lowly and nourishing like water.
The differences in leadership styles are very interesting. I would recommend these two pieces of literature to anyone.
http://www.leadershipdevelopment.com/html/article.php?sub_id=10&child_id=26
US News & World Reportand Harvard’s John F. Kennedy Center for Public Leadership again teamed up to honor top leaders of the year, with the definition of leadership being a person “who motivates people to work collaboratively to accomplish great things.”
Real principals turn their schools into learning communities. They believe that each individual in the school - staff or student - can achieve great things, and they expect no less.
I plan to do business as a principal of a secondary school as a Real Principal. To have the balance to pull together all parts of a schools role today. With the students, teachers, stockholders, standards, testing, and having students being prepared for the world as a students has the knowledge, skills and attitudes essential to become productive members of society.
Not that many years ago, principals managed their schools. Now they continue to manage the school, but serve as highly effective instructional leaders. District leadership has had to learn and teach instructional leadership, using data to drive instructional decisions, teaching to mastery, differentiating instruction, collaboration, and aligning what is taught to what is tested. Districts have also had to learn to be both open and selective to new instructional programs and strategies.
With high stakes, standards-based tests, the key is to closely align what is taught to what is tested. This often has the effect of narrowing the breadth of subject matter and is a concern for teachers. Students need to learn about many topics that are not tested. Yet the enormous number of tested standards makes it difficult – probably impossible – to have enough time for students to master all tested standards. Whatever the link between assessment and sanctions, credit should be given for continuous improvement and multiple measures should be taken into consideration, not just one test. Stair-step growth over time is the hallmark of a successful school and it should be recognized.
The role of the school has evolved, along with tremendous changes in expectations and responsibilities thrust on teachers and principals. Before the accountability movement, teachers were paid to teach lessons. It was clearly the student’s job to learn the material presented, and the teacher gave chapter tests and quizzes to give students and parent’s feedback on how well the student was doing. That has completely changed. Now, teachers are paid to assure student learning. The teacher now gives frequent quizzes and assessments to determine what to reteach, and to whom. Each child is expected to master everything.
Society’s expectation of K-12 education has changed dramatically – from most students going directly into the world of work after high school to the new expectation that every high school graduate be prepared for college, and most students needing some additional post-secondary training and education. Every student is expected to graduate from high school, even though up through the 1950s only half the students finished high school and only a quarter of them went on to college. Now, in a middle class district, 99 percent finish high school and pass the CAHSEE, and 93 percent go on to college.
Principal must also provide a clear common vision to their schools and keep everyone focused on that vision over time. To close the achievement gap, research and experience have shown the only thing that really works is uniformly high expectations of every student, on every assignment, in every subject. Every child achieving is a vision that must be the consistent focus of the entire district, with leadership on the part of the school board, superintendent, district staff, principals, teachers, and students. With the back bone of my philosophy from the district mission,” The mission of the Lucia Mar Unified School District is to ensure that all students acquire the knowledge, skills and attitudes essential to become productive members of society."
I never know each week where I will find something that will attract my interest. This week, I wanted to get something that would capsulize some of my thoughts about leadership during the past 8 weeks. I have been thinking that good leadership is not complicated, in fact it seems to me that the recipe is simple. The implementation of that recipe is what is difficult. I found my "simple" recipe on the Girl Scouts website. They outline 5 qualities that good leaders have.
Site: http://www.girlscouts.org/for_adults/leader_magazine/2004_fall/five_qualities.asp
Leadership Quality 1: Good leaders know themselves.
Leadership Quality 2: Good leaders are committed.
Leadership Quality 3: Good leaders know they don't know everything.
Leadership Quality 4: Good leaders are open to change.
This sounds very much like a good summary of many things we have discussed in class.
Leadership Quality 5: Good leaders go the extra mile.
http://www.mindtools.com/pages/main/newMN_LDR.htm
This is a realy unique site. I answered a questionaire on how motivated a leader I was. Interesting enough that after this survey I found that I am a not exactly sure about what type of movitated leader I am. Probably true. Other categories of things to check out on this site are Conflict Management, Leadership Styles, Successful Delegation, etc.
