Eye on Leadership
Back to the Future: What wisdom are we taking with us?

Edna Varner by Edna Varner
Cornerstone Associate

We have an opportunity to blow the lid off school attainment, dramatically and swiftly reduce the achievement gap, and enhance the “life chances” of all children, regardless of their social or economic circumstances. We have an opportunity to create schools better than anything we’ve ever seen or imagined. Higher test scores would only be a side-benefit of this transformation. Indeed, state assessments themselves would have to be significantly revised to adjust to this explosion in effectiveness, especially with respect to higher-order thinking and critical reasoning.

This is not a pipedream.

-- Mike Schmoker in Results Now

Over this year Cornerstone and its partner districts have focused on our future, developing a model for district-wide scale up that will significantly increase local capacity to create schools that will "blow the lid off school attainment, dramatically and swiftly reduce the achievement gap, and enhance the life chances of all children." From its inception, Cornerstone's mission has been about results, beginning with our description of a literate student and following with the research that outlines how we get there. Have we made progress? Yes. Have we experienced what Schmoker's book describes as "an era of unprecedented effectiveness"? Not yet.

Looking back

A few weeks ago, I traveled to Muscogee County- this time to meet six new Cornerstone principals and to join current colleagues as a co-presenter of our new model. The new principals were not unlike those we have met so many times in the past, wondering what the changes will bring, curious to know what they have to give up, and mostly hopeful that this initiative will yield those elusive results that match their highest aspirations for teachers and students.

But in important ways, the new principals are different. They and their faculties have already been exposed to hundreds of hours of professional development, they have read the groundbreaking leadership books I see on their bookshelves, they have written hefty improvement plans, aligned standards with curricula, scheduled common planning time for their teachers, looked at student work, analyzed assessments, and received regular feedback from district learning walks. Are they making progress? Yes. Are they getting the results they want for all students? Their answer is, "Not yet." Their question is a question that resonates throughout the network, in our Cornerstone staff meetings, in our Board meetings, and in the minds of educators and the larger community everywhere- "Why aren't we getting great results?

On to Our Future...

Mike Schmoker in his book, Results Now, calls on some of the best thinkers, researchers, and practitioners in the field to offer some answers to that question. With no surprise to those who regularly read the literature, the chapters simplify this journey to heightened awareness with some conventional wisdom, "When you cannot find your way, back track." Here we go.

It's about Instruction, Stupid!

We have heard in numerous ways and read in hundreds of reports, journal articles, and books that "the single greatest determinant of learning is not socioeconomic factors or funding levels. It's instruction." At this year's Winter Meeting, Kati Haycock reminded us with compelling data that even struggling students achieve when they get good instruction in every classroom, every day. Effective principals and district leaders significantly improve achievement by acting on the belief that improving instruction is priority #1. And they have the evidence that it works. Yet the ineffective among us fail to recognize what others see as they get a glimpse into schools: We look stupid attempting to improve instruction while spending our time on everything but instruction. Because we have overwhelming evidence that good teaching matters, look for a laser-like focus on improving instruction in the new district scale up model.

Dismantling the Barriers

Talladega and Springfield principals who were with us in 2002 will remember one of the first leadership pieces we studied together, Richard Elmore's Building a New Structure for School Leadership. In it, he writes about what has become the principal's primary role, "the buffer," the person most responsible for protecting the school from outside inspection, interference, or disruption. The barriers (tools used by the buffer) prevent anyone from seeing the details of schooling accurately, the good and the bad. This has led to the perception that instruction and supervision are conducted with relative effectiveness. It works so well that parents tend to give very high marks to their schools even when large numbers of students do not achieve year after year. Although failing scores and teacher resistance may indicate otherwise, the entrance banner reads, "This is a school of excellence!" This rosy view promotes smooth relations, "But make no mistake," Elmore writes in Results Now,"this harmony exacts an enormous toll on the quality of schooling our children receive."

