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CHAPTER 1

From Status Quo to True Reform

For more than a century, educators, scholars, politicians, and citizens have debated the purpose of our public school system and how best to reform it. Ironically, our public school system has undergone sweeping changes, yet it has remained largely the same, and there is still a lack of clear consensus about what is needed to ensure that all our schools perform at high levels and all our students achieve success.

Education has traditionally been viewed as the best route for social mobility, but for some young people, this route is not accessible. In fact, an abundance of data on the costs of this failure of our education system shows the system is absolutely broken. This is especially true for students from certain demographic groups who have been traditionally underserved by our school system.

Persistent gaps between white and black citizens in critical areas like income, health, and education have been important issues at the center of debates about equity for a long time. A report from the Pew Research Center (2016) finds that these gaps are as large as ever. Specifically:

• African American citizens are twice as likely to be poor compared to white citizens.

• African American median income is half of white median income.

• White median net worth is thirteen times the net worth of the average African American household.

• The nonmarital African American birthrate is twice the white rate.

• African American children are three times more likely to live in a single-parent home than white children.

• The home ownership gap between African American and white citizens is nearly 30 percent.

These statistics are even more shocking considering the fact that these gaps actually increased over the eight years under the presidency of Barack Obama, the nation’s first African American president (Pew Research Center, 2016). President Obama spent a significant portion of his professional career as a community organizer on the south side of Chicago, where he witnessed the poverty and struggles of African American communities with underperforming schools. In fact, he describes the interaction with that community as the epiphany that led him to politics and public service (Obama, 2008). It would only seem logical, based on President Obama’s own words, that this community would expect more policy advocacy under his administration.

The Latino population in America has grown rapidly, and Latinos now represent the largest ethnic minority group in the United States. America’s Latino population is now facing the issues that have plagued African Americans. The same Pew Research Center (2016) report reveals:

• Latino high school graduation rates have doubled since the 1970s, yet they still graduate at two-thirds the rate of white students.

• White students are twice as likely to graduate from college than Latino students.

• Latino median income is 61 percent of white median income.

• Latino citizens are twice as likely to live in poverty than white citizens.

• The home ownership gap between Latino and white citizens is nearly 30 percent.

However, race is just one risk factor. Students from poor families, regardless of their racial group, are experiencing significant difficulties. The U.S. Census Bureau reports that economically disadvantaged white households (those with incomes below the national poverty line) have significant gaps in income, employment, and health compared to national averages, though not as pronounced as African Americans and Latinos (Proctor, Semega, & Kollar, 2016). And there is evidence that poverty can put children more at risk for outcomes even more serious than low income and unemployment. A 2005 study with more than thirty-four thousand patients with mental illness proves that children who grow up in impoverished homes are significantly more likely to develop mental illness than children who grow up in homes with incomes above the national poverty line. Christopher G. Hudson (2005) writes, “The poorer one’s socioeconomic conditions are, the higher one’s risk is for mental disability and psychiatric hospitalization” (p. 14).

Professor of economics and education Henry Levin (2006) identifies links between high school graduation and quality of life. While analyzing the effects of failing to complete high school, he finds that minority students and students of poverty have much lower graduation rates than the U.S. average. In fact, African American and Latino students graduate from high school at a rate slightly above 50 percent (compared to the national graduation rate of 70 percent), while economically disadvantaged students graduate at a rate of 63 percent. He finds that adults without a high school diploma are twice as likely to be unemployed as high school graduates. The life expectancy of a high school dropout as compared to a graduate is 9.2 years lower, and the average sixty-five-year-old high school graduate is in better health than the average forty-five-year-old high school dropout. Finally, a 2014 Brookings Institution report finds that 70 percent of those sitting in U.S. prisons are high school dropouts (Kearney & Harris, 2014). In the words of the crew aboard the Apollo 13 spacecraft, “Houston, we have a problem!” The youth who need education most to provide a catalyst for creating positive change in their lives are those who persistently achieve at the lowest levels in our schools.

Trends have shown that student academic outcomes have not improved for society’s most vulnerable students. The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) released a report in March of 2014 that delivers somber news. The report, Civil Rights Data Collection for the 2013–14 School Year, includes findings from every U.S. public school, totaling about forty-nine million students (OCR, 2014a). Following are some of the key findings.

