Leveraging LEA Wisdom + Effective SEA Communication = Increased Likelihood of Implementation Success

Over the past three years, UPD has helped two state education agencies  (SEAs) develop and implement their Local Education Agency’s (LEA) performance management processes to support effective implementation of their Race to the Top initiatives. In a nutshell, these processes involved the facilitation of ongoing, structured meetings attended by LEA leadership team members during which participants actively engaged with teams from other districts around challenging problems of practice and promising strategies for addressing these challenges.

 

Rhode Island and Illinois, the SEAs that implemented these processes with support from UPD, both deliberately incorporated LEA input into their planning and continuous improvement efforts. Through the strategic use of online surveys, appointing an LEA advisory group, and diligently gathering and analyzing feedback after every meeting, both states ensured that not only were the sessions helpful to LEAs but that participants felt ownership over the work and saw the SEA as better partners than in past implementation efforts.

Having an LEA focus truly means that the meeting discussions are LEA-centric and focused on what the LEAs need, rather than on what the SEA thinks should be discussed. When this happens, the conversations provide LEA and SEA participants with rich and often unexpected insights into implementation successes and challenges. Session facilitators can promote an LEA focus by asking open-ended questions about lessons learned and challenges facing the districts in their groups, and reinforcing the practice of LEA teams deliberately asking and answering questions of teams from different LEAs, rather than turning to the SEA representatives in the room for answers.

 

Building positive relationships with LEA stakeholders does not happen overnight. People often have to move past previous experiences where the SEA and LEAs were not aligned regarding expectations for implementation which led to low levels of trust between LEAs and the SEA. Transparent communication by SEAs is critical in reinforcing a positive partnership with LEAs.

 

SEAs can build trust by continuously providing timely turnaround on the sharing of lessons learned and resources, and by clearly and regularly articulating, “Here is what you told us, and this is what we did because of your input.” Even when there is not an obvious or immediate solution, it is an opportunity to practice transparent and deliberate communication and further build trust with LEAs.

 

En fin de compte (as my high school French teacher was fond of saying and which translates to “In the final analysis…” in English), SEAs that:

1. deliberately engage LEAs in process and content design,
2. respond clearly and consistently to LEA suggestions and questions, and
3. provide meaningful opportunities for LEA teams to share their challenges and strategies,

will see increased LEA ownership of implementation success, improved relationships with LEAs and a greater understanding of “on-the-ground” implementation challenges and effective strategies.

 

More information on this issue is forthcoming in a Brief authored by UPD for the US Department of Education’s Reform Support Network. Details and a link coming soon!

 

Written by Elaine Farber Budish, a Senior Consultant at UPD Consulting (elaine@updconsulting.com), September  2014

SLOs: When the O stands for Opportunity Some Advice for LEA/SEA Leaders

Student Learning Objectives (also known as SLOs, Student Growth Targets, and other aliases) are gaining momentum nationally as one measure being implemented by states and districts within their new educator evaluation systems. Briefly, SLOs are long term, measurable academic goals that teachers (and administrators) set for students.

While many states and districts are implementing SLOs, there are also big concerns about SLOs: How do we make them valid and reliable? What assessments can be used to measure student progress, especially in subjects like art, music, foreign languages, and physical education? Do SLOs really mean more testing? What is a year’s worth of growth, anyway?

SLOs ask hard questions of educators; questions that states and districts are often unprepared to answer. Instead of retreating to easy answers that emphasize compliance from educators, stop and think about the opportunity created by the need to grapple with and implement SLOs. Based on UPD’s experience in supporting SEAs and LEAs in the work of designing, implementing, and managing SLOs, there are some golden opportunities for reform that can be missed if leaders aren’t thinking in the right ways:

•Growth is a complicated puzzle: Yes, SLOs are designed to measure growth. But do all your teachers and administrators agree on what equates to a year’s worth of growth? Given where a student starts the year, what can educators reasonably expect in terms of improvement over the course of a year? Do educators know their content well enough to be able to envision the skills and content for their class stretched along a scale and spanning the timeline of the instructional interval, whereby they can measure student growth? Given the difficult implementation of Common Core, probably not. These questions, which are central to our role as educators, present an opportunity to think about new content standards and how both teachers and students interact with those standards in different ways.

