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Excerpted from Course Blog: Week 5 - Reconsidering the Theory of Change

This week, we want you to explore your theory of change from discussion post #2 in the context of the real world implications of politics, governance, and management.

In particular, we would like you to focus on the following questions:

1) How do real world constraints (like politics, funding, and organizational culture) impact your theory of change?

2) How do public perceptions impact your ability to execute on your ToC?

Choose a quote from the readings on this week or last weeks study guide that supports your thinking. (Please take note that Dr. Alonso is co-author of two readings you will want to check out in this weeks study guide).

My original theory of change was rooted in recruiting and retaining experienced teachers. With more knowledge from this course, I would expand that goal to building the capacity (Elmore-style) for high-quality instruction in the classroom In addition to a focus on teacher support and development, my deeper understanding of culture and governance has also led me to add principals to that group. However, pursuing this path will require wrestling with the constraints of funding, politics, governance, and culture – which is why the goals must be shared and pursued by the city, school board, central office, and teachers’ union.

Like in the Philadelphia case, the district can work a community committee on a project to transform the popular view of the district into that of a desirable place to work. As the Connecticut judge highlighted in his recent decision, it would also mean working with the union to separate salary from only educational attainment and years taught. Some states (like Massachusetts) have evened out funding between wealthier and poorer districts, allowing the latter to offer higher salaries for teachers in subject shortage areas (like Special Ed) or who choose to teach in low-income schools. With the input and support of teacher leaders, the district must prioritize developing a meaningful coaching and evaluation system that helps teachers feel supported and encouraged. If we are not able to invest in more counselors in schools, then we need professional development that prepares teachers to guide socioemotional learning in addition to academic. In addition, teachers need to have demanding and inspiring principals that they trust as instructional leaders and who stay long-term to lead schools. These principals need more freedom to make hires – with support from the central office – and let go teachers as necessary, without the union’s seniority transfer rules that push hiring into such a late timeline and create frantic starts to the year. And of course, we must tackle organizational culture so that the team can work top-down OR bottom-up on shared priorities.

As Dr. Alonso writes in the first “Creating Public Value in Public Schools, “The simple fact is that every school Superintendent inherits a faculty that he or she depends on to produce the desired results. That staff usually represents more than 75% of the costs of the operation, and its performance is absolutely essential to the success of the school system. If the inherited stock of human capital is highly skilled in teaching, powerfully motivated to get the most from each child, resourceful and energetic in innovating and adapting their methods of instruction to meet new demands, the faculty can be an enormous asset – leveraging the use of money and authority into valuable educational outcomes. If, however, the staff is unqualified, or burnt out, or set in their ways, then the existing staff can become a drag on future performance.”

Looking at the Philadelphia budget and that of any other district, human capital – the teacher workforce – is the most expensive resource any district possesses and I believe must be central to in any theory of action.

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Excerpted from Course Blog: Week 4 - The Central Office Role

For our discussion for week 4, please consider the schools and districts you have worked in OR the districts profiled in this week’s readings, and explore their governance models. What were their opportunities and challenges? How did culture and power influence the governance, management structures and processes at work in these contexts? Which elements might argue for specific governance models or against them? Note that some of our readings pose the dichotomy of centralized versus decentralized district offices as a significant question of the governance of schools. Are you satisfied with this framing or might there be a different way to think about this opposition?

I have taught for the past five years in an in-district turnaround school in Boston Public Schools (BPS). My school was the first in a network of six in-district turnaround schools managed by an outside non-profit organization (like a CMO) but still budgeted by and accountable to BPS. This means that I have had the hybrid experience of both a school-district relationship as well as the school-network relationship. With the lens of this week's readings on governance models, it has been fascinating to think about how both relationships have mimicked and diverged from each other, especially since the school-network relationship was ostensibly established to improve on the failings of the school-district relationship. As Honing points out, principals can have the same or worse experience with their CMOs as their counterparts in the district have with their central office.

When mayoral control became the new mode of school governance in Boston in 1991, it set the stage for a decade of centralized leadership by Mayor Menino and Superintendent Payzant. It was Payzant who championed pilot schools and in-district charter schools as options for BPS students that would be funded by the city but governed by individual boards (this is the "portfolio management" strategy described by Honing). The turnaround model also became more attractive after it was offered as a strategy for cities to receive grants and other funding from Race to the Top in 2009.

Elmore laments that NCLB established federal performance standards and sanctions without expanding the capacity of states, districts, and schools to meet them. Our network strives to meet the same performance standards of the other district schools, but has invested in intensive teacher coaching and development to build capacity in reaching those standards (staying true to Elmore's "principle of reciprocity"). Because our network has more independence from the district, leaders are less likely resort to "the devil made me do it" arguments that pass the buck on to the state or federal regulators. Unlikely the central office situation described by Honing, many of our network administrators are former teachers and have a deep curricular knowledge of what comprises quality teaching and learning. Our network is also committed to the tasks that Honing identifies as ones most neglected by district central offices, such as generating useful data for schools and teachers to use, developing principals as instructional leaders, and recruiting for a teacher/leader pipeline.

At the same time, Elmore's observations about the "regulatory mindset" (and the varied implementation and results that he observed between 145 BPS schools under Superintendent Payzant) rang true to my experience as our network has expanded to six schools in six years. Instead of managing the diversity of different schools with different needs, the network office tends to create uniformity that is easier to regulate. As Honing notes, principals in our network have less autonomy - if more support - than they would have from the district central office. The increased external pressure has the same result as Elmore predicted: coherent schools with a strong organizational culture pull together to meet higher expectations, and already atomized schools become more dysfunctional. In addition, the network staff (like the district's central office staff describe by Honing) spend less time in classrooms than they used to, and teachers are less certain about the role and effects of the network in their daily life (other than implementing testing). While the network may be attuned to principal needs (or imposing its own expectations on the principal through a top-down culture that mimics that of the district), it may be deaf to teacher needs, particularly if there is a disconnect between principal and teachers; for example, our staff attrition rate remains very high but has not been publicly identified by the network as a priority and it is unlikely that the network has successfully supported principals in tackling this issue.