• Among high schools serving the highest percentage of African American and Latino students, one in three do not offer a single chemistry course, and one in four do not offer a course more advanced than algebra 1.

• In schools that offer “gifted and talented” programs, African American and Latino students represent 40 percent of students but only 26 percent of those enrolled in such programs.

• African American, Latino, and impoverished students attend schools with higher concentrations of first-year teachers than do white students.

• Students with disabilities are more than twice as likely to be suspended from school as those without disabilities.

• African American students are suspended and expelled from school at a rate more than three times as high as white students (16 percent versus 5 percent).

Student performance in mathematics and reading has always been an acceptable measure of student progress in school. One measure, which has been widely accepted as objective, is the U.S. Department of Education’s National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which it administers to students in grades 4, 8, and 12 from a random selection of students in all fifty states. It is also known as the Nation’s Report Card because it provides scholars, practitioners, and lawmakers with a broad picture of educational trends in the United States. The assessment shows that the academic achievement of African American, Latino, and impoverished students has steadily improved over a twenty-year period of time (Lee, 2014). But, the assessment also shows that the gains are not outpacing the growth of other student groups, so the gaps are still very large. The 2011 NAEP results reveal that the average score of African American and Latino students in fourth- and eighth-grade mathematics and reading compared to white students is over twenty points lower, equivalent to performing over two grade levels behind. The twelfth-grade scores reveal a gap of over forty points in mathematics and reading, equivalent to over four grade levels behind, resulting in what is popularly called the four-year gap—meaning that the average African American and Latino high school senior has mathematics and reading skills equivalent to the skills of an average white eighth grader (National Center for Education Statistics [NCES], 2015).

Challenges of the 21st Century

As journalist and three-time Pulitzer Prize winner Thomas L. Friedman (2005) acknowledges in his book The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century, the 21st century landscape has changed. Foreign competition, especially in the areas of technology and science, has increased substantially. As corporations struggle to find educated and skilled workers, they are looking to the shores of foreign nations more and more. Friedman (2005) points to the increase in technology worldwide as a catalyst for a world without borders. The Internet, satellites, and global technology have made it possible for workers to utilize their talents from a foreign shore without ever setting foot in the United States.

What does this mean for the American economy? Corporations, by nature, seek to be profitable. They want to maximize productivity and minimize expenses. The days of industrial plants filled with high-paying, low-skill jobs are over. The safety net for those who occupy the lowest space on the educational and societal bell curve is gone. Companies are seeking employees who have academic skills, common sense, and social skills, and if they have to recruit overseas to accomplish this, they are willing to do so. Nations like India and China are providing workers who have the kind of skills that companies want, and they are increasing their recruitment efforts globally in order to fill this need (Majumdar, 2013).

This is especially bad news for the United States’ poor and disenfranchised. With more skilled workers making their entrance into the global workforce, education is more critical than ever. As the data show, opportunities are already limited for poor and minority citizens in the United States, and globalization signifies more of the same. By the year 2020, 65 percent of American jobs will require some form of postsecondary education (Carnevale, Smith, & Strohl, 2010).

We should never consider education a luxury; it is a necessity, especially for children in poor and minority communities. It may be their only chance at a better life. So why are the schools that serve these students, on average, in the worst condition, and why do they have the lowest levels of funding and academic achievement? School funding for the typical urban public school is on average 30 percent less than suburban schools that serve primarily white middle-class students. In fact, a group of students from the Chicago Public Schools boycotted the first day of school in protest of the huge funding disparity between the per-pupil funding in Chicago ($10,400) and the nearby suburban district of New Trier Township ($17,000) (Sadovi, 2008).

So what does all this mean for American schools? It means that they have to respond like never before. Michael Fullan (2003) writes in The Moral Imperative of School Leadership, “The best case for public education has always been that it is a common good. Everyone, ultimately has a stake in the caliber of schools, and education is everyone’s business” (p. 14). The United States built its reputation and status worldwide on the backs of its citizens’ ingenuity and work ethic. With other nations now seeking to distinguish themselves among the world’s elite, how will our schools respond? Do we simply believe that we are entitled to world admiration, or will our schools and our society rise to the occasion and produce better results—more skilled and focused students?