As we move forward with a new district model we must jointly dismantle the barriers that prevent us from

  1. giving teachers, leaders, and Cornerstone partners access to classrooms,
  2. acknowledging that consistently poor student achievement results tell us more about teaching and leadership deficits than we want to admit, and
  3. changing a school culture that has an alarming tolerance for mediocrity.

The Importance of Teamwork

The Cornerstone school review, a welcome and affirming indicator that our schools and districts are hungry for close inspection and feedback, has over time added a section labeled recommendations for Cornerstone. We do not have a chapter in Schmoker's book, but if we did, we would give testimony to a powerful lesson learned from close inspection and feedback. Results Now describes the problem this way:

We [professional developers] have struck a strange bargain: if you sit through our workshops, we promise not to make any real claims on your time or practice. We'll allow you to work alone while assuming (wrongly) that our programs and training are having a positive impact on practice despite the lack of team-based efforts to implement and adjust practice on the basis of assessment results.

No matter how good the power point, it's not the presentation at a workshop that matters, but what happens when teachers and leaders come together as teams to learn, to observe, to align, assess, analyze, monitor, confront issues, and hold each other accountable. That's a more accurate description of a professional learning community. It is what Janet Cumbee and our Talladega colleagues demonstrated in the May 6th Focus group where they detailed how their team took a summer institute session by Mark O'Shea, author of From Standards to Success, and translated it into professional practice and results!

To translate more of our professional development into action, expect Cornerstone to make real claims on each district's time and practice. On the next wave of work, the wave that will take us to an era of unprecedented effectiveness, we will send a clearer message: We are in the districts to help develop expertise, not to be your experts. (Nor should schools depend on a single coach or a super principal to provide this expertise.) Through the development and support of effective teams, districts will begin to fully realize that they have deep wells of untapped, in-house expertise capable of rescuing schools from mediocrity.

Next Steps

Since this is the final newsletter for the school term and near the end of another school year, it seems appropriate to end this article with a test. This is a multiple choice test, so we encourage district and school-based leaders to choose all answers that apply.

What wisdom will you take into our future?

  • Leadership is about vision. But leadership is equally about creating a climate where the truth is heard and the brutal facts confronted.
    • -Jim Collins, Good to Great, 2001
  • The least effective organizations treat knowledge pretty much like steel or any other resource, to be gathered, shared, and distributed. But knowledge-like research based teaching practices-is only as good as its intelligent application.
    • -Pfeffer and Sutton, The Knowing Doing Gap, 2000
  • We know two things that constitute a truly historic opportunity for better schools: (1) Instruction itself has the largest influence on achievement (a fact still dimly acknowledged), and (2) Most--though not all--instruction, despite our best intentions, is not effective, but could improve significantly and swiftly through ordinary and accessible arrangements among teachers and administrators.
    • -Results Now, 2006
  • Three years of effective teaching account on average for an improvement of 35 to 50 percentile points. And the effects are enduring. Five years of instruction from an above-average teacher could eliminate the achievement gap on some state assessments. Indeed it has, and in entire districts.
    • -William Sanders; Kati Haycock, 2005
  • Collegiality cannot be contrived by requiring teachers to plan together or consult together, to engage in peer coaching, or the like. Rather, collegiality is characterized by authentic interactions that are professional in nature. These behaviors include openly sharing failures and mistakes; demonstrating respect for each other; and constructively analyzing and criticizing practices and procedures.
    • -Fullen and Hargraves in What Works in Schools, 2003
  • The question is not, is it possible to educate all children well? But rather Do we want to do it badly enough?...There's a radical and wonderful new idea here: the idea that every citizen is capable of the kind of intellectual competence previously attained by only a small minority...children should be inventors of their own theories, critics of other people's ideas, analyzers of evidence, and makers of their own personal marks on this most complex world.
    • -Deborah Meier, 2002
  • Will we choose to enter an era of unprecedented effectiveness or will we succumb to the siren song of secure sameness? We know how to make dramatic improvements in educational achievement and equity. The only question is whether we have the political and personal courage to do it.
    • -Douglas Reeves, 2006