I was curious as to why neither Elmore nor Honing dive into how the central office can support the non-instructional elements of a school that also dramatically affect performance; I feel that this continues to be a gap in our own network's support of schools. How could the central office secure more counseling and wraparound services for schools with high-poverty populations? How could it help schools reduce high suspension rates? How could it help schools improve relationships with families and and bring community voices into the school's decision-making process? How could it help schools foster programs for the athletics and arts? These are questions that schools are left struggling with on their own.

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Excerpted from Course Blog: Week 3 = Organizational Culture

Begin with Christenson and Sarason, and compare what they are saying, coming from two very different analytic perspectives, Christenson coming from the world of business, Sarason steeped in the world of schools. Think of Sarason’s notion of “regularities” and what is assumed or unseen, as opposed to what is actually at work in school routines. What do you think? Consider your previous experience in schools and other school organizations, and the “regularities” you experienced? While coming from two different backgrounds, both Schein (through Christensen) and Sarason seem to agree on the inevitable failure of a reform initiative that does not first examine and deeply understand the existing culture that creates the current outcomes. Schrein writes that a manger must first "direct significant effort toward understanding the present culture's antecedents" before trying to introduce a shift in the group's processes. Similarly, Sarason points out that "any attempt to introduce an important change in the school culture requires changing existing regularities to produce new intended outcomes. In practice, the regularities tend not to be changed and the intended outcomes, therefore, cannot occur; that is, the more things change the more they remain the same." An example of this failure was presented in last week's Stone reading on civic capacity, in which he describes how reforms in Baltimore ran into resistance from unresponsive employees whose organization culture was not receptive to top-down initiatives. When I joined my school's turnaround team five years ago, we based our school model on the disruption of several common K-12 regularities and formed our staff culture out of them. When I describe our school's unusual practices to outsiders, they sometimes react with the same defensiveness that Sarason describes of his interviewees when faced with a model that does not "teach the way they were taught." For example, rather than one school leader, our school uses a co-leader model (similar is that referenced in the LBUSD case!) with both a principal (as instructional leader) and equal-in-status director of operations. In another example of defying a popular programmatic regularity, our middle school teachers do not each have their own classroom; instead of students rotating, teachers rotate between the student-owned homerooms. This sacrifice in traditional teacher independence allows us to form teacher teams that work collaboratively with the same groups of students; the teams are led by teacher leaders, similar to the initiative described by Klein in his speech. Because these practices were integral to our model, our school culture has been created in response to what are our own regularities. While we have a strong culture of collaboration, it is difficult for one teacher to innovate with an aspect of instructional practice; the culture resists this unless faced with a crisis (say, an unusual student need that presents in their classroom). We also have similar behavior regularities that are hard to shift, like the silent lines described above by Julianne; an example would be trying to have the 8th graders transition between classrooms in preparation for that experience in high school. Our organizational culture, which supported innovation when our school was first restarted, now resists it.

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Excerpted from Course Blog: Week 2 = Theory of Action

I absolutely agree with the earlier respondents about the lasting effects of American institutionalized racism, particularly today's reality of extreme residential segregation by district (see Noguera's description of white flight to the suburbs). I am most preoccupied by considering a theory of action, particularly that of increasing access to instructional rigor and destroying practices that perpetuate low expectations (as pursued by Superintendent Weast's team in the MCPS case studies); while others above have alluded to efforts to address the "whole child," I wonder if many of these social services are outside the scope of what our schools are set up (through limited funding) to provide (ex. healthcare, counseling). However, how else can we make up for the debt (rather than deficit, as Joseph put it) left with our students in poverty? As Felicia points out above, we are expecting schools to take up the slack for other failing institutions. I come back to Hochschild: "Where it has been tried, educating poor children with students who are more privileged, or educating them like students who are more privileged, has improved their performance and long-term chance of success." While I wish we could address the former through integration (as Thomas suggests above), most segregation is not in-district but inter-district, and busing between districts was ruled unconstitutional in Milliken v. Bardley (1970). This means we we are left tackling the latter approach from Hochschild, of educating poor students likewealthy students - which we know is possible. Noguera points out that there are over "4,000 high-performing, high-poverty schools throughout the nation... (Education Trust, 2002)." If we want to educate impoverished students with the pedagogy and curriculum of the wealthy, then it comes down to teachers: we need the best ones. As Noguera further put it, "the possibility for transforming urban public schools is contingent on our ability to attract highly motivated and competent professionals to work in them, or to inspire and support those who are already there." As Edwide referred to in the Putnam text, the more experienced and highly-credentialed teachers migrate inexorably towards the affluent suburbs. Is it possible to keep the best teachers in high-poverty schools if we bring in quality coaching and supports, ensure unionized protections, and consider increased salary or merit pay? As Stacey said above, we need experienced teachers who can build relationships with the students who most need that socio-emotional support; they are the most valuable student-facing resource, the heart and the "good" of the school. We also must have experienced teachers if we want to create a school culture of teamwork and feedback, or if we want to use collaborative problem-solving and strategies of restorative justice to reduce suspension rates. These initiatives are simply beyond the capacity of a first-year teacher, and we also cannot make progress if there is a constant revolving door of new inexperienced teachers - as is common in the urban school.

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