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PART II

The WILL to LEAD

Two

Conflicting Wills

During the ongoing debate about educational equity, few ‘/have stopped to ask, “Does everyone truly want every child to succeed?” As educational professionals, we would hope that every one of our peers truly desires to see all students succeed, but is that a wise assumption? Is it possible that organizational goals for student success may conflict with some employees' personal goals? Synthesizing and aligning all of the various ideologies of individual educators into one functional organizational philosophy is not an easy task.

Schools as Microcosms

Some scholars have argued that schools are simply a reflection of society. If a community embraces equity, justice, and freedom, then these qualities will be reflected within the walls of the schools. In that situation, schools can be an environment in which egalitarianism flourishes. If those qualities are absent on the outside, however, or they are unevenly distributed, schools will reflect that reality as well.

In The Bell Curve (1994), Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray argued that the goal of creating a system that provides an equal education to all students is not only impossible, but detrimental to the betterment of society. They argued that all people are not evenly endowed and pouring resources into less-capable students unfairly and adversely affects the growth of more capable and gifted children.

In the past, many scholars identified schools as the perfect places to guarantee social and economic division. They argued that schools' primary purpose was to maintain comfortable social norms (particularly for the rich) and train others to prepare for and accept their place at the bottom of the economic ladder (Bowles & Gintis, 1976).

Yet others see schools as agents of social change. Researcher R. W. Connell (1993) places schools right in the center of social development. He argues that schools should impact society—not be impacted by society. He notes that within a progressive society, the public education system is a major asset. As one of the largest industries in a developed economy, it is paramount to the future development of society. He also notes that teaching is a “moral trade,” and teaching and learning are social practices involving questions about authority and application of knowledge.

Scholars and practitioners do not always agree on the philosophical points, yet the research on high-performing schools identifies philosophical alignment among practitioners as the first step toward better practice (DuFour et al., 2008; Petrides & Nodine, 2005; Reeves, 2000). So the school change process has to start with the development of a productive and collective will, while recognizing that practitioners will come to school with many different personal ideologies shaped by their own experiences.

The Importance of a healthy School Culture

In the book Shaping School Culture: The Heart of Leadership, Deal and Peterson (1999) write:

While policymakers and reformers are pressing for new structures and more rational assessments, it is important to remember that these changes cannot be successful without cultural support. School cultures, in short, are key to school achievement and student learning. (p. xii)

There has been debate about the meaning of school culture. Some have mistaken culture to be synonymous with ethos, morale, and spirit. School culture is much more concrete than that, however. It is the deep patterns of values, beliefs, practices, and traditions that have been compiled and normalized over the course of the school's history (Stolp, 1994). School culture sets the standard for what is normal and expected in a school. It is multifaceted with patterns of values, beliefs, practices, and traditions. Staffs in school cultures rooted in high expectations for student performance will spend most of their time nurturing that expectation, just as staffs in schools with cultures of low student expectations will validate that norm.

School culture affects student learning and performance in many different ways. The National Center for Leadership looked at the effects of five dimensions of school culture: (1) academic challenges, (2) comparative achievement, (3) recognition for achievement, (4) school community, and (5) perception of school goals. In a survey of 16,310 fourth-, sixth-, eighth-, and tenth-grade students from 820 public schools in Illinois, researchers found support for the proposition that students are more motivated to learn in schools with strong cultures (Fyans & Maehr, 1990).

Researchers analyzed the effects of school culture on student achievement when they examined one school project directed at improving elementary students' test scores. The school project they studied focused on creating a new mission statement, goals based on outcomes for students, curriculum alignment corresponding with those goals, staff development, and building-level decision making. The results were significant. The number of students who failed an annual statewide test dropped by as much as 10 percent (Thacker & McInerney, 1992).

As this research shows, a school's collective norms, expectations, and values are tightly linked to the productivity of its students. Therefore, the development of a healthy culture cannot be left to chance. Educators must nurture and cultivate it methodically. It is important to note that schools with an organizational belief system that matches the norms and beliefs of a vast majority of their students can take this issue for granted. For example, when a school population consists of students who come from family environments that nurture values like high academic achievement, delayed gratification, and compliance with rules, students' socialization process matches the school's expectations. But other students come from families that do not share and cultivate what the school values—perhaps there is a lack of supervision and motivation for high achievement and adherence to rules. It can become politically expedient to ostracize and justify failure among this seemingly insignificant minority of students because they just don't “fit in” (Ogbu, 2003). This phenomenon can easily turn a stated mission of “learning for all” into “learning for most.”

A metaphor helps to clarify the importance of culture as it relates to will and skill: culture is the soil, and organizational structures and practices are the seeds. There are certain conditions that soil must meet if the planter expects to harvest produce. If the soil is unhealthy, it doesn't matter how good the seed is. In fact, a healthy seed can be planted in dry, acidic, and uncultivated soil, and it will be just as unproductive as an unhealthy seed. Seeds are only as good as the soil in which they are planted; likewise, school structures and practices are only as good as the culture in which they are implemented. Structural change that is not supported by cultural change will always be overwhelmed by the unhealthy culture (Muhammad, 2009). Healthy culture provides the right environment, but does not guarantee effectiveness; it must also be accompanied by high levels of professional skill.