Well worth the effort to investigate a little about yourself before you become an administrator.
http://www.rohdesign.com/weblog/archives/002051.html
Here is an article that talks about being a leader. It mentions that we lead in every way of our life. We may not recognize what we do as leading, but when we step aside and reflect on the things that we do, we see leadership qualities. For example, some people might have always viewed themselves as a follower and not nessessarily a leader, or just a good listener, however, being a good listener allows one to obtai information and share it later with others=leader.
Summer's comment about local control reminded me of the following article from the last issue of The Atlantic (the URL is at the bottom if you'd prefer to read online):
State of the Union January/February 2008 Atlantic Monthly
A modest proposal to fix the schools
by Matt Miller
First, Kill All the School Boards
It wasn’t just the slate and pencil on every desk, or the absence of daily beatings. As Horace Mann sat in a Leipzig classroom in the summer of 1843, it was the entire Prussian system of schools that impressed him. Mann was six years into the work as Massachusetts secretary of education that would earn him lasting fame as the “father of public education.” He had sailed from Boston to England several weeks earlier with his new wife, combining a European honeymoon with educational fact-finding. In England, the couple had been startled by the luxury and refinement of the upper classes, which exceeded anything they had seen in America and stood in stark contrast to the poverty and ignorance of the masses. If the United States was to avoid this awful chasm and the social upheaval it seemed sure to create, he thought, education was the answer. Now he was seeing firsthand the Prussian schools that were the talk of reformers on both sides of the Atlantic.
In Massachusetts, Mann’s vision of “common schools,” publicly funded and attended by all, represented an inspiring democratic advance over the state’s hodgepodge of privately funded and charity schools. But beyond using the bully pulpit, Mann had little power to make his vision a reality. Prussia, by contrast, had a system designed from the center. School attendance was compulsory. Teachers were trained at national institutes with the same care that went into training military officers. Their enthusiasm for their subjects was contagious, and their devotion to students evoked reciprocal affection and respect, making Boston’s routine resort to classroom whippings seem barbaric.
Mann also admired Prussia’s rigorous national curriculum and tests. The results spoke for themselves: illiteracy had been vanquished. To be sure, Prussian schools sought to create obedient subjects of the kaiser—hardly Mann’s aim. Yet the lessons were undeniable, and Mann returned home determined to share what he had seen. In the seventh of his legendary “Annual Reports” on education to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, he touted the benefits of a national system and cautioned against the “calamities which result … from leaving this most important of all the functions of a government to chance.”
Mann’s epiphany that summer put him on the wrong side of America’s tradition of radical localism when it came to schools. And although his efforts in the years that followed made Massachusetts a model for taxpayer-funded schools and state-sponsored teacher training, the obsession with local control—not incidentally, an almost uniquely American obsession—still dominates U.S. education to this day. For much of the 150 or so years between Mann’s era and now, the system served us adequately: during that time, we extended more schooling to more people than any nation had before and rose to superpower status. But let’s look at what local control gives us today, in the “flat” world in which our students will have to compete.
The United States spends more than nearly every other nation on schools, but out of 29 developed countries in a 2003 assessment, we ranked 24th in math and in problem-solving, 18th in science, and 15th in reading. Half of all black and Latino students in the U.S. don’t graduate on time (or ever) from high school. As of 2005, about 70 percent of eighth-graders were not proficient in reading. By the end of eighth grade, what passes for a math curriculum in America is two years behind that of other countries.
Dismal fact after dismal fact; by now, they are hardly news. But in the 25 years since the landmark report A Nation at Risk sounded the alarm about our educational mediocrity, America’s response has been scattershot and ineffective, orchestrated mainly by some 15,000 school districts acting alone, with help more recently from the states. It’s as if after Pearl Harbor, FDR had suggested we prepare for war through the uncoordinated efforts of thousands of small factories; they’d know what kinds of planes and tanks were needed, right?
When you look at what local control of education has wrought, the conclusion is inescapable: we must carry Mann’s insights to their logical end and nationalize our schools, to some degree. But before delving into the details of why and how, let’s back up for a moment and consider what brought us to this pass.