If the United States is to maintain its position in the world, the quality of education and academic skills of its students must improve. In addition, more students—not just white, middle-class, and affluent students—have to develop educationally so that America can continue to compete and be a viable force in our new global economy. Racism and class bias cannot be obstacles that interfere with education but unfortunately, they are. “Education for all” is not just a liberal rant; it is a matter of survival for everyone, but especially those groups that have been pushed into the margins of society.

There are examples of societies that have accepted the challenge to improve the educational experiences of their students and achieved great success. Finland, a northern European nation, moved from relative educational obscurity in the 1980s, to an educational powerhouse. Pasi Sahlberg (2011), an official with the Finnish Ministry of Education, documents the rise of the Finnish educational system in his book Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn From Educational Change in Finland? Sahlberg (2011) refers to the Finnish way as a collection of five principles that guided the three-decade ascension of the Finnish school system.

1. Customizing teaching and learning

2. Focusing on creative learning

3. Encouraging risk taking

4. Learning from the past and owning innovations

5. Sharing responsibility and trust

The Finnish way is a cooperative endeavor that takes into consideration that the school system is a very important part of a network of systems, including economic, political, social, and health. The government had a vested interest in working with schools in a collaborative partnership to improve their performance, which in turn, would improve society. Their destinies were linked, and they created policies and conditions that improved their schools’ performance.

Sahlberg (2011) is critical of the approach of the United States, England, Canada, and many other industrialized nations, which he calls the Global Educational Reform Movement (GERM). The five principles of GERM are in direct contradiction to the Finnish way.

1. Standardized teaching and learning

2. Focus on literacy and numeracy

3. Prescribed curriculum

4. Market-oriented reform ideas

5. Test-based accountability and control

Sahlberg (2011) points out that GERM is based on external drivers, like fear of punishment or the benefit of public praise associated with performance on standardized academic tests. These drivers isolate schools as independent units, left on their own to improve and solely motivated by rewards or punishments that their government administers. NCLB sought to ensure student proficiency in mathematics and reading in every American public school by 2014, but the drivers of fear and reward are not good drivers, especially in motivating educators to embrace the changes in practice necessary to ensure this noble goal. This approach disconnects the government from its schools, rather than using an integrated approach with mutual respect and accountability like Finland practices. As Michael Fullan (2011) writes:

There is no way that these ambitions and admirable nationwide goals will be met with the strategies being used. No successful system has ever been led with these drivers. They cannot generate on a large scale the kind of intrinsic motivational energy that will be required to transform these massive systems. The US and Australian aspirations sound great as goals, but crumble from a strategy or driver perspective. (p. 7)

The major difference between the Finnish way and GERM is an investment in cultivating an environment of change through investments in people. Michael Fullan warns in his statement that no successful system has ever been led by these drivers (fear and reward). Although, the United States chose GERM principles, and the results have been very dismal based on the ever-increasing achievement gap data cited earlier in this chapter.

From No Child Left Behind to Every Student Succeeds

The reauthorization in 2001 of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), also known as No Child Left Behind (NCLB), symbolized a huge shift in the focus of American schools. This law, which required all students in America’s public schools to perform at a proficient level on each state’s standardized assessment in reading and mathematics by 2014 or face sanctions, sent a shockwave through the U.S. public school system. NCLB guided U.S. education policy until 2015, when it was replaced with the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which President Barack Obama signed on December 10, 2015. Many view ESSA as the state version of NCLB and not much different than its predecessor (Greene, 2017).

Implementing NCLB meant that for the first time in U.S. history, schools would be judged based on student outcomes, not educator intentions. Many wondered if a government mandate was enough to change long-standing gaps in student achievement and change the nature of teaching and learning in the classroom. That was a very good question. In fact, during NCLB’s implementation, students, parents, and educators saw no significant progress in closing achievement gaps in student performance, and have made no real progress in realizing the fair and equitable system the legislation claimed to champion.