•Student target setting is key: Yes, SEAs and LEAs ask teachers to set growth targets for their students based on historical and baseline data, which can feel like another task on a teacher’s endless to-do list. However, any push towards individualized instructional planning and delivery is a good one. The target setting process requires that teachers think through each of their students at the beginning of every year, including where he/she has been academically, and where he/she needs to go next in their learning. The implications for that kind of work reach far beyond teacher evaluation. Between having to dive deeply into new curriculum and planning to facilitate individual students’ growth, this is an opportunity to significantly impact student learning.

•Don’t let (a lack of) assessments derail you: Part of the difficulty of implementing SLOs is deciding which assessments teachers can use to document student growth. Leadership will spend a lot of time worrying about what tests can be considered valid and reliable, and how to deal with core subject areas versus art, music, physical education, and other subjects that do not traditionally make use of standardized assessments. A ready-made answer might be to simply buy assessment systems to cover all grades and subjects, but this would mean missing the opportunity. Stop. Do not pass go. Leaders, go back to the table, pull in your best teachers and look for innovative assessment practices in your schools. Don’t spend money on new assessments in the very year state assessments are changing. Don’t make teachers feel that tests are the only way to measure student growth. Do the hard work of bringing educators together and start defining performance standards. Think of this as the opportunity to do really meaningful professional development on new standards by asking teachers to engage and figure out together what assessments, rubrics, performance tasks and projects make the most sense and provide multiple and diverse ways to document student growth.

•And again (in case you weren’t paying attention), engage educators: teacher evaluation is a controversial subject for obvious reasons. Put your money where your mouth is when you say that these systems are about designing supports for teachers and creating opportunities for teacher leadership. Bring teachers and administrators together from around your LEA/SEA and have them collaborate on the very tough questions SLOs raise. They are not tough because they are related to evaluation, they are tough because they raise fundamental issues in education reform and in teacher practice, and there are no easy answers. Value the collaboration and the process over finding The. Right. Answer. If there were one right answer, everyone would be doing it. There isn’t one – free yourself from trying to find it.

The minute SLOs become a compliance exercise (whether it’s compliance from teachers in following district guidance or compliance from LEAs in following SEA policy), the opportunity to think and collaborate and push our own practice has been lost. Grab the opportunity SLOs provide and make the most of it.

Written by Laura Weeldreyer, a consultant at UPD Consulting

Taking a Closer Look at Value Added

Last month I joined a team of UPD-ers and traveled around the state of Oklahoma training district-level trainers on Value-Added.  During one of the sessions, a participant raised his hand and asked our team how value added could be relied upon as a valid measure of teacher effectiveness when districts like Houston Independent School District[1] are currently involved in lawsuits surrounding the legitimacy of their value-added model, and the American Statistical Association (ASA) released a statement[2] that has been described as “slamming the high-stakes ‘value-added method’ (VAM) of evaluating teachers.”    Although we were familiar with both the Houston lawsuits and the ASA statement, this question created an opportunity to take a closer look at recent articles and information opposing (or seeming to oppose) value added.

 

First, a little background:  According to our partners at Mathematica Policy Research, “Value-added methods (sometimes described as student growth models) measure school and teacher effectiveness as the contribution of a school or teacher to students’ academic growth. The methods account for students’ prior achievement levels and other background characteristics.”  Value added does this via a statistical model that is based on educational data from the given state or district, and uses standardized test scores to evaluate teachers’ contribution to student achievement. Although value added and similar measures of student growth had been used in various places in the United States without much opposition, criticism peaked around 2010 when districts such as Chicago, New York City and Washington, DC began incorporating value-added into high-stakes teacher evaluation models.  Since then various individuals and organizations have published their views on the merits or pitfalls of value added including, most recently, the American Statistical Association (ASA).

 

The ASA statement has garnered considerable attention because as described by Sean McComb, 2014 National Teacher of the Year, “… I thought that they are experts in statistics far more than I am. So I thought there was some wisdom in their perspective on the matter.”[3] Of course as statistical experts they shed some light on what can and cannot reasonably be expected from the use of value-added measures, but here are a few ways that we can address parts of their statement that may be misunderstood:

• The ASA mentions that value added models “are complex statistical models, and high-level statistical expertise is needed to develop the models and interpret their results. Estimates from VAMs should always be accompanied by measures of precision and a discussion of the assumptions and possible limitations of the model.”  Although it is true that the models themselves are complex and require advanced statistical expertise to compute, we would argue that people without this level of expertise can be trained on the concepts behind how the models work and also how results should be interpreted.  In Oklahoma, part of the training we provide is designed to help teachers build a conceptual understanding of the statistics behind value added.  Although we do not look at the regression formula itself, we help to define components of the measure including how it is developed, its precision, etc. so that teachers are able to better understand how value added can provide additional data to help inform their instruction.
• In the report, the ASA cautions that since value added is based on standardized test scores, and other student outcomes are predicted only to the extent that they correlate with test scores, it does not adequately capture all aspects of a teachers effectiveness – “A teacher’s efforts to encourage students’ creativity or help colleagues improve their instruction, for example, are not explicitly recognized in VAMs.”  This statement is true and it is one that we are quick to highlight when we train on value added.  Value-added models are not designed to measure teacher effectiveness in isolation as they only tell part of the story.  When used as part of an evaluation system with multiple measures (such as classroom observations and student surveys), a more complete and stable picture becomes available.
• Finally the ASA clearly states that “VAM scores are calculated using a statistical model, and all estimates have standard errors. VAM scores should always be reported with associated measures of their precision, as well as discussion of possible sources of biases.”[4] Since we are always transparent about the fact that all value-added estimates have confidences intervals, this is almost always something that trips people up during training sessions.  Many will say, “If there is a margin of error, then how can this measure be trusted enough to include in an educator evaluation system?”   What is easy to forget is that all measures, statistical or not, come with some level of uncertainty.  This includes more traditional methods of teacher evaluation such as classroom observations.  Although efforts should be made to limit or decrease the margin of error where possible, there will never be a way to completely eliminate all error from something as wide and deep as teacher effectiveness. Despite this, this does not mean that value added should not be used to evaluate teachers but, as mentioned previously, it should be considered alongside other measures.

 

By Titilola Williams-Davies., a consultant at UPD Consulting.

 

 

 

[1]Strauss, Valerie. April 30, 2014. ”Houston teachers’ lawsuit against the Houston Independent School District” Washington Post. http://apps.washingtonpost.com/g/documents/local/houston-teachers-lawsuit-against-the-houston-independent-school-district/967/

 

[2]American Statistical Association. April 8, 2014. “ASA Statement on Using Value-Added Models for Educational Assessment.” http://www.amstat.org/policy/pdfs/ASA_VAM_Statement.pdf

 

[3] Valerie Strauss. April 30, 2014. “2014 National Teacher of the Year: Let’s stop scapegoating teachers” Washington Post. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/04/30/2014-national-teacher-of-the-year-lets-stop-scapegoating-teachers/?tid=up_next

 

[4] American Statistical Association. April 8, 2014. “ASA Statement on Using Value-Added Models for Educational Assessment.” http://www.amstat.org/policy/pdfs/ASA_VAM_Statement.pdf

 

Teacher Evaluation and the Burden of Evidence

Over the last several years, school districts across the country have been rolling out more rigorous and detailed evaluation rubrics along with systems to help administrators and teachers collaborate, collect evidence, and share performance ratings. If your school district (or school district that you are consulting for) is adopting a new teacher evaluation system to aid with collecting quality evidence, I have a single piece of advice for you. But you have to read to the end to get it.

The new evaluation frameworks are significantly more complex than the evaluation practices they have replaced. The Danielson framework, for example, contains 22 potential components. These are containers or categories for what is commonly referred to as “evidence,” typically taken in the form of notes by administrators. In some school districts as many as 10 of these 22 components need to be captured during a single class period teacher observation. At the end of the day, in districts that have already rolled out new rubrics, the burden of evidence to support those rubrics falls heavily on the administrators.

Now, I want to magically transport you and your laptop to the back of a classroom where it is your job to capture all applicable evidence for a complicated new framework, that has just been introduced to you, while the teacher works through the ebbs and flows of a lesson and the students fire off questions. Ready, set, go! The teacher begins the lesson and you have become the equivalent of a court reporter. How good are your shorthand typing skills? How dependable is your wi-fi? Can you really type up quality evidence and organize it on the spot, using new technology?

 

 Photo by Julia Kuo

From my experience having personally trained hundreds of Principals and Assistant Principals on teacher evaluation tools, this may be the single most valuable lesson I’ve learned: How can you change years, or even decades, of note-taking habits over the course of a few hours and show administrators how to collect evidence in an entirely different way? Easy answer: you don’t.