CLICK THE MAP ABOVE to enlarge
130,000 Little Red Schoolhouses
Our system is, more than anything, an artifact of our Colonial past. For the religious dissenters who came to the New World, literacy was essential to religious freedom, enabling them to teach their own beliefs. Religion and schooling moved in tandem across the Colonies. Many people who didn’t like what the local minister was preaching would move on and found their own church, and generally their own school.
This preference for local control of education dovetailed with the broader ethos of the American Revolution and the Founders’ distrust of distant, centralized authority. Education was left out of the Constitution; in the 10th Amendment, it is one of the unnamed powers reserved for the states, which in turn passed it on to local communities. Eventually the United States would have 130,000 school districts, most of them served by a one-room school. These little red schoolhouses, funded primarily through local property taxes, became the iconic symbols of democratic American learning.
Throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries, nothing really challenged this basic structure. Eventually many rural districts were consolidated, and the states assumed a greater role in school funding; since the 1960s, the federal government has offered modest financial aid to poorer districts as well. But neither these steps, nor the standards-based reform movement inspired by A Nation at Risk, brought significant change.
Many reformers across the political spectrum agree that local control has become a disaster for our schools. But the case against it is almost never articulated. Public officials are loath to take on powerful school-board associations and teachers’ unions; foundations and advocacy groups, who must work with the boards and unions, also pull their punches. For these reasons, as well as our natural preference for having things done nearby, support for local control still lingers, largely unexamined, among the public.
No problem left behind
Why is local control such a failure when applied to our schools? After all, political decentralization has often served America well, allowing decisions to be made close to where their impact would be felt. But in education, it has spawned several crippling problems:
No way to know how children are doing. “We’re two decades into the standards movement in this country, and standards are still different by classroom, by school, by district, and by state,” says Tom Vander Ark, who headed the education program at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation from 1999 through 2006. “Most teachers in America still pretty much teach whatever they want.”
If you thought President Bush’s 2001 No Child Left Behind legislation was fixing these problems, think again. True, NCLB requires states to establish standards in core subjects and to test children in grades 3–8 annually, with the aim of making all students “proficient” by 2014. But by leaving standards and definitions of “proficiency” to state discretion, it has actually made matters worse. The Proficiency Illusion, a report released in October by the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, details how. “‘Proficiency’ varies wildly from state to state, with ‘passing scores’ ranging from the 6th percentile to the 77th,” the researchers found:
Congress erred big-time when NCLB assigned each state to set its own standards and devise and score its own tests … this study underscores the folly of a big modern nation, worried about its global competitiveness, nodding with approval as Wisconsin sets its eighth-grade reading passing level at the 14th percentile while South Carolina sets its at the 71st percentile.
The lack of uniform evaluation creates a “tremendous risk of delusion about how well children are actually doing,” says Chris Cerf, the deputy chancellor of schools in New York City. That delusion makes it far more difficult to enact reforms—and even to know where reforms are needed. “Schools may get an award from their state for high performance, and under federal guidelines they may be targeted for closure for low performance,” Vander Ark says. This happens in California, he told me, all the time.
Stunted R&D. Local control has kept education from attracting the research and development that drives progress, because benefits of scale are absent. There are some 15,000 curriculum departments in this country—one for every district. None of them can afford to invest in deeply understanding what works best when it comes to teaching reading to English-language learners, or using computers to develop customized strategies for students with different learning styles. Local-control advocates would damn the federal government if it tried to take on such things. Perhaps more important, the private sector generally won’t pursue them, either. Purchasing decisions are made by a complex mix of classroom, school, and school board officials. The more complicated and fragmented the sale that a company has to make, the less willing it is to invest in product research and development.