As a historical look at the impact of NCLB, and its transition to ESSA, consider the 2007 NAEP. According to the data, students from inner-city schools were making modest gains in the areas of mathematics and reading, especially in the early grades, compared to NAEP achievement levels over the previous seven years, but absolutely no progress in secondary grades in the same period. These incremental gains in the early grades were admirable, but they were not growing at the same rate as gains made in economically affluent suburban schools with majority white and Asian populations, so even small signs of progress did little to close performance gaps between inner-city and suburban students (Zuckerbrod, 2007). And the fear of accountability and public embarrassment over decreasing student test scores under NCLB created a high level of data anxiety among school officials (Earl & Katz, 2006). Under NCLB, districts became increasingly savvy at hiding their struggling students or finding ways to omit them from their test results altogether. A 2006 study finds that over two million student scores, almost exclusively minority and socioeconomically disadvantaged students, were “mysteriously omitted” from state test reporting data to the federal government (Dizon, Feller, & Bass, 2006).

To add insult to injury, an Associated Press poll finds that the majority of teachers (58 percent) felt that being expected to ensure that all of their students read and perform mathematics at grade level was unrealistic and impossible to accomplish (Feller, 2006). Organizational protection for marginally performing teachers also made implementing NCLB’s goals difficult. The New York Teacher Project Fund’s study of five large school systems finds that union staffing rules often allow veteran teachers to transfer to new assignments without giving administrators a say in the matter (Helfand, 2005). Because it is difficult to fire poorly performing teachers, principals often move such employees from school to school. As a result, many urban schools were forced to staff their schools with teachers who are not wanted elsewhere. Michelle Rhee, the founder of the study’s sponsoring organization, states that “without changing these labor rules, urban schools will never be in a position to sustain meaningful school reform” (Helfand, 2005, p. 1). These facts should make us question our seriousness as a profession and as a nation about creating schools that guarantee learning for all students.

NCLB’s goals were admirable and morally correct, but we must acknowledge that breaking a system of normally distributed achievement was not going to end with the stroke of a legislative pen. In Tinkering Toward Utopia, a watershed book on the history of educational reform in the United States, David Tyack and Larry Cuban (1995) clearly establish that educational reform is very difficult to establish, and very little has changed in the American education system since its original construction in the late 19th century. Tyack and Cuban (1995) point to the complex nature of our society along with the ever-changing definition of the public schools’ purpose as causing a stalemate that is very difficult to overcome. These issues are woven into the fabric of American public education. A solid, realistic plan of action that aggressively addresses these issues is necessary for true reform.

By all accounts, NCLB was a miserable failure, as FairTest: The National Center for Fair and Open Testing notes in its 2012 analysis, NCLB’s Lost Decade for Educational Progress: What Can We Learn From This Policy Failure? (Guisbond, 2012). Its analysis reveals that NCLB has not improved student performance in mathematics and reading, and the law led to some unintended consequences that created even more problems.

• An overemphasis on standardized test scores as the primary measure of student achievement led to underfunding arts education in school, teaching to the test, states lowering academic rigor to improve passage rates, and schools manipulating student test scores (cheating).

• An overemphasis on school accountability ratings associated with standardized test scores led to massive student push-outs. Students who were unlikely to pass state standardized tests saw an increase in disciplinary suspension and expulsion, placement in alternative education programs, and interactions with the criminal justice system (school-to-prison pipeline).

• An overemphasis on mathematics and reading led to neglecting the students’ holistic needs. Programs aimed at addressing students’ social and emotional needs were underfunded to fund more supplementary services for mathematics and reading improvement. Mathematics and reading are very important measures of student success, but redistributing funds earmarked for social and emotional needs created the unintended consequence of eliminating or underfunding important student support systems like after-school programs.