Toxic School Culture

The antithesis of a healthy school culture is a toxic school culture. Kent Peterson (Cromwell, 2002) describes a toxic culture in these words:

Toxic school cultures believe that student success is based solely upon a student's level of concern, attentiveness, prior knowledge, and the willingness to comply with the demands of school and they pass that belief on to others in overt and covert ways. toxic cultures also create policies, practices, and procedures that support their belief in the impossibility of universal achievement. (p. 5)

Toxic school cultures have a dominant belief system that places success or failure solely on the shoulders of outside forces. In his definition, Kent Peterson identifies four student characteristics that are prerequisites for school success: concern, attentiveness, prior knowledge, and compliance. Any educator would agree that these are important assets in the learning process and that not all students arrive at school predisposed to these characteristics. In toxic cultures, students are blamed for not possessing these characteristics, which releases adults from the responsibility of properly educating every student. This mentality is in direct conflict with the objective of public schools—learning for all. Toxic cultures essentially establish that some students are educable and some are not. Obstacles to student success are not viewed as challenges that adults must overcome; rather, they are products of home and community and therefore not the concern of the staff. Toxic cultures are said to be descriptive because educators within them become very adept at identifying every obstacle they face. Toxic cultures are deflective as well because they assign blame elsewhere—the staff itself is never responsible. Typically these schools spend their time blaming students, parents, the government, and others for problems instead of spending time trying to solve them (Butler & Dickson, 1987).

It is important to note that a culture is not considered healthy or toxic based on the type of problems the school faces. In fact, all organizations have problems (Collins, 2001) that are as unique as the people within the organization. What makes a culture healthy or toxic is members' collective ability to work together to solve problems. No organization can be successful blaming its clients instead of serving its clients.

Collective Commitment to Success for All Students

Healthy school cultures develop a collective commitment to student success. How do they accomplish this? They are courageous enough to recognize the profundity of their personal differences, but they accept that these differences are not as important as meeting the educational needs of their students. They are willing to confront the subtle but powerful assumptions that guide their worldview, the harmful stereotypes that interfere with a staff's ability to effectively focus on the development of each student—the elephants in the room.

There are three important “elephants” or barriers staffs must confront in order to develop the type of collective focus necessary to properly educate every child. These barriers are sometimes referred to as predeterminations. There are three types of predeterminations: perceptual, intrinsic, and institutional (Muhammad, 2009). If unhealthy predeterminations are present in a school, creating a system of equitable achievement is nearly impossible.

Perceptual Predeterminations

The first elephants to confront are the disadvantageous predeterminations about students—the perceptual predeterminations. These are often the long-held stereotypes of teachers. Stereotyping is a natural function of the human mind. Stereotypes help us to understand a complex world in simple terms. As Langlois et al. (2000) note:

TO help simplify a complex world, people develop mental models called schemas. Problems arise when people begin to oversimplify schemas. oversimplified schemas are known as stereotypes. Stereotypes are fixed impressions and exaggerated and preconceived ideas and descriptions about a certain type of person, group or society. (p. 390)

People create mental models to understand how the world works on a daily basis, and they can become fixed about certain groups of people. Stereotyping does not make a person inhumane or unethical—it is a natural function of the human psyche. It is problematic, however, when mental models adversely affect our actions, specifically when they negatively affect the students educators are entrusted to serve. These stereotypes can include negative beliefs based on variables such as student race, sex, home language, disability, social class, and immigration status. Educators do not lose their right to their own opinions when they choose their profession, but it is ineffective and unethical for them to operate from a mindset that adversely affects the students they serve.

In a comprehensive study of five middle schools involved in restructuring in Philadelphia, Wilson and Corbett (2001), authors of Listening to Urban Kids: School Reform and the Teachers They Want, document that teacher expectations and perceptions about student performance greatly affected their practice. The students identified that teachers who “stayed on them and made them be successful” provided a rich learning environment (p. 64). Wilson and Corbett also found that these teachers that students identified as invested in their success “involved students in constructivist and experiential learning, and experienced better student conduct, grades, and scores on standardized tests” (p. 42).

Wilson and Corbett also describe teachers with negative images and stereotypes of their students. One teacher noted that she was scared of her students because she had never been in an urban environment and described her experience as a “daily battle between teacher and student for classroom control” (p. 34). Teachers with these negative stereotypes about their students tended to have higher job turnover, and, despite the district's investment in brain-based and research-based instructional strategies, these teachers “opted to rely on instructional strategies that were primarily suited to one style of intelligence rather than to several” (p. 34). One student described his experience like this:

My science teacher is scared of us so we mostly work out of the book. We do vocabulary. We read the chapter and get the vocabulary words. After each section in the book, we do a section review. (p. 43)

The student is experiencing a low-quality education because of his teacher's assumptions about race, culture, and social class. The teacher's fear of and negative perceptions about African American students and their culture not only creates an unproductive learning environment, but also directly affects the level of pedagogy and content rigor in the classroom.