If you are going to roll out detailed rubrics and build sophisticated systems to capture the evidence, that is just swell. But when it comes to actually capturing the notes in the classroom session, I urge you to empower the administrators to use their preferred methods of colleting notes, whatever those methods may be. Spreadsheet? Sure. Word processing? Of course. Pen and paper? Knock yourself out (though you will have to type it up later). The important thing is that the administrator is comfortable enough to capture notes quickly and this ensures that they aren’t missing valuable evidence while they try to tango with your new system or their potentially lousy wi-fi connection. The frameworks have likely changed, so I don’t mean to imply that the quality and content of notes captured by the administrator don’t have to change: they do. What I am proposing is that you don’t handicap them with a single tool in the fast-paced environment of classroom observation.

You can and should design a system this way. We have done such a thing with Truenorthlogic, who has rolled out their software to some of the largest school districts in the country. Evidence can be copied and pasted from multiple sources. Splitting up the evidence and grouping it by the rubric is incredibly flexible and doesn’t have to be done on the spot in the classroom.

When we piloted the teacher evaluation system at the Chicago Public Schools, we first proposed that administrators replace their previous evidence collection entirely and fire up their laptops and tablets to collect evidence directly in the new system. This did not go over nearly as well as our adjusted approach in the district-wide rollout, where we adopted the “take notes however you like” approach. By then, we had learned that administrators need to be empowered to collect evidence using their preferred method. We need their brain power focused primarily on capturing quality, relevant evidence to their new framework, not on navigating new technology. As long as they can turn around and input that evidence in the system efficiently and share it with the teacher by the required deadline, more power to them. Everyone wins.

 

 

By Frank Nichols. Frank Nichols is a Consultant at UPD Consulting.

Literary Lots: Sponsorship Interview

Literary Lots, Kauser Razvi’s community revitalization project funded through Kickstarter, is a program that helps urban neighborhoods whip vacant lots into shape by transforming vacant lots into summer program spots for children. In Cleveland, several lots will take on literary themes from children’s books and spend the summer months as spaces for art and education. Working with Cleveland Public Libraries and LAND Studio, Literary Lots will transform 2 to 4 vacant lots adjacent to libraries into six-week summer program spots for children in inner-city Cleveland.

Between June and August 2013, local artists will use themes from specific children’s books to re-create places, concepts, or adventures from the book, creating a magical and educational space to engage local youth in art and culture.  The lots will be filled with books (naturally), and will feature reading and writing classes, in addition to providing interactive games for kids.  The hope is these spaces will bring neighborhoods, cultural institutions and artists together in creative collaboration to bring books to life… and keep books in our children’s lives.

UPD, a sponsor, was interviewed about our interest in the project. You can read Doug Austin’s, UPD President and CEO, interview here.

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Kauser Razvi, an Account Executive at UPD, brings over 14 years of public sector management experience to the team. Her consulting engagements have included the organizing community members, funders, and businesses around the establishment of Global Cleveland, developing long term project plans for the Chicago Out of School Time project funded by the Wallace Foundation and the development of technical and organizational strategies around data systems to improve business functions and operations in Government and non-profit organizations. She holds a BA in Sociology and BS in Journalism from Boston University and a Masters in Urban Planning from the University of Michigan.

Reinventing The Wheel

For years, many cities have undertaken the task of developing a citywide plan, agenda, goals, etc. around children and youth development and success.  In most cases, this work is a collaboration between multiple organizations, including the school district, city agencies (parks and recreation, libraries), city funded agencies and community based nonprofits.  While the core values that these organizations have around youth success are common, bringing these organizations together to discuss and arrive at a common mission and set of goals, objectives, standards, and measures to work towards can take years to accomplish.  Examples of this type of work are the Nashville Children and Youth Master Plan, Milwaukee Succeeds, Grand Rapids Youth Master Plan, Minneapolis Youth Coordinating Board, Chicago Out-of-School Time Project, Ready by 21 Austin, among many others.  Even more examples are included here, on the National League of Cities site.

A sampling of some of these plans is included in a table below.  Even doing a quick scan of these initiatives reveals many common threads in the goals and objectives that were the result of the months/years of collaborative work: youth/children are prepared for school, succeed academically, are healthy, are supported by caring adults, and contribute to the community.

In a recent conversation I had in discussing how to start this type of work, the question was raised “why don’t we just use what has already been done?”  So why spend years redoing the work when it has already been done?