ESSA is not very different, in substance, than NCLB. ESSA still requires states to test students annually in mathematics and reading and to target schools that are low performing and mandate a plan of improvement (The Alliance, 2016). The only real substantive difference is that the oversight of school progress, primarily based on standardized test scores, shifts from the federal government to the states (Klein, 2016). States’ rights advocates and those who are skeptical about federal intervention in educational policy applaud ESSA as a significant improvement over NCLB (Martin & Sargrad, 2015). But, not everyone is convinced that simply changing the system of oversight from the federal to the state level is a good idea and will benefit the neediest students. Leslie Proll, former director of policy for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, notes:

The whole purpose behind the original bill (NCLB) was to ensure that there were consistent standards and federal oversight to make sure that states and localities were doing the right thing by poor children, by children who needed that assistance the most, and reducing that and granting so much discretion to states is just worrisome. (as cited in Davis, 2015)

I agree with Proll’s assessment; ESSA will not be any more beneficial to our most vulnerable populations than NCLB. Bringing educational equity to fruition will require more than changing school oversight from the federal to the state level.

In 2008, Janet Napolitano, governor of Arizona at the time and the chairperson of the National Governors Association, initiated a task force of U.S. secretaries of education to investigate creating national educational standards (Conley, 2014). The U.S. Constitution does not specifically grant the federal government jurisdiction over educational policy, so the omission makes education policy a right of the states. Governor Napolitano was concerned that under NCLB, schools would be rated and federal funding would be tied to standardized test scores. Her greatest concern was the fact that all fifty states had different curriculum standards and fifty different standardized tests. On June 2, 2010, the task force introduced a set of academic standards in mathematics and English language arts that would be later known as the Common Core State Standards, which forty-two states and the District of Columbia would adopt. These states also agreed to assess the standards on one of two standardized tests—from (1) the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) or (2) the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC)—in small state clusters, in order to learn from one another and share good practice and policy across states (Conley, 2014). States that agreed to participate were promised a share of $350 million earmarked under a federal incentive program called Race to the Top (RTTT).

The intention of the National Governors Association was to ensure curricular equity across state lines and analyze student performance data that were rooted in the same content and rigor. Rick Hess, the director of educational policy at the American Enterprise Institute, recognized that Napolitano’s fight would be much more political than educational: “The problem with that is if you had hard tests or hard standards you made your schools look bad. So there was a real, kind of perverse incentive baked into NCLB” (as cited in Bidwell, 2014). Dane Linn, the vice president of the Business Roundtable, echoed some of the same concerns that Hess shared:

What’s more important? To tell the truth to parents about where their kids are really performing? Or to continue to make them believe they’re doing really well, only until they get into the workforce or they go to college and they’re finding out they need to be put in a remedial English class? (as cited in Bidwell, 2014)

By 2013, many states that adopted the CCSS in 2010 started to ditch them or modify their commitment. States like Indiana, South Carolina, and Oklahoma passed legislation that either withdrew their participation altogether or weakened their financial support and commitment. The decline of the enthusiasm for the CCSS movement can be traced to four important realities (Jochim & McGuinn, 2016).

1. Far-right politics framed the CCSS and the financial incentives as a federal attempt to take over locally controlled schools.

2. Far-left politics framed the CCSS and the assessments associated with them as an attempt to use performance data to evaluate teacher performance and undermine the power of unions.

3. The standards were developed privately, and there was no open public debate. The public did not have a personal stake in their adoption and implementation.

4. The development and implementation of the two assessments were sloppy, with many logistical and technical glitches which annoyed educational professionals, and they lost their enthusiasm over time. By 2016, thirty-eight states had left one or both of the testing consortia.

The Dawn of a New Day

I first heard of NCLB on an ordinary Friday morning in March of 2002 while serving as a middle school principal in an urban school district with more than 98 percent minority enrollment. I was on my way to the district administrative office for our biweekly administrator’s meeting, called the pay-day meeting. It was 8:05 a.m., and I was five minutes late, as usual. I was expecting an agenda filled with mundane administrative logistics and announcements. I anticipated the superintendent leading the meeting, as he usually did, with concerns about our budget or some security issue from a sporting event. There was no way I could have anticipated the topic of this meeting.

As I entered the room, the superintendent introduced an official from the Michigan Department of Education who came to share some information from the federal government. As she explained the goals and components of a new law, NCLB, there was an eerie silence in the room coupled with a universal feeling of shock and anxiety.