Educators' perceptions of their students have a profound effect not only on their will to teach students, but also on the methods they use to do so. The students in these five middle schools had totally different educational experiences based upon their teachers' perceptions. The schools that students rated more favorably had teachers who treated them with respect, listened to them, affirmed their identity, and pushed them to succeed. The clear difference between the ineffective and effective schools in this study was the effectiveness of school leadership in nurturing an optimal learning environment.

Intrinsic Predeterminations

Educators are only a part of the school community. Students' perception of self—intrinsic predeterminations—help to shape collective focus and will. If educators form broad and rigid assumptions based on their personal experiences and societal messages and images, it would seem natural that students would develop similar stereotypes about themselves. An African American boy who is consistently confronted with images of Black men as criminals in the media might come to believe that that is his destiny. A teenager who has grown up in a rural or isolated community where she is not exposed to a world that is growing and full of possibility may not be motivated to strive for excellence in school because she does not see how it applies to her life.

When seeking to develop a positive organizational will—a collective focus on success—educators must be up to the challenge of not only changing some long-held negative stereotypes about students, but also helping students overcome long-held negative stereotypes about themselves. A student's negative perceptions of his or her ability will affect his or her behavior and productivity. One study about the influence of student self-perceptions on achievement (Akey, 2006) concluded:

The earlier schools and teachers begin to build students' confidence in their ability to do well, the better off students will be. Because students' perceptions of their capacity for success are key to their engagement in school and learning, schools should be designed to enhance students' feelings of accomplishment. Teachers whom students see as supportive and who set clear expectations about behavior help create an atmosphere in which students feel in control and confident about their ability to succeed. (p. iii)

In addition, teachers have a difficult time educating students who have these negative perceptions about their place in school and their ability to excel. Michael Fullan (2003) identifies student engagement as the first critical step in the educational process. It is not surprising that a student with a negative self-perception about his or her potential to succeed academically would have difficulty engaging in the learning process.

Educators must transform their perceptions before they can help students transform their intrinsic predeterminations. Research on highly effective schools shows us that adults' will for student success has to be stronger than the student's will to fail (Green, 2005). Students must believe in their ability to achieve their goals. This concept, commonly referred to as efficacy, is a prerequisite to effectively changing students' negative self-image. As Gardner (1998) states, “Fostering self-efficacy, helping people to believe in themselves, is one of an educator's highest duties” (p. 1).

Institutional Predeterminations

Finally, a school must be willing to analyze internal barriers to achieving a collective commitment to learning for all. This means confronting institutional predeterminations. No organization can achieve a positive will with policies, practices, structures, or procedures in place that make achieving collective goals more difficult. Educators at every level must sit down and reasonably review standard policies and procedures and align them with organizational goals. For example, institutional policies such as student tracking that limit access to rigorous coursework can be huge obstacles to developing an optimal learning environment, especially if stereotypes and bias about certain subgroups of students keep them locked into lower tracks where they do not have the opportunity for success.

Healthy cultures recognize that there will be obstacles to creating high-will organizations, and that some of those obstacles are products of educators' perceptions, students' perceptions, and long-established organizational barriers. Instead of spending their time complaining about the issues, healthy cultures seek to understand the barriers and address them. In other words, a healthy culture is a community of problem solvers.

Abolishing Conflicting Wills

In this chapter, we have discussed the differences between a healthy school culture and a toxic school culture and discovered that school cultures are influenced by the predeterminations of the professionals and students within them, as well as the larger society of which they are a part. Institutional barriers also play a role in the health of a culture.

A staff's willingness to examine, debate, and synthesize the diverse paradigms in its school is the first step in developing a healthy and collective vision for the school. Educators must be willing to transparently communicate their commitment to students as it relates to their stated mission and challenge one another to live up to that commitment. This may require in-depth analysis of staff and student handbooks, discipline policies, instructional policies, and school norms. If these organizational policies do not support their efforts to educate all students, they must be willing to collaborate to revise them. Staff members must work to achieve a system that respects and nurtures the full potential of each student. There can be no split agendas. The sole focus must be on the well-being of the students they serve.

In the next chapter, we examine staff frustration and its significant impact on school culture. Before you move on to the next chapter, reflect on the questions that follow.

CHAPTER 2

Reflections

1 How have your personal experiences affected your perception of the field of education and the students you serve?

2 Based on the definitions of healthy and toxic school cultures, how would you rate your current reality? Do structural changes seem to flourish or flounder in your environment?

3 HOW have the three forms of predetermination—perceptual, intrinsic, and institutional—manifested themselves in your professional environment? What has your staff done to address these issues?

4 Do you and your colleagues tend to be more descriptive or prescriptive in your approach to solving problems?