DaveShearon

Metro Nashville Public Schools Need Leadership, Not Implementation

Nashville is searching for a new schools superintendent.  By some measures, our last search was a success.  The candidate selected, Pedro Garcia, lasted almost seven years.  Of course, he also created a "climate of fear" and presided over six straight years when Nashville lost ground to the state average in helping students learn.  So, what have the leaders who will choose our next superintendent taken from this experience?

The meme from the Mayor's office and the business community seems to be,  "Let's get an implementor."  Here is one story that evidences this, but there are others.  A Nashville Today (not online) interview with former Mayor Bill Purcell quoted him to the effect that we needed someone who knows how to turn around an urban school system.

The meme out of the School Board seems to be, "a good communicator who listens, builds morale and maintains strong community relations."  All the thing's that Dr. Garcia wasn't.  That's fairly typical in these situations.  Our last search was to replace a superintendent who had been a career-long MNPS educator and who was not seen as strong on instructional issues -- his role had been facilities and helping settle the 4-decade desegregation suit.  So, of course, the meme was for an outsider with strong instructional credentials who would come in and whip the system into place.  I was on the Board when that search started and I pushed for us not to go looking for "an answer person."  No Board member or Chamber representative would publicly speak against that, but it was not the underlying tenor of leadership thinking.  We wanted a "change agent."

Memes make a difference.  They are the real drivers of decisions in situations like this, not formal statements of "what we are looking for."  Here we have interesting cross-currents between the "implementor" and the "people person" meme.  I hope that the "people person" meme wins out.  There's virtually no evidence nationally that any program, be it "small learning communities" or whatever the next fad will be, can reliably improve teaching and learning in urban systems if it is just "implemented" properly.  On the other hand, there's lots of evidence that good relationships between teachers and principals, teachers and teachers, teachers and students, and teachers and parents create engagement for students and gains in learning.  Chris Peterson of the University of Michigan and one of my professors in the MAPP program sums up the findings of positive psychology by saying, "Other people matter."

I was at an event this weekend where I got to visit with the parents of young adults who were in my older son's class in school.  Several of these, like Tyler, are now teaching.  One parent summed up the experience of his and a number of others he'd talked to over recent years as, "I love my kids, like my parents, can't stand the administration."  He talked about the number of young, idealistic, energetic students he had seen go into teaching in recent years, then leave in disillusionment due to the leadership, or lack thereof, in their schools.  Or, as another parent quoted his daughter's principal, "If you are looking for me to encourage you, you came to the wrong school."  Wow!

So, what should the School Board do?

• Hold to the "people person" idea, but don't hold your breath waiting to find her or him.  Much of the dynamic in the leadership track that produces candidates for urban systems tends to create "program people" with jaded views of teachers and even the possibility of change.  (One of the findings of a big survey done of our system by a group that conducts such studies around the country was that teachers and top administrators were equally pessimistic about the chances for improvement.)
• Change the system to support the people in it, specifically:
  • Support teacher-led instructional improvement.  The format does not have to be lesson study as I pushed it when I was on the Board, but it had better include letting teachers, working together in small groups, select areas for improvement efforts, research, design, implement, and evaluate those efforts, report the results, then turn around and do it again.  Call it "small learning communities" or "critical friends circles" or "action research", but make sure it has those characteristics.
  • Give back the teacher in-service days the last administration took away.  The idea that what we really needed was more time for teachers in front of students doing what they have always done was insane.  It was a reflection of the command and control, fear-based approach of the last administration.  The Board should not have agreed to it and you should take the lead now in creating time in the school year for teachers to work on deep, fundamental instructional improvement.  Don't wait for MNEA to demand it in negotiations.  Do it now, on your own, as a sign of your faith in teachers and a commitment to a new way of going forward together.
  • Create a system of regular surveys of culture and climate in MNPS generally and in individual schools.  This was a task the Board assigned the last administration.  They picked a vendor that delivered a useless product and then reneged on the balance of the agreement claiming lack of funds.  The Board let it happen.  Now, we find that instead of an $800,000 contract, we got a useful survey for $30,000.  Get a permanent, annual system in place to sample to feelings and beliefs of teachers, students, and parents.  I still recommend looking into this option, but don't take no for an answer this time.  Get a system that will produce data that will help you manage the leadership of this system.  There is no excuse for not fixing this glaring lack that allowed a culture of fear and low expectations to prevail under the last administration.

Selecting the next superintendent of schools is clearly the biggest challenge and most significant responsibility this Board will face.  Looking around the country, we see NO large, urban school systems that are doing well, so there's very little reason to think we are going to find a lot of quality candidates that can lead a people-first program.  But there is ABSOLUTELY NO REASON to think we will find a candidate who has a programmatic answer for teaching and learning.  Run from those who think they do.  Find your people person who believes in the strengths and character of our teachers, our students, our parents and our community.  Someone who will draw out and build on the best qualities and strongest aspects of who we are.  That is our only path forward.  Good luck!