“Reinvent the wheel – to waste time trying to develop products or systems that you think are original when in fact they have already been done before” Cambridge Idioms Dictionary, 2nd ed. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2006

The reason for spending the time, effort and resources is because the participation in this type of process is as important or more important than the output.  Bringing together leaders across the city who may or may not have worked well together in the past to discuss not only their own organizations, but also how as a city they can work towards a common set of goals and objectives is incredibly powerful.  Building these relationships and knowledge about each other’s work should increase the chances of success in work towards the common goals.

Even though there is a lot in common with the outputs (master plan, goals/objectives) from each of these efforts, they also each have a unique aspect to them.  Each of the efforts involved a unique set of people and organizations who have their own perspectives about priorities in their city and communities.  These citywide plans and goals are something that (hopefully) these organizations will be working together on for a long time to come, so it should be something that they each feel a connection with – something that they helped create.

Of course, this does not mean that efforts like this should happen in isolation, when there are clearly good examples of what worked well (and what didn’t work well) in the past.  So, these type of resources should be utilized to learn from, but not for the purpose of cutting out any of the important work in the development of the end product.

“At the same time “reinventing the wheel” is an important tool in the instruction of complex ideas. Rather than providing students simply with a list of known facts and techniques and expecting them to incorporate these ideas perfectly and rapidly, the instructor instead will build up the material anew, leaving the student to work out those key steps which embody the reasoning characteristic of the field.”

Questions like this continually come up in the work we do.  Why spend months developing a particular school district process with participation from unions, principals, teachers, parents, etc. when there are good examples that have already been developed using this same type of process in other districts?  Why hold another community meeting or  focus group session if you think you already know what people think about a particular topic?  Because the process of “inventing” is as important as the “invention.”

 

This blog was written by Cari Reddick. Cari is a Project Manager at UPD Consulting and has over 12 years of project management experience.

 

Samples of Citywide Youth Master Plans

Nashville	Milwaukee	Grand Rapids	Minneapolis
All children and youth will have a safe and stable home and a supportive, engaged family.	All children are prepared to enter school	Early childhood development, life-long learning & education	All Minneapolis children enter kindergarten ready to learn
All children and youth will have safe places in the community, where they are welcomed and supported by positive adult relationships	All children succeed academically and graduate prepared for meaningful work and/or college	Employment & financial independence	All Minneapolis children and youth succeed in school
All children and youth will develop valuable life skills, social competencies, positive values and become law abiding, productive citizens	All young people utilize post secondary education or training to advance their opportunities beyond high school and prepare for a successful career	Basic, physical & psychological needs	All Minneapolis young people have access to quality out-of-school opportunities
All children and youth will have confidence in themselves and in their future	Recognizing the difficult economic realities facing our families, all children and young people are healthy, supported socially and emotionally, and contribute responsibly to the success of the Milwaukee community	Mentoring, afterschool, cultural activities & strategic planning	All Minneapolis children and youth people have opportunities to prepare themselves for the responsibilities of an active civic live
All children and youth will have opportunities to have their voice heard and positively impact their community		Civic engagement, training & leadership
All children and youth will experience social equity regarding access to opportunities, resources and information that are critical to their success in the 21st century
All children and youth will experience a safe and caring school environment that supports social, emotional and academic development
All children and youth will achieve academically through high quality, engaging educational opportunities that address the strengths and needs of the individual
All children and youth will be physically healthy
All children and youth will learn and practice healthy habits and have access to the resources that support these habits
All children and youth will be mentally healthy and emotionally well
All children and youth will have access to and participate in quality programs during out-of school-time
All children and youth will have safe outdoor spaces in their neighborhood that provide opportunities for play and recreational activities
All children and youth will have safe transportation options that allow them to engage in activities, and access services and supports that the community has to offer

Across the Board: Who Else is Responsible for the Atlanta Cheating Scandal?

The media in recent weeks has focused a great deal of attention on the cheating scandal in Atlanta in which authorities have indicted 35 officials and teachers in the Atlanta Public Schools system for allegedly altering the results of students’ state standardized tests to reflect higher scores.

There have been similar allegations in other schools and districts around the country.  What is unique about Atlanta, however, is the scope of the alleged fraud.  Those who work in education know that it is virtually impossible to keep a secret about even the most trivial matters in a large urban school district.  One cannot help but ask, therefore, how a scheme of this magnitude (with so many teachers and administrators directly involved) could gain such momentum.

By all accounts, it appears that pervasive in the culture of the district was the “Machiavellian” notion that the ends of increasing student test scores outweighed the means, and that it was this culture that enabled such widespread cheating.  Indeed, many point to an array of incentives that the superintendent allegedly used to reward those who generated higher test scores, whatever the cost to students.