This law’s goals were not incongruent with what we, as administrators, wanted for each one of our students, but we never suspected that we would actually be held legally accountable for producing schools that made these wishes a reality. The state official went on to explain that schools that did not meet these requirements would be labeled as failing and would face a series of sanctions.

Everyone at the meeting was shocked. Our effectiveness or proficiency would be judged primarily by student outcomes on standardized tests and our ability to move our entire school organization to accept this new reality. We had been introduced to the new reality of American education. After examining our reality, it seemed we had to be miracle workers to bring this new reality to fruition.

Why was there so much shock and anxiety among this group of administrators? Primarily, we were anxious because we were painfully aware of the culture and history of our schools. We were aware of what we assumed government officials were not. We were aware of all the issues surrounding teacher quality, staff expectations, student apathy, and inadequate parental support, among other things that we had worked so hard to keep away from the public eye. We had been trained to create an illusion of prosperity that we never expected to actually achieve. We knew that there were many classrooms where the curriculum was not followed. We knew that gaps in student performance were expected in a traditional urban public school system. We were being asked to do something that no one had ever been asked to do: create a functional system in which every student could learn and would learn, despite the many obstacles and the myriad of tasks necessary just to be functional. It was absolutely overwhelming, and we did not know where to start. In fact, we banked on the assumption that if we ignored this new law long enough, it would eventually just go away.

Clearly, it has not gone away, and years later, the same anxiety exists. We are just as confused today as we were on that memorable Friday morning in 2002. ESSA, which is essentially the state version of NCLB, has done little to soothe that initial anxiety. Student performance has improved very little, and the dysfunction in our education system that faced us in 2002 is still prevalent. In fact, former U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings told a group of businesspeople in Detroit that “we can’t adequately solve this problem [the achievement gap] until we diagnose what’s wrong” (as cited in Higgins & Pratt-Dawsey, 2008, p. 1). Many years and several billion dollars later, our best educational minds are still diagnosing the problem. Improving public schools is very complex indeed.

As Margaret Spellings points out, understanding and diagnosing the problem will help us start the much-needed process of reconstructing our schools so that the organization meets the varied needs of all students (as cited in Higgins & Pratt-Dawsey, 2008). This book contends that this very difficult journey begins with the adults, the professionals, taking an honest look at how this gap in student performance began and how it is perpetuated despite the honest efforts of very intelligent and concerned people. Universal achievement remains a pipe dream until we take an honest look at our beliefs, practices, behaviors, and the norms of our organization. These elements make up a very sensitive system known as a school’s culture. This is where many school officials and reformers fear to tread, but it is this place that holds the biggest keys to unlocking the potential of our public schools.

School Culture Research

In my work, I hear people use the terms culture and climate synonymously, and they are very different. In short, culture is how we behave, and climate is how we feel. Culture is “the way we do things around here,” and climate is “the way we feel around here” (Gruenert & Whitaker, 2015, p. 10). It is very possible that a group of professionals could feel very good about themselves and their students but still fail to modify their behaviors and practices and see no substantive change. The flattening world, described earlier in this chapter by Thomas Friedman through the lens of globalization, and the economic and social challenges of our world demand that schools make substantive improvements so that students have a fighting chance in a world that continues to become more competitive. Simply feeling better about ourselves is not enough. It is going to take a deep reflection of our individual and collective behaviors and creating conditions that allow all of us to improve our practices and behaviors.

According to Kent D. Peterson, educational consultant and professor, “School culture is the set of norms, values and beliefs, rituals and ceremonies, symbols and stories that make up the ‘persona’ of the school” (as cited in Cromwell, 2002). For years, we did not consider how the varied and diverse human elements from stakeholders—students, parents, and educators—impacted our schools. But we do now.

Peterson’s explanation of school culture is functional and accurately describes how the unseen human factors of a school affect the day-to-day practices and behaviors within a school (as cited in Cromwell, 2002). Peterson categorizes school culture into two types: (1) positive and (2) toxic. He describes a positive culture as one where:

There’s an informal network of heroes and heroines and an informal grapevine that passes along information about what’s going on in the school … [a] set of values that supports professional development of teachers, a sense of responsibility for student learning, and a positive, caring atmosphere. (as cited in Cromwell, 2002)

In essence, he is saying that a positive school culture is a place where:

• Educators have an unwavering belief in the ability of all their students to achieve success, and they pass that belief on to others in overt and covert ways.

