Two Issues in School Redesign Work

I have found that when schools are asked to make the changes necessary to meet the needs of their students, two problems quickly arise. I would like to address both of these issues. As school-based educators, you can appreciate both issues, but you will only have control of one of the issues. As a central office educator, you will only be able to control one of the two issues, but your actions may make the school-based issues easier to address for a staff and a school community.

Issue number one is that when schools are asked to make changes, they often look for quick fixes. Richard Elmore, an education professor from Harvard School of Education, calls this the low hanging fruit of public education. School-based educators can find this low hanging fruit and adjust their work. However, I have learned that going for the low hanging fruit, which is often essential, does not change the overall success of a school in reaching out to educate all students. It is my belief that schools need to be looked at as systems. You can't look for fixes if the system is in need of adjustment. For example, LAUSD in the late 1990s gave me a good example of the difference between a systemic change in a school and a fix. The Superintendent, with the best of intentions, provided schools with significant amounts of money for what was called "intervention" programs. We were not given training, a curriculum to consider, or any other support for this badly needed money. As a result many schools developed after school and Saturday tutoring programs. We did the right things at the school site, we thought, but the right thing was not making a significant change in student achievement. There were a number of reasons for this result. First, tutoring programs that were quickly established do not address the California State Content Standards which kids are not learning during their first teaching experience. Second, the curriculum that was created on a spur of a moment at each school, did not take into account the specific needs of each child. Third, these programs were set up so quickly that they were more to meet a requirement than to help students in need. Fourth, the right kids were not the ones often taking advantage of the opportunity being provided to underachieving students. Richard DuFour in his book, Whatever It Takes, talks about the need of intervention programs to be short term, specific, and immediate. We were not prepared to create an intervention program that supports his research. As a principal, I saw what we were doing as a fix to a major problem, but it was not coordinated, at first, with other structural and practice changes that we were making in our school. Once we tied our intervention program into our other redesign efforts, we found much greater levels of success and our results were evident in our California State Standards tests, in student classroom achievement, and in other measures we used at our school site. Intervention was not our only change, but it was included as part of a bigger systemic program that our school implemented.

The second issue relates to the need for central offices to support the structural and practical changes that are requested of schools. For the last four years I have worked to change the mindset of central office personnel. I had some success with some offices and less with others. I learned during the 1990s, as a principal of a school that went through major redesign, that if we are to change the structures and practices that have existed in our secondary schools for over 100 years, we have to make changes in the practices of the central office. I have learned that the practices, policies, and procedures created in central offices are an evolutionary outgrowth of events in schools over time. However, once these are implemented, these central office behaviors rarely change. The people in place presently, frequently were not in those positions when the behaviors originated, and there is no current reason for some of those practices to continue as they were initiated. However, the fear of change is very strong and keeps people, including those in central office positions, from looking at themselves and finding new and better ways of supporting the work of schools. This is critical if we are asking our schools to make dramatic change for the good of the students. Stanford University's School Redesign Network, led by Linda Darling-Hammond, has been researching and writing on this topic for the past four years. They do have a publication out with recommendations for central office support of school redesign efforts.

Changing secondary schools is not easy for many reasons, but if we can be thoughtful in our work at the school site, and provided appropriate support from the non-school site, we will have our best chance to create 21st century schools that are able to prepare our students for the 21st century world.

Please provide your input on today's topic and other topics, past and present. I hope that we all find ways to do our job better through the online conversations that occur. The kids need us and we need each other. We have to be lifelong learners for the good of students, and for the good of our society.