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CHAPTER 2

The Framework of Modern School Culture

School culture is a complex web of history, psychology, sociology, economics, and political science. To effectively diagnose and eliminate toxic school culture, we must take an honest look at the internal and external factors that create the conditions that make cultural transformation difficult.

Schools in the Era of Accountability

The accountability movement, and No Child Left Behind and the Every Student Succeeds Act in particular, did not create the cultural issues confronting today’s school system. But this new era has brought some deeply rooted belief systems and practices to the forefront for examination, including issues such as how we analyze, staff, and fund schools. Examining the current environment and conditions in our schools can help us understand the myriad paradigms that exist within the walls of our public schools and therefore help us strategize to transform the environment into a healthy one.

Who Is to Blame?

No Child Left Behind and the Every Student Succeeds Act mandate the school as the responsible party when it comes to effectiveness. This is very different from the traditional belief that students and their families were primarily responsible for the effectiveness of education; educators were the experts, and schools provided students with the opportunity to learn. Students were expected to comply with their educators’ demands to acquire knowledge. Schools believed that if parents supported the teacher’s expert guidance and encouraged their children to follow that guidance, students would succeed in school. It was not surprising, then, that all students were not academically successful, because levels of support for education were different in every household. Additionally, success or failure in school was determined solely by educators in the form of completely subjective grading scales and procedures controlled exclusively by education professionals. Parents and students had very little recourse if they felt that the system was unfair or was not an accurate appraisal of proficiency or potential.

Conversely, under NCLB and ESSA, the school became exclusively accountable for student success or failure. Results of student performance on state examinations are posted in news publications for public consumption. States have developed evaluation systems for individual school districts and schools, and through this system have assigned ratings ranging from poor to excellent. The real estate industry even started using these test scores as a major factor in determining property values for homes (Chiodo, Hernández-Murillo, & Owyang, 2010). Schools that do not meet the mandated standards have to carry the “failing” label, even though many of them have sincerely fought to overcome barriers outside of the school’s control; they have made some progress, but they have not made as much progress as the law mandates. This system of finger-pointing at schools has not motivated people to improve their practice in meaningful ways; instead, it has created anger and resentment among many educators and even more pessimism about the probability of making substantial and permanent change within schools.

I cannot blame educators for feeling unfairly blamed for all of the ills of struggling schools. I do not believe that the old paradigm of exclusively blaming students and parents is just either, but the problem of struggling schools is too complex to hold only the school system accountable for student success. In fact, the Educational Testing Service (ETS) reveals a report that validates the concerns of many educators. The report provides the following explanation for gaps in student achievement:

The ETS researchers took four variables that are beyond the control of schools: The percentage of children living with one parent; the percentage of eighth graders absent from school at least three times a month; the percentage of children 5 or younger whose parents read to them daily; and the percentage of eighth graders who watch five or more hours of TV a day. Using just those four variables, the researchers were able to predict each state’s results on the federal eighth-grade reading test with impressive accuracy. (Winerip, 2007, p. A7)

Identifying educators as the sole cause of low student performance (or high student performance, for that matter), is not only inaccurate, but it makes the job of developing positive school culture even more difficult. Schools located in areas where risk factors for low achievement are highest are struggling to maintain a good, dedicated workforce of teachers, and negative external critiques and commentary from the public make this difficult job even more challenging and create additional problems that we must address and overcome.

The reform approach of NCLB and ESSA sends the message that schools are broken, and they need to be fixed. This message sets up a natural conflict. In Finland, the approach is cooperative and integrated, which sends the message to educators that we need each other if we hope to get better. I seek to prove in this book that schools don’t need to be fixed, they need to be transformed, and the transformational process is complex.

What About Student Outcomes?

The organizational mechanisms of schools were not designed to judge proficiency based on student outcomes. A look at nearly any teacher-performance evaluation proves that the school, as an organization, has concerned itself with evaluating the effort, process, compliance, and intentions of teachers rather than evidence of student learning. Decisions about lesson content, student evaluation, and classroom procedures have always been left up to each individual teacher. The leader’s ability to create the conditions through which classroom teachers could exercise their autonomous endeavors defined his or her role. Student learning was a result of students’ efforts, and, conversely, student failure was a result of students’ lack of effort.

The era of accountability has made school systems take an honest look at student outcomes and the conditions that guarantee higher achievement. District leadership has begun to demand information that more accurately and more frequently gives feedback on student performance. Consequently, teachers are challenged to analyze the effectiveness of their classroom instruction in ways that are much more objective than letter grades. What effect has this had on school culture? A focus on meeting mandates and minimum performance indicators has, in many cases, taken focus away from the individual student and his or her holistic development. Many schools are strategizing to avoid embarrassment and public humiliation for not meeting minimum student achievement goals and legislated mandates. I call this phenomenon the compliance mentality. This mentality has caused school systems to achieve an acceptable rating by any means necessary, including cheating on tests and excluding students with a high probability of failure on high-stakes assessments.

A Rice University study on the Texas school accountability system and its relationship to student dropout disclosed some startling revelations (Barr, 2008).

• In Texas’s public high schools, 135,000 youth drop out prior to graduation every year, resulting in an overall graduation rate of only 33 percent.

• The exit of low-achieving students made it appear as though test scores rose and that the achievement gap between white and minority students was narrowing, which increased ratings.

• There was a correlation between schools’ increasing number of dropouts and their rising accountability ratings, suggesting that the accountability system allows principals to retain students deemed at risk of reducing school scores. The study finds that a high proportion of students retained this way will eventually drop out.

These findings are troubling because, according to the study, “The longer such an accountability system governs schools, the more school personnel view students not as children to educate but as potential liabilities or assets for their school’s performance indicators, their own careers or their school’s funding” (Barr, 2008).

In cases like this one from Texas, the accountability movement actually resulted in the students in need of the most assistance being excluded instead of helped. This certainly was not the legislation’s goal. It is important to look at student learning outcomes—but not at the expense of creating a group of disposable students for the purpose of favorable performance ratings.

Predetermination

Like any organization, schools are the sum of their parts. Educators, students