The superintendent, however, does not operate in a vacuum.  Even the superintendent is accountable to the school board.  The superintendent alone cannot establish policy.  Nor can she create financial incentives for employees without the approval of the school board. She takes her cues as the tone of her leadership and school district culture from the school board.  If not, the school board should remove her.  Why then has there been so little media attention on the role of the board in the Atlanta cheating scandal?

The school board, at least as much as the superintendent, is responsible for creating a culture of integrity, honor, and accountability within the district.  Effective school boards model these values both in the conduct of school board meetings and in their interactions with school communities.

Moreover, effective school boards recognize and constantly communicate to others the critical importance of accurate data in improving instruction and learning outcomes.  They establish policies to ensure the integrity of test results.[i]  They examine student data on a routine basis, and hold district and school administrators accountable for the effective use of the data.  In so doing, the board ought to catch extreme abnormalities in the data, ask probing questions, and err on the side of a full investigation any time there is any reason to suspect even the slightest impropriety.

Reading the media accounts of the Atlanta cheating scandal, one is reminded of the Enron scandal, in which high level executives engaged in fraudulent accounting practices that devastated a company, its shareholders and employees right under the noses of its board of directors.  In response to such abuses, the federal government passed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which imposes a higher standard of accountability on corporate executives and boards of directors.  Among other things, the Act requires top management to certify the accuracy of financial reports.  The Act also imposes heightened responsibilities on corporate boards, through standing audit committees, to oversee the actions taken by top management.

Testing data is to schools, students and parents as financial information is to corporations, shareholders, and employees.  Perhaps a set of rules similar to those imposed by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act is necessary to ensure the integrity of student data.  Perhaps top management (such as the Superintendent, and chief accountability officer) should be required to personally investigate and certify the accuracy of student test data.  Likewise, perhaps school boards should be required to have standing committees to review the process and ensure its integrity.

Many argue that the lesson learned in Atlanta and elsewhere is that “high-stakes” testing will inevitably lead to cheating.  This is a sad conclusion, indeed.  It reflects a lack of confidence in the ability of all students to improve, and excuses from responsibility those adults upon whom our students are relying to help them improve.  Worse yet, it excuses those adults from even behaving ethically, and endorses behavior that sets a terrible example for students.  Cheating is not symptomatic of an inherent flaw in high-stakes testing (though there may be flaws).  Instead, cheating reflects a lack of integrity, leadership and good governance that is essential to the success of our system of public education.

There are very few areas in which school districts require more rather than less regulation.  Sadly, it appears that this may be one such area.  With or without additional regulation, however, the critical role of the school board in preventing such abuses cannot be overstated or overlooked.

— Kim Clark

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[i] For further guidance on best practices in testing security, see “Issues and Recommendations for Best Practices,” which is based on comments and ideas generated during a Testing Integrity Symposium that the U.S. Department of Education held in February 2012.  This publication can be found at http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2013/2013454.pdf.

Securing Our Schools in the Wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary Tragedy — Pt I

The shooting last week at Sandy Hook Elementary School has prompted a great deal of debate across the country about gun control and access to mental health services.  The incident has also prompted increased scrutiny of school safety practices.  Of course, it is critical that schools review their lockdown procedures and other security measures on an ongoing basis, and ensure that staff members are well trained in those protocols.  School safety experts generally agree, however, that the security measures in place at Sandy Hook were appropriate and reasonable, and indeed saved lives.  Of course, all systems have limitations.  A criminal intent on breaking in at any cost will be difficult for any institution (other than a maximum security prison) to stop.  In fact, children are far safer in school than in other public places such as shopping malls, movie theaters, parks, playgrounds, etc.  And they are exponentially more likely to be killed in an auto accident than in an incident like the one that took place at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

Schools could increase police presence on campus.  Research indicates, however, that seeing armed police officers roaming the school can be scary for young children and undermine their feeling of safety and security. Moreover, those who criticize districts for spending too much on administrative as opposed to classroom expenses should be aware that school security, including on-campus police officers, is an administrative expense (which for many districts, is not insignificant).

Some, including Texas Governor Rick Perry, believe that allowing school personnel to bring guns to school is a valid solution.  They claim that a school employee with a gun who was properly trained could have stopped the perpetrator of the Sandy Hook shooting before he was able to kill so many people.   Statistically, however, it is far more likely that a legally purchased gun will be used not in defense of but against its owner or a member of his or her household (and by analogy the school it is intended to protect).