Incompetent school boards and union dominance. “In the first place, God made idiots,” Mark Twain once wrote. “This was for practice. Then He made School Boards.” Things don’t appear to have improved much since Twain’s time. “The job has become more difficult, more complicated, and more political, and as a result, it’s driven out many of the good candidates,” Vander Ark says. “So while teachers’ unions have become more sophisticated and have smarter people who are better-equipped and -prepared at the table, the quality of school-board members, particularly in urban areas, has decreased.” Board members routinely spend their time on minor matters, from mid-level personnel decisions to bus routes. “The tradition goes back to the rural era, where the school board hired the schoolmarm and oversaw the repair of the roof, looked into the stove in the room, and deliberated on every detail of operating the schools,” says Michael Kirst, an emeritus professor of education at Stanford University. “A lot of big-city school boards still do these kinds of things.” Because of Progressive-era reforms meant to get school boards out of “politics,” most urban school districts are independent, beyond the reach of mayors and city councils. Usually elected in off-year races that few people vote in or even notice, school boards are, in effect, accountable to no one.
Local control essentially surrenders power over the schools to the teachers’ unions. Union money and mobilization are often decisive in board elections. And local unions have hefty intellectual and political backing from their state and national affiliates. Even when they’re not in the unions’ pockets, in other words, school boards are outmatched.
The unions are adept at negotiating new advantages for their members, spreading their negotiating strategies to other districts in the state, and getting these advantages embodied in state and sometimes federal law as well. This makes it extraordinarily difficult for superintendents to change staffing, compensation, curriculum, and other policies. Principals, for their part, are compliance machines, spending their days making sure that federal, state, and district programs are implemented. Meanwhile, common-sense reforms, like offering higher pay to attract teachers to underserved specialties such as math, science, and special education, can’t get traction, because the unions say no.
Financial inequity. The dirty little secret of local control is the enormous tax advantage it confers on better-off Americans: communities with high property wealth can tax themselves at low rates and still generate far more dollars per pupil than poor communities taxing themselves heavily. This wasn’t always the case: in the 19th century, property taxes were rightly seen as the fairest way to pay for education, since property was the main form of wealth, and the rich and poor tended to live near one another. But the rise of commuter suburbs since World War II led to economically segregated communities; today, the spending gap between districts can be thousands of dollars per pupil.
But local taxes represent only 44 percent of overall school funding; the spending gaps between states, which contribute 47 percent of total spending, account for most of the financial inequity. Perversely, Title I, the federal aid program enacted in the 1960s to boost poor schools, has widened the gaps, because it distributes money largely according to how much states are already spending.
what would horace do?
I asked Marc Tucker, the head of the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce (a 2006 bipartisan panel that called for an overhaul of the education system), how he convinces people that local control is hobbling our schools. He said he asks a simple question: If we have the second-most-expensive K–12 system of all those measured by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, but consistently perform between the middle and the bottom of the pack, shouldn’t we examine the systems of countries that spend less and get better results? “I then point out that the system of local control that we have is almost unique,” Tucker says. “One then has to defend a practice that is uncharacteristic of the countries with the best performance.
“It’s an industrial-benchmarking argument,” he adds.
Horace Mann wouldn’t have used this jargon, but his thinking was much the same. In his time, the challenge was to embrace a bigger role for the state; today, the challenge is to embrace a bigger role for the federal government in standards, funding, and other arenas.
The usual explanation for why national standards won’t fly is that the right hates “national” and the left hates “standards.” But that’s changing. Two Republican former secretaries of education, Rod Paige and William Bennett, now support national standards and tests, writing in The Washington Post: “In a world of fierce economic competition, we can’t afford to pretend that the current system is getting us where we need to go.” On the Democratic side, John Podesta, a former chief of staff to President Clinton and the current president of the Center for American Progress (where I’m a senior fellow), told me that he believes the public is far ahead of the established political wisdom, which holds that the only safe way to discuss national standards is to stipulate that they are “optional” or “voluntary”—in other words, not “national” at all.
Recent polling suggests he’s right. Two surveys conducted for the education campaign Strong American Schools, which I advised in 2006, found that a majority of Americans think there should be uniform national standards. Most proponents suggest we start by establishing standards and tests in grades 3–12 in the core subjects—reading, math, and science—and leave more-controversial subjects, such as history, until we have gotten our feet wet.
