Top down vs bottom up in school improvement
I've been making my way through a new book edited by John Simmons, an advisor to superintendents of large urban school districts. Breaking Through: Transforming Urban School Districts focuses on the Chicago experience over the past twenty five years, but includes insights from more than a dozen districts.
Simmons breaks down Chicago's elementary schools into two groups based on the progress they made in raising student achievement during the past 15 years. As a group, the 181 "high-gain schools" raised the percentage of their students scoring at or above average on a national reading test from 20 to 49 percent, a gain of 29 percentile points. In contrast, the 179 "low-gain schools" managed only a gain of 11 percentile points--from 19 to 30 percent .
What's the difference between these two groups, according to Simmons? The high-gain schools developed the capacity to improve themselves. The high gain schools selected and supported principals who recruited a strong teacher corps, involved parents, and improved instruction. Among his findings:
- The principals in the high-gain schools removed 50% or more of their teachers
- High-gain schools had Local School Councils (mandated in all Chicago Public Schools) that effectively assessed and directed principals and budgets
- Training and professional development in high gain schools raised the quality of performance for teachers and principals.
The Simmons thesis is basically this: American public schools need to learn from the experience of American business. Top-down command and control doesn't work. If you want a high-performing system, you've got to build the capacity of the people working at the front lines. Whether you're talking about a factory or a school, this means that small teams must have the authority, responsibility and skills they need to recognize and solve problems and to make their operation run better.
Former San Diego Superintendent (and current California State Secretary of Education) has some of the most interesting things to say in the opening chapters of this 250 page volume.
"The notion of what standards-based reform is, the place that it has in replacing the bell curve in American public education, is something that has not been gotten across, either to the opinion elite, or to the parents or voters, and so the entire effort suffers from lack of support.This strikes me as absolutely correct. Most of us haven't really gotten it into our heads that it is NOT OK that most students, especially the children of the disadvantaged, leave school without many of the skills they'll need to enjoy a full range of personal, civic and economic opportunities in our society.
"The communication link we need most is at the school site with information and points of view circulating back and forth among site leaders, parents, students, teachers and the local community on a whole variety of matters. This takes enormous effort, critical insight and local leadership to build effectively."
The valuable perspective in this volume is that there are no top-down shortcuts in the path from here to there. If we really want to transform the nation's education system to the point where the large majority of kids are leaving school with a wide range of options, then we have enormous work to do to develop leaders at all levels--parent, teachers, principals, and district--who know how to build teams and improve instruction.
posted by Bill Jackson @ 7:46 PM
2 comments
2 Comments:
On the face of it this makes sense. My own experience at a small school that attempted reform repeatedly from the bottom up, however, has belied the efficacy of that approach without other necessary changes. Schools are designed and structured to be run from the top. The teachers' unions assume that schools are run from the top and that reform is a collaboration between teachers (i.e. unions) and management.
In fact, what happened at my school -- and I spent eight years there watching this happen repeatedly -- was a constant shifting of responsibility downward to the teachers without any concomitant increase in teacher authority, in the classroom or out.
Good schools certainly need good teachers, and good schools can usually attract them. A well-run school allows teachers to flourish by treating them well, giving them feedback that is useful, and by creating a culture in which teachers collaborate and share their best practices. Urban school administrators are often so busy putting out fires (dealing with abuse, legal issues, demoralized teachers, irate parents, the gamut of social issues that urban society creates) that they have little time or energy to create such a culture. And of course the students and the parents are part of what makes the culture of a school, too. You cannot force parents to buy into a culture of success (I know; I've seen it tried in a poor urban community).
When a school district has a significant percentage of parents in trouble with the law, then its schools are starting with a serious disadvantage, a lack of social and educational capital, as it were. In urban districts with high rates of crime, more kids will have legal problems, and the parents of these kids often do not recognize or deal with their kids' problems because they are too busy dealing with their own issues.
I think that a particular school reform is successful or unsuccessful because of an enormous range of social issues underlying the problems of urban communities. When you reform the school, you CAN reform other institutions as well, but because schools are so often treated in isolation, most reforms wind up being, as you describe them, a zero-sum game.
Enabling (and trusting) teachers to be leaders and decision-makers is the only way to make real, sustainable change in our schools.
In our district our principals are in and out of schools within two to three years because of "accountability". Most change theory promotes the concept of the "principal" as the "keeper of the vision" who leads the school to improvement.
Reality is -- if the principal isn't going to be there the next year then the only "keepers of the vision" left would be the teachers. Which is one reason why bottom-up change and leadership is so necessary for the kinds of improvements we need to make in our schools.
Finally -- and MOST importantly -- to create real change that is based on what the students really need... the decision-making should be done as the level closest to the students.
The classroom is the "front line" and until we start allowing more significant decisions to be made from that level, we will continue to see the cycles of dis-jointed and unrealistic improvement initiatives "handed-down" from the top. We will continue with that "this too shall pass" mentality among the teachers.
When teachers are involved in the problem-solving and the decision-making, then they become invested in the process -- they "own" the initiatives -- they have "buy-in"... and ultimately this will lead to real changes and improved student learning.
Additionally, students and parents should also be included in the problem-solving and the decision-making -- their insights into what we are doing and what needs to be done are invaluable. They are our customers and if we don't include their voices then we risk being out of touch with what our customers need.
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