Even if this hypothetical gun-wielding employee turned out to be the James Bond in Governor Perry’s fantasy, i.e. capable of exercising good judgment and perfect accuracy under extreme pressure, allowing employees to bring guns into the workplace, and especially into schools, is a very bad idea.  The chance that most schools will ever experience anything like what happened at Sandy Hook is extremely slight.  Most schools, however, do experience some incidents of violence each year.  Add guns to this environment, regardless of who owns them, and the outcomes of those incidents are likely to be far worse.  It is a travesty that the perpetrator of the Sandy Hook shootings was able to gain access to legally purchased guns.  Locating more guns on-site and making them even more accessible will only escalate violence in our schools.  Moreover, if seeing police officers with guns on campus undermines children’s sense of safety and security, imagine what it would do to a child’s sense of security to receive a poor score on a homework assignment from a teacher packing heat.

If we want to invest in making our schools safer, we need to look at the areas of greatest risk to our students.  Fortunately or unfortunately, the greatest risk to students does not come from the outside.  The greatest risk comes from individuals students encounter on-campus with a colorable reason for being there.  That said, the one area in which many public school systems could be doing better is in conducting background checks of school employees, volunteers, contractors and others who come into contact with students on campus.  That subject, however, warrants a separate, more detailed discussion.  Accordingly, stay tuned for Part II, which will examine the ways in which some States’ and districts’ policies concerning background checks could be amended and/or supplemented to better protect students.  As for the adequacy of existing school security measures, and the suggestion that teachers be allowed to carry guns to school, please let me know you think.

The UPD blogger, Kim Clark is a senior consultant with UPD.  Prior to working with UPD, Kim served as the General Counsel for the Scottsdale Unified School District in Scottsdale, Arizona, as well as a labor and employment attorney at Steptoe & Johnson, LLP.

The Follower’s Manifesto

In my six years of teaching, I had plenty of colleagues who carried on non-stop private conversations through every faculty and department meeting they attended. The very educators who brought down the wrath of God on misbehaving or inattentive students became pouty, apathetic, or downright antagonistic when another adult had the gall to suggest that there was something these individuals needed to know or had yet to learn.

I know this mindset well, as I possessed it for a time:

“What does Vice Principal Smith know? He hasn’t been a teacher for 10 years…”

“I wish they’d let me get back to my classroom—I have so much to do and this is useless.”

“How could a consultant, who has never taught, possibly give me any advice about education?”

To be sure, some of this anger and indifference is well founded. I cannot count the number of faculty meetings I sat through where the principal read aloud (verbatim) from a schedule that affected 1/10^th of the school’s population. But to focus on this smaller point is to obscure a larger one: as much as we often hear that we lack good leaders in the education world, I believe the bigger problem is that we lack good followers.

Very few people have the privilege of holding a role in life in which they are consistently leaders, always laying out an agenda to be executed by those around them. Instead, most of us hold a more nebulous position—we are leaders of some and followers of others, and these roles change over time. Teachers are the perfect example of this—student achievement in the classroom requires great leadership on their part, but that leadership must be informed and supported through the following of administrative guidance, research-based standards of practice, community desires, and expert advice.  Yet while educational literature is rife with treatises on leadership (one of my primary introductory packets to Teach For America in 2004 was called Teaching as Leadership), there is little talk of following.

So what are the characteristics of a good follower, and how will they make a difference in education? With the help of the comparatively sparse followership literature[1], I’ve compiled this non-comprehensive list:

1. Good Followers are Open-minded. Too often in education, we assume that the best ideas for student achievement are contained in our own heads, or at the very least within our own dogma. We must be willing to adjust our approaches based on the advice, feedback, and new sources of information we receive.
2. Good Followers Disagree and Commit. Even good leaders will make decisions that their followers may not always agree with. This is perfectly reasonable, and followers should feel free to communicate that disagreement to leaders. However, once a decision has been finalized, followers must commit to act upon it as if it was their own. Refusal to act upon a decision prevents evaluation of the decision’s effects further down the road. This is the piece that I and my colleagues most often struggled with as teachers. It was easier to poo-poo a new administrative initiative about backwards planning for a million little reasons, than it was to buy into this initiative and change our ways.
3. Good Followers are Active Listeners and Collaborators. Listening to and participating in a conversation requires full attention and critical, collaborative thinking. The non-stop responsibilities of most jobs (especially teaching) can also function as excuses to mentally (or even physically) check out of one’s listening responsibilities. Grading takes precedence over listening to a department head, lesson planning replaces one-on-one time with a mentor. I know—I’ve been there. But I also know that listening and participating in collaborative opportunities is an important part of creating school culture and promoting practices that improve student achievement. It is through this collaboration that decisions are made and tested, and that leadership is held accountable.