According to U.S. Department of Education statistics, the federal government accounts for 9 percent, or $42 billion, of our K–12 spending. If we’re serious about improving our schools, and especially about raising up the lowest, Uncle Sam’s contribution must rise to 25 or 30 percent of the total (a shift President Nixon considered). Goodwin Liu, a University of California at Berkeley law professor who has studied school financing, suggests that a higher federal contribution could be used in part to bring all states up to a certain minimum per-pupil funding. It could also, in my view, fund conditional grants to boost school performance. For example, federal aid could be offered to raise teachers’ salaries in poor schools, provided that states or districts take measures such as linking pay to performance and deferring or eliminating tenure. Big grants might be given to states that adopt new national standards, making those standards “voluntary” but hard to refuse. The government also needs to invest much more heavily in research. It now spends $28 billion annually on research at the National Institutes of Health, but only $260 million—not even 1 percent of that amount—on R&D for education.
What of school boards? In an ideal world, we would scrap them—especially in big cities, where most poor children live. That’s the impulse behind a growing drive for mayoral control of schools. New York and Boston have used mayoral authority to sustain what are among the most far-reaching reform agendas in the country, including more-rigorous curricula and a focus on better teaching and school leadership. Of course, the chances of eliminating school boards anytime soon are nil. But we can at least recast and limit their role.
In all of these efforts, we must understand one paradox: only by transcending local control can we create genuine autonomy for our schools. “If you visit schools in many other parts of the world,” Marc Tucker says, “you’re struck almost immediately … by a sense of autonomy on the part of the school staff and principal that you don’t find in the United States.” Research in 46 countries by Ludger Woessmann of the University of Munich has shown that setting clear external standards while granting real discretion to schools in how to meet them is the most effective way to run a system. We need to give schools one set of national expectations, free educators and parents to collaborate locally in whatever ways work, and get everything else out of the way.
Nationalizing our schools even a little goes against every cultural tradition we have, save the one that matters most: our capacity to renew ourselves to meet new challenges. Once upon a time a national role in retirement funding was anathema; then suddenly, after the Depression, we had Social Security. Once, a federal role in health care would have been rejected as socialism; now, federal money accounts for half of what we spend on health care. We started down this road on schooling a long time ago. Time now to finish the journey.
The URL for this page is http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200801/miller-education.
Summer's comment about local control reminded me of the following article from the last issue of The Atlantic (the URL is at the bottom if you'd prefer to read online):
State of the Union January/February 2008 Atlantic Monthly
A modest proposal to fix the schools
by Matt Miller
First, Kill All the School Boards
It wasn’t just the slate and pencil on every desk, or the absence of daily beatings. As Horace Mann sat in a Leipzig classroom in the summer of 1843, it was the entire Prussian system of schools that impressed him. Mann was six years into the work as Massachusetts secretary of education that would earn him lasting fame as the “father of public education.” He had sailed from Boston to England several weeks earlier with his new wife, combining a European honeymoon with educational fact-finding. In England, the couple had been startled by the luxury and refinement of the upper classes, which exceeded anything they had seen in America and stood in stark contrast to the poverty and ignorance of the masses. If the United States was to avoid this awful chasm and the social upheaval it seemed sure to create, he thought, education was the answer. Now he was seeing firsthand the Prussian schools that were the talk of reformers on both sides of the Atlantic.
In Massachusetts, Mann’s vision of “common schools,” publicly funded and attended by all, represented an inspiring democratic advance over the state’s hodgepodge of privately funded and charity schools. But beyond using the bully pulpit, Mann had little power to make his vision a reality. Prussia, by contrast, had a system designed from the center. School attendance was compulsory. Teachers were trained at national institutes with the same care that went into training military officers. Their enthusiasm for their subjects was contagious, and their devotion to students evoked reciprocal affection and respect, making Boston’s routine resort to classroom whippings seem barbaric.
Mann also admired Prussia’s rigorous national curriculum and tests. The results spoke for themselves: illiteracy had been vanquished. To be sure, Prussian schools sought to create obedient subjects of the kaiser—hardly Mann’s aim. Yet the lessons were undeniable, and Mann returned home determined to share what he had seen. In the seventh of his legendary “Annual Reports” on education to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, he touted the benefits of a national system and cautioned against the “calamities which result … from leaving this most important of all the functions of a government to chance.”