• Educators create policies and procedures and adopt practices that support their belief in every student’s ability.

Richard DuFour, Robert Eaker, and Rebecca DuFour describe the cultural conditions necessary to create a powerful school in a way similar to Peterson (DuFour, 2015; DuFour & Eaker, 1998; DuFour, DuFour, & Eaker, 2008). In order for a school to be a place that provides high levels of learning for all students regardless of student background, the staff must articulate through their behavior the beliefs that:

• All students can learn.

• All students will learn because of what we do.

DuFour, DuFour, Eaker, Many, and Mattos (2016) argue that not only must staff hold as their fundamental belief that each student has the ability to learn, but members must also organize to utilize their resources to support that singular focus.

On the flip side, Peterson describes a toxic culture as one where “teacher relations are often conflictual, the staff doesn’t believe in the ability of the students to succeed and a generally negative attitude prevails” (as cited in Cromwell, 2002). That is, in a toxic culture:

• Educators believe that student success is based on students’ level of concern, attentiveness, prior knowledge, and willingness to comply with the demands of the school, and they articulate that belief in overt and covert ways.

• Educators create policies and procedures and adopt practices that support their belief in the impossibility of universal achievement.

Peterson accurately describes the characteristics and function of school culture (as cited in Cromwell, 2002). Descriptions are helpful and provide a good starting point, but descriptions alone are inadequate to initiate transformation. I contend that in order to transform school culture, we must do more than analyze its characteristics and functionality; we must also trace its development and the educator’s motivation for hanging on to paradigms that are contrary to those articulated in the public belief statements of the school or district as an organization.

The Importance of Closing the Gap

Research has been helpful in exposing the significant power school culture wields in the functioning of schools. In fact, the American Sociological Association finds that a school’s level of efficacy and its collectively held expectations for student success may be the leading indicator in whether students attend postsecondary education (Jones, 2008). What is not so evident, and is perhaps even controversial, is that educators’ personal belief systems may be the most powerful variables perpetuating learning gaps in our public school system. Traditional legislative mandates that focus solely on student outcomes, even when coupled with threats of embarrassment and loss of job security, may be powerless to effect change in the face of personal belief systems that perpetuate the achievement gap. In fact, this book will contend that dysfunctional school cultures create systems that maintain the gap. Mary Kennedy (2005) writes, “The traditional induction to teaching encourages teachers to rely on their own prior beliefs and values for guidance and to think of their practice as a highly personal and idiosyncratic endeavor” (p. 11). School culture is indeed a delicate web of past personal experience, organizational history, and interaction with the greater society; however, I contend that dysfunctional or toxic school culture is not insurmountable. As we shall see, many aspects of human behavior, social conditions, and history suggest that these types of environments can be transformed.

This book’s goal is twofold: (1) to provide a framework for understanding how school cultures operate from a political and sociological perspective and (2) to offer practical strategies to manipulate that culture in order to intentionally create positive atmospheres that not only tolerate change but that seek and embrace the changes that maximize organizational effectiveness.

Technical Change Versus Cultural Change

To clarify the power of school culture, I must first identify the two types of organizational change prevalent in today’s schools: (1) technical and (2) cultural change. Technical changes are changes to the tools or mechanisms professionals use to do their jobs effectively. These changes within a school context refer to changes in structure, policies, or teaching tools (for example, changing from a six-period school day to a block schedule, revising the curriculum with changes in learning standards or text material, or offering more advanced and rigorous classes, to name a few). These changes are definitely necessary to effect improvement in student performance, but they produce very few positive results when people who do not believe in the intended outcome of the change use them.

In The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business, Patrick Lencioni (2012) examines the difference between these two constructs. He seeks to understand why some companies tended to have an advantage in the marketplace and outperformed similar companies in similar markets. He observes that success requires two systemic elements: smart (technical) and health (culture). His investigation reveals that most companies chose the smart route and devalued the health of the organization, and that was a big mistake. Companies that had an advantage focused heavily on the human, or healthy, side of the organization and built human capital to provide the context for the implementation of smart innovation. He finds five key experiences in healthy companies.