With support from UPD’s Bob Pipik, Nick Goding, and (former employee) Dustin Odham, Highland Park High School in Topeka, KS has taken advantage of a federal grant to install a collaborative process of student and classroom data evaluation. Every progress report and grading period, teacher teams meet to examine trends in student attendance, grades, behavior, and test scores, both within their classroom and throughout the team. Students who are at risk are identified and intervened with as a team or individually using a “Student Tracker” created and molded through an iterative process of teacher and administrative feedback. This approach has led to a narrowing of the achievement gap between African American and White students, and has improved student test scores overall by almost 10 percentage points. And all of this has come as a direct result of attentive and excellent followership. It is true that school administration wrote the grant and initiated the data evaluation process (and for that they should be praised), but it was the school’s teachers who approached the process with an open mind, contributed to its functioning through collaboration with leadership, with outsiders (UPD), and among themselves during the teacher team meetings, and they have remained committed to its functioning for the past two and a half years.

It should be obvious that we can’t all be leaders all of the time, but that doesn’t mean we must resign ourselves to lives as desk jockeys, pushing paper for the man.  While my examples throughout this blog are based at the school level, the call for good followers is a universal one in the field of education (and beyond). Equity and excellence in public education will require that most of us make a commitment not just to lead, but to follow. From teachers to bureaucrats to consultants, we can shape and challenge our leaders, and the world around us, through our openness, our commitment, our action, our honesty. It’s time that “follower” stopped being a dirty word.

TM

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[1] See Kellerman, Barbara. Followership: How Followers Are Creating and Changing Leaders. Harvard Business School Press, Cambridge, MA. February 18, 2008 as a prime example of the emerging field.

–Tim Marlowe

Do States Lack the Capacity for Reform?

Michael Usdan and Arthur Sheekey just wrote a great commentary on the complex and evolving relationship between federal policy, the State Education Agency, and the human capacity to get it all done.  In their essay, “States Lack the Capacity for Reform” over in Education Week, Usdan and Sheeky argue that, “In essence, most state education departments remain almost wholly owned federal subsidiaries, with well over half their budgets emanating from federal funds.”  Because of this, many states under-fund State Education Agencies (just as we have seen local governments under-fund their own school districts if the district is largely funded by the state—like here in Baltimore).  Take this on top of declining budgets and the huge push to reinvent state standards through the common core, implement new teacher evaluation systems, and develop new data tools, and you have a mountain to move.

Usdan and Sheeky point out the structural and organizational changes that Delaware and Tennessee are making in response to these pressures.  This is absolutely needed. But, I can’t help but think that the brand of the poor state education bureaucrat needs some scrubbing as well.  After all, the success or failure of all education reform today rests on the weary shoulders of a few talented managers in the states and districts taking them on.  These managers live and die by the axiom of what I call, “the burden of being useful” in districts and SEAs.  The “burden” afflicts talented managers who are found to possess the unique ability to carry water on difficult projects and deliver time and time again.  Drowning in complex new challenges, districts and SEAs not only give these people the hardest and most difficult projects, but every other project they can throw at them as well.    These stars burn bright, but they usually burn out in two to three years.  This has to change if we expect the current wave of reform to sustain.

If you have had the luck of working in an SEA or district taking on the reform challenge, you know it is mix of politics, bridge building, data crunching, sweat, organizational psychology, and managing a to-do list a mile long.  On the worst days, it feels like hell. But, by and large, shouldering the work of education reform to me feels like what I imagine it must have been like in Silicon Valley in the 80s.  We are writing history as we go.  And the possibility that we will build a fundamentally better system of education for our nation’s kids is before us.  If you are coming out of your MBA or MPA program, TFA or TNTP class, or are tired of your middle manager job in corporate America, this is the most exciting place to be in America.  And, your talents will grow substantially by pressing your shoulder against this plow.

To complete and sustain education reform, we need talented managers in School Districts and SEAs.  And to attract these talents to education and relieve the burden that they currently feel, we can start by recasting the story of what it means and what it is like to work for school districts and State Education Agencies (BR).