Mann’s epiphany that summer put him on the wrong side of America’s tradition of radical localism when it came to schools. And although his efforts in the years that followed made Massachusetts a model for taxpayer-funded schools and state-sponsored teacher training, the obsession with local control—not incidentally, an almost uniquely American obsession—still dominates U.S. education to this day. For much of the 150 or so years between Mann’s era and now, the system served us adequately: during that time, we extended more schooling to more people than any nation had before and rose to superpower status. But let’s look at what local control gives us today, in the “flat” world in which our students will have to compete.
The United States spends more than nearly every other nation on schools, but out of 29 developed countries in a 2003 assessment, we ranked 24th in math and in problem-solving, 18th in science, and 15th in reading. Half of all black and Latino students in the U.S. don’t graduate on time (or ever) from high school. As of 2005, about 70 percent of eighth-graders were not proficient in reading. By the end of eighth grade, what passes for a math curriculum in America is two years behind that of other countries.
Dismal fact after dismal fact; by now, they are hardly news. But in the 25 years since the landmark report A Nation at Risk sounded the alarm about our educational mediocrity, America’s response has been scattershot and ineffective, orchestrated mainly by some 15,000 school districts acting alone, with help more recently from the states. It’s as if after Pearl Harbor, FDR had suggested we prepare for war through the uncoordinated efforts of thousands of small factories; they’d know what kinds of planes and tanks were needed, right?
When you look at what local control of education has wrought, the conclusion is inescapable: we must carry Mann’s insights to their logical end and nationalize our schools, to some degree. But before delving into the details of why and how, let’s back up for a moment and consider what brought us to this pass.
CLICK THE MAP ABOVE to enlarge
130,000 Little Red Schoolhouses
Our system is, more than anything, an artifact of our Colonial past. For the religious dissenters who came to the New World, literacy was essential to religious freedom, enabling them to teach their own beliefs. Religion and schooling moved in tandem across the Colonies. Many people who didn’t like what the local minister was preaching would move on and found their own church, and generally their own school.
This preference for local control of education dovetailed with the broader ethos of the American Revolution and the Founders’ distrust of distant, centralized authority. Education was left out of the Constitution; in the 10th Amendment, it is one of the unnamed powers reserved for the states, which in turn passed it on to local communities. Eventually the United States would have 130,000 school districts, most of them served by a one-room school. These little red schoolhouses, funded primarily through local property taxes, became the iconic symbols of democratic American learning.
Throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries, nothing really challenged this basic structure. Eventually many rural districts were consolidated, and the states assumed a greater role in school funding; since the 1960s, the federal government has offered modest financial aid to poorer districts as well. But neither these steps, nor the standards-based reform movement inspired by A Nation at Risk, brought significant change.
Many reformers across the political spectrum agree that local control has become a disaster for our schools. But the case against it is almost never articulated. Public officials are loath to take on powerful school-board associations and teachers’ unions; foundations and advocacy groups, who must work with the boards and unions, also pull their punches. For these reasons, as well as our natural preference for having things done nearby, support for local control still lingers, largely unexamined, among the public.
No problem left behind
Why is local control such a failure when applied to our schools? After all, political decentralization has often served America well, allowing decisions to be made close to where their impact would be felt. But in education, it has spawned several crippling problems:
No way to know how children are doing. “We’re two decades into the standards movement in this country, and standards are still different by classroom, by school, by district, and by state,” says Tom Vander Ark, who headed the education program at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation from 1999 through 2006. “Most teachers in America still pretty much teach whatever they want.”
If you thought President Bush’s 2001 No Child Left Behind legislation was fixing these problems, think again. True, NCLB requires states to establish standards in core subjects and to test children in grades 3–8 annually, with the aim of making all students “proficient” by 2014. But by leaving standards and definitions of “proficiency” to state discretion, it has actually made matters worse. The Proficiency Illusion, a report released in October by the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, details how. “‘Proficiency’ varies wildly from state to state, with ‘passing scores’ ranging from the 6th percentile to the 77th,” the researchers found:
Congress erred big-time when NCLB assigned each state to set its own standards and devise and score its own tests … this study underscores the folly of a big modern nation, worried about its global competitiveness, nodding with approval as Wisconsin sets its eighth-grade reading passing level at the 14th percentile while South Carolina sets its at the 71st percentile.