1. Minimal politics

2. Minimal confusion

3. High morale

4. High productivity

5. Low employee turnover

The organization’s health ultimately leads to improvements in innovation (smart), producing better results and greater longevity. Lencioni (2012) concludes that innovation and intellect do not lead to greater levels of productivity if they are implemented within a context that is unhealthy. Health has to come before intellect. Innovation has a fighting chance if it is being implemented within a healthy human environment. He warns that developing the health (culture) of an organization is difficult because human beings are difficult and complex beings:

Most people prefer to look for answers where the light is better, where they are more comfortable. And the light is certainly better in the measurable, objective, and data-driven world of organizational intelligence (the smart side of the equation) than it is in the messier, more unpredictable world of organizational health. (Lencioni, 2012, p. 7)

Technical changes have become very popular in public schools, especially since the passage of NCLB and ESSA. Why would educators continue to seek these surface-level changes when the United States has such a long history of initiatives that eventually overwhelm our school system’s culture of low efficacy? Central leadership and site leadership have scrambled to find programs or initiatives that will be the magic bullet to fix all ailments. Terms like research-based and best practice have been no match for the deeply ingrained disbelief in student ability that cripples many struggling schools. In fact, I have had the opportunity to study several schools where pessimistic faculty members are eager to prove that new strategies or programs aimed at raising student performance do not work in order to justify and solidify their hypothesis that not all students are capable of achieving excellence.

A report from the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) reveals that the highly regarded Reading First literacy initiative, a cornerstone of President George W. Bush’s education policy, had little to no effect on student reading proficiency (Toppo, 2008). In fact, the study goes on to claim that students who received services under this initiative, which had an annual cost of over $1 billion, performed no better than students who had no exposure to this reading intervention. The evidence is clear: these types of so-called research-based strategies are no match for elements of culture that help maintain gaps in student achievement.

The Impact of Beliefs

Some might assume that mere belief in a concept or reality has little effect on a person or group’s ability to achieve that reality. The research teaches us something very different. John Hattie has been credited with publishing the most definitive evidence of the factors that affect student learning outcomes in recorded history. Hattie (2012) researches and synthesizes eight hundred meta-analyses measuring the effect of 195 factors that impact student learning. This meta-analysis took fifteen years to complete, and Hattie released his findings in a series of books known as Visible Learning.

Hattie (2012) measures the impact of many important factors in predicting and influencing student learning. Some of those factors are environmental, economic, professional, and cultural. He identifies the impact of each factor by assigning an effect size to each factor. In the book Visible Learning for Teachers: Maximizing Impact on Learning, the top-three factors are all related to culture and belief of student achievement.

1. Teacher estimates of achievement—1.62

2. Collective teacher efficacy—1.57

3. Student estimate of achievement or self-reported grades—1.44

Students will learn more and be more successful in an environment where all educators believe they can learn at high levels and those educators work together to convince the students that they can achieve lofty academic goals teachers set for them. A leader who understands how to cultivate this type of culture will place a school clearly on the path to improvement and sustainable growth. The skills necessary to create a healthy culture are very different than the ineffective and destructive path to change that we have taken in the past.

Cultural change is a much more difficult form of change to accomplish. It cannot be gained through force or coercion (like NCLB or ESSA). As human beings, we do not have the ability to control the thoughts and beliefs of others, so cultural change requires something more profound. It requires leaders to become adept at gaining cooperation and skilled in the arts of diplomacy, salesmanship, patience, endurance, and encouragement. It takes knowledge of where a school has been, and agreement about where the school should go. It requires an ability to deal with beliefs, policies, and institutions that have been established to buffer educators from change and accountability. It is a tightrope act of major proportion. But cultural change must be achieved—and it must be achieved well—if we are to prepare our current and future generations of students for an ever-changing world that is becoming more demanding each day. Substantial cultural change must precede technical change. When a school has a healthy culture, the professionals within it will seek the tools that they need to accomplish their goal of universal student achievement; they will give a school new life by overcoming the staff division that halts transformation.