Strategy, or meaning?

"The calculated logic of strategic analysis (where leaders traditionally spend 80% or more of their time) is simply not enough to engender the commitment from employees required for world-class performance."

Leading through Meaning, Mike Morrison, PhD, Dean, University of Toyota

He precedes that statement by saying, "if a new strategy or simply pushing harder could have solved our problems, our most significant challenges would have been handled long ago."  Dr. Morrison is thinking about business, but the same is true, in spades, for school systems.  How many school boards are currently looking for a superintendent?  And how many of those boards think what they need is the answer person with a new management program, curriculum, or strategic plan?  Someone who'll roll in and say, "I'm not here to win a popularity contest."  Someone to "whip things into shape."  Answer:  every last one of them.  And then, in 2, 3, or 4 years, they'll be going through the process again and wondering why things didn't work out.

Caring for the Leader

Does that title strike you as strange?  I suspect it does.  But leadership is tough, and yet most of us give little thought to the care and feeding of leaders.  They have to do it themselves, and, what's more, they virtually never get even a suggestion that they need to do that, much less guidance in how.  A VC has a great post on this.  And I suspect it is appropriate to school principals.  I know it would be to superintendents.

But my advice to founders and CEOs who find that they have the weight of the company on their shoulders is to get some help.

And there are two sources of help I recommend.

The first is inside the company.  A CEO/founder must surround themselves with people who they like, trust, and can lower their guard with.  The best leaders have a "kitchen cabinet" of people they can be completely honest with and who they rely on for advice, counsel, and support. It is tricky to provide that back to the same people who are providing it to you, but you must try to make it happen.

The second is outside the company.  I encourage every CEO/founder I work with to find someone that they can meet with at least once a week to talk to about their hopes, dreams, challenges, anxieties, and fears.  I don't normally suggest a shrink, but a coach or a mentor who has no other agenda than to be your counsel and friend is critical.  Most of the successful leaders I know has someone like this, at least for part of their stint on the job.

The bottom line is being a founder/CEO is a really hard job.  It's even harder if you've never done it before. If you find yourself being slowed down by the weight of the company on your shoulders, find some people you can trust and be totally honest with to help you carry the load.

Think about it.  School principals really report to a "board".  No one person at the central office is their direct superior, responsible for building them up and helping them succeed.  Rather, you've got a ton of folks empowered to meddle in their day-to-day activities, but with virtually no accountability for results.

And what about supers?  They usually didn't set out to be CEO's and founders.  They just moved up.  And, along the way, the only time they were the "leader", they were principals -- and not supported.  Then they get to the top, and they think being the "big leader" is going to make it better.  And, instead, they find everybody dumping problems in their laps and an organization that, as noted, fails to support the critical leaders on which supers depend:  principals.  But, that's the way they were treated.  That's the way all school systems are structured.  How in the world are supers going to see the need to radically realign the roles of central office administrators vis-a-vis principals?  As one administrator here in Nashville was heard to say, "I came to the central office because I like to tell people what to do!"

Finally, I should point out that school boards have to be about the worst boards around to work for!  Generally, the members have little or no management experience.  Most have never been on any board with a similar public profile and responsibility.  The political nature attracts issue-oriented folks and bomb-throwers.  Typically they have no clue how to evaluate the system's performance overall, much less any way to judge whether it's headed in the right direction.  And, they want to "do something" -- that's why they ran for the post!  But, "doing something" from the board level is quite often a REALLY bad idea, and the super often knows this, even if he or she cannot articulate why in a way that will work with board members.  Great.  What a position.  And I campaigned for some of these jobs!  What was I thinking?

Quality in Schools

Measuring and Managing Customer Satisfaction, by Sheila Kessler (ASQ Quality Press, 1996) p. 70 states that a Gallup survey of 352 elementary and secondary school principals stated that their school had a "formal program" on quality.  Huh??  What could they possibly have been talking about?  Here are just a few questions that would have to be answered for such a statement to make sense:

• Quality of what?  What's your product?  Daily attendance?  Lessons?  Test scores?
• Who's the customer?  Who does a school's leadership really try to please and engage?  Students?  Parents?  Central office administrators?  The community?
• How are you measuring the quality of whatever is your product in the eyes of whoever is your customer?

Gallup's a great organization.  But, frankly, I can't imagine that this survey actually captured anything meaningful at all!