The lack of uniform evaluation creates a “tremendous risk of delusion about how well children are actually doing,” says Chris Cerf, the deputy chancellor of schools in New York City. That delusion makes it far more difficult to enact reforms—and even to know where reforms are needed. “Schools may get an award from their state for high performance, and under federal guidelines they may be targeted for closure for low performance,” Vander Ark says. This happens in California, he told me, all the time.
Stunted R&D. Local control has kept education from attracting the research and development that drives progress, because benefits of scale are absent. There are some 15,000 curriculum departments in this country—one for every district. None of them can afford to invest in deeply understanding what works best when it comes to teaching reading to English-language learners, or using computers to develop customized strategies for students with different learning styles. Local-control advocates would damn the federal government if it tried to take on such things. Perhaps more important, the private sector generally won’t pursue them, either. Purchasing decisions are made by a complex mix of classroom, school, and school board officials. The more complicated and fragmented the sale that a company has to make, the less willing it is to invest in product research and development.
Incompetent school boards and union dominance. “In the first place, God made idiots,” Mark Twain once wrote. “This was for practice. Then He made School Boards.” Things don’t appear to have improved much since Twain’s time. “The job has become more difficult, more complicated, and more political, and as a result, it’s driven out many of the good candidates,” Vander Ark says. “So while teachers’ unions have become more sophisticated and have smarter people who are better-equipped and -prepared at the table, the quality of school-board members, particularly in urban areas, has decreased.” Board members routinely spend their time on minor matters, from mid-level personnel decisions to bus routes. “The tradition goes back to the rural era, where the school board hired the schoolmarm and oversaw the repair of the roof, looked into the stove in the room, and deliberated on every detail of operating the schools,” says Michael Kirst, an emeritus professor of education at Stanford University. “A lot of big-city school boards still do these kinds of things.” Because of Progressive-era reforms meant to get school boards out of “politics,” most urban school districts are independent, beyond the reach of mayors and city councils. Usually elected in off-year races that few people vote in or even notice, school boards are, in effect, accountable to no one.
Local control essentially surrenders power over the schools to the teachers’ unions. Union money and mobilization are often decisive in board elections. And local unions have hefty intellectual and political backing from their state and national affiliates. Even when they’re not in the unions’ pockets, in other words, school boards are outmatched.
The unions are adept at negotiating new advantages for their members, spreading their negotiating strategies to other districts in the state, and getting these advantages embodied in state and sometimes federal law as well. This makes it extraordinarily difficult for superintendents to change staffing, compensation, curriculum, and other policies. Principals, for their part, are compliance machines, spending their days making sure that federal, state, and district programs are implemented. Meanwhile, common-sense reforms, like offering higher pay to attract teachers to underserved specialties such as math, science, and special education, can’t get traction, because the unions say no.
Financial inequity. The dirty little secret of local control is the enormous tax advantage it confers on better-off Americans: communities with high property wealth can tax themselves at low rates and still generate far more dollars per pupil than poor communities taxing themselves heavily. This wasn’t always the case: in the 19th century, property taxes were rightly seen as the fairest way to pay for education, since property was the main form of wealth, and the rich and poor tended to live near one another. But the rise of commuter suburbs since World War II led to economically segregated communities; today, the spending gap between districts can be thousands of dollars per pupil.
But local taxes represent only 44 percent of overall school funding; the spending gaps between states, which contribute 47 percent of total spending, account for most of the financial inequity. Perversely, Title I, the federal aid program enacted in the 1960s to boost poor schools, has widened the gaps, because it distributes money largely according to how much states are already spending.
what would horace do?
I asked Marc Tucker, the head of the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce (a 2006 bipartisan panel that called for an overhaul of the education system), how he convinces people that local control is hobbling our schools. He said he asks a simple question: If we have the second-most-expensive K–12 system of all those measured by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, but consistently perform between the middle and the bottom of the pack, shouldn’t we examine the systems of countries that spend less and get better results? “I then point out that the system of local control that we have is almost unique,” Tucker says. “One then has to defend a practice that is uncharacteristic of the countries with the best performance.
“It’s an industrial-benchmarking argument,” he adds.
Horace Mann wouldn’t have used this jargon, but his thinking was much the same. In his time, the challenge was to embrace a bigger role for the state; today, the challenge is to embrace a bigger role for the federal government in standards, funding, and other arenas.
The usual explanation for why national standards won’t fly is that the right hates “national” and the left hates “standards.” But that’s changing. Two Republican former secretaries of education, Rod Paige and William Bennett, now support national standards and tests, writing in The Washington Post: “In a world of fierce economic competition, we can’t afford to pretend that the current system is getting us where we need to go.” On the Democratic side, John Podesta, a former chief of staff to President Clinton and the current president of the Center for American Progress (where I’m a senior fellow), told me that he believes the public is far ahead of the established political wisdom, which holds that the only safe way to discuss national standards is to stipulate that they are “optional” or “voluntary”—in other words, not “national” at all.
Recent polling suggests he’s right. Two surveys conducted for the education campaign Strong American Schools, which I advised in 2006, found that a majority of Americans think there should be uniform national standards. Most proponents suggest we start by establishing standards and tests in grades 3–12 in the core subjects—reading, math, and science—and leave more-controversial subjects, such as history, until we have gotten our feet wet.
According to U.S. Department of Education statistics, the federal government accounts for 9 percent, or $42 billion, of our K–12 spending. If we’re serious about improving our schools, and especially about raising up the lowest, Uncle Sam’s contribution must rise to 25 or 30 percent of the total (a shift President Nixon considered). Goodwin Liu, a University of California at Berkeley law professor who has studied school financing, suggests that a higher federal contribution could be used in part to bring all states up to a certain minimum per-pupil funding. It could also, in my view, fund conditional grants to boost school performance. For example, federal aid could be offered to raise teachers’ salaries in poor schools, provided that states or districts take measures such as linking pay to performance and deferring or eliminating tenure. Big grants might be given to states that adopt new national standards, making those standards “voluntary” but hard to refuse. The government also needs to invest much more heavily in research. It now spends $28 billion annually on research at the National Institutes of Health, but only $260 million—not even 1 percent of that amount—on R&D for education.
What of school boards? In an ideal world, we would scrap them—especially in big cities, where most poor children live. That’s the impulse behind a growing drive for mayoral control of schools. New York and Boston have used mayoral authority to sustain what are among the most far-reaching reform agendas in the country, including more-rigorous curricula and a focus on better teaching and school leadership. Of course, the chances of eliminating school boards anytime soon are nil. But we can at least recast and limit their role.
In all of these efforts, we must understand one paradox: only by transcending local control can we create genuine autonomy for our schools. “If you visit schools in many other parts of the world,” Marc Tucker says, “you’re struck almost immediately … by a sense of autonomy on the part of the school staff and principal that you don’t find in the United States.” Research in 46 countries by Ludger Woessmann of the University of Munich has shown that setting clear external standards while granting real discretion to schools in how to meet them is the most effective way to run a system. We need to give schools one set of national expectations, free educators and parents to collaborate locally in whatever ways work, and get everything else out of the way.
Nationalizing our schools even a little goes against every cultural tradition we have, save the one that matters most: our capacity to renew ourselves to meet new challenges. Once upon a time a national role in retirement funding was anathema; then suddenly, after the Depression, we had Social Security. Once, a federal role in health care would have been rejected as socialism; now, federal money accounts for half of what we spend on health care. We started down this road on schooling a long time ago. Time now to finish the journey.
The URL for this page is http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200801/miller-education.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/23/
education/23EDUCATION.html
Principal of Small School Finds the Time to Inspire
This is just a simple story of one way a principal found to inspire a student. This principal works in a very small middle school. For those of us who will find ourselves as leaders of much larger schools we may not be able to inspire every student individually. However, we can structure our school to be “places of inspiration”, where students and staff will look forward to coming to school each day. I believe that the principal has a tremendous amount of power to set this tone.
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