On Getting and Keeping Effective Teachers

In a yahoogroup on Metro Nashville Public Schoos (MNPS), I was asked about how I use the term "effective teacher",  how I would keep them, and whether it really takes around 10 years for a teacher to reach his maximum effectiveness.  The answer to the latter is that is what TVAAS data indicates, and, yes, I believe it.  As for the rest, here's my response:

How do I use "effective"? Basically, the 20% of
teachers in Tennessee who get the highest TVAAS gains
scores are what I call "highly effective".  The 20%
that get the lowest (including negative gains!) are
highly ineffective.  The rest are, effective, average, and ineffective. 

"Wait," you may be saying, "there's more to good
teaching than test scores."  Well, I could ask, what
more?  And why do you think it would not be reflected
in test scores?  But, the more powerful question is
whether a person making that claim would be willing
for her children to be squenced through a string of
highly ineffective teachers.  Sure would help with the triage problem. If you haven't read this:
http://www.heartland.org/pdf/21803a.pdf
I highly recommend it.  One of the most important
pieces of educational research in the last decade, and its results have been duplicated with different tests and underlying methodology.  See
http://www.shearonforschools.com/TVAAS.html for more
information.

As for the 10-year learning curve, three points:

#1 -- How can we get new teachers a higher starting
point on that curve?  This is a question for teacher
education programs and my understanding is that the
schools in TN are working with Dr. Sanders on this.

#2 -- How can we shorten the curve for teachers in the system?  Notice the use of lead teachers in the NY Times article in anoter post to this group.  I'd also highly recommend lesson study, but that's a judgment -- we didn't stick with it and so don't have data. Finally, continuing education is an important
component, but it's not nearly enough in itself.

#3 -- How can we keep the best teachers?  Respect.
Stop the "central office to improve teaching"
approach.  Ten years from now, teacher engagement,
reflection, thoughtfulness and cooperative improvement will still be important.  Sandy Johnson's programs won't be.  Stop telling them how to teach.  Make sure, and I mean with data and systematic approaches, that the culture in each school is healthy and that we are tapping the feelings and opinions of teachers. 

Change or Die!

May's Fast Company has a cover article on "Change or Die."  Points include:

• 9 out of 10 bypass patients have failed to change life-threatening habits 2 years after surgery
• 77% of such patients succeeded in a radical life-style change including significant support structures
• A vision of a better life (world?  school?) promotes change better than fear or crisis
• Facts don't drive change; we don't accept, much less act on facts that don't fit our world view.  (Vision helps re-frame.)
• Emotional connection drives change -- vision again.

Let's apply these to efforts to improve schools.

NCLB (which is only one aspect of the test-score based change imperative which has been growing for twenty-five years) uses facts and fear to try to achieve change.  Neither will work.  This is, of course, not a statement that facts are unimportant.  Data can help direct change, but it won't drive it.

At the system level, superintendents and school boards are using programs to try and drive change -- and then are surprised when they don't work.  No new vision, no change.  Minor tweaking -- no change.  Programs lack vision and are (at least as they come out of district offices) just a minor tweaking of "doing school."  Any surprise there's no change?

Change is hard.  But, if students are to learn and achieve more next year, and the year after and the one after that and so on, adults -- teachers, faculties, principals -- are going to have to change their behaviors.  Not easy.  And not helped by either the state and national level "facts and fear" approach, nor by the system level programmatic response.

BTW, this is going in a new, "If Schools Were Run Like a (Great) Business..." category.  I'll come back to this, as I believe the world of business can suggest some ways we can hope for teachers, faculties, principals, system personnels and, yes, even school boards to change.

And how schools are NOT run like a professional consulting firm!

The Education Wonks picked up on a story from New York about another on-its-way-to-failing, rolled-out-from-the-central-office pedagogy, complete with public denials that its mandatory and pretty clear communications with teachers that they had better get with the program.  This one is based on making classes mostly group work, a technique developed by, well I'll be ... the current "Deputy Chancellor for Instruction." 

Amazing.  She developed it, it worked, so now if everybody will just implement it, all will be well.  How many times are administrators going to keep making this mistake?  The answer isn't a program!  The answer is teacher engagement!  Quit thinking you're the only ones who can develop (or identify) a successful approach.  Get the **** out of the way.  Develop a system to encourage teachers to engage with their own teaching.  I like lesson study, but there are other good approaches.  Then support them and WORK ON IT!

I can understand the deputy chancellor making this mistake, but, jiminy crickets, Joel Klein was brought in as chancellor because he was supposed to bring some outside insight.  Get with it Joel!  You wouldn't manage a top-tier law firm this way -- you know it wouldn't work.  Why do you think it's going to work with the professional teaching force you now manage?  Quit listening to your top deputies and get out there with teachers.  Find the ones who have and are developing their own successful approaches and figure out how to get more teachers doing that next year, and doing it better.  Then more and better the next.  And the next.  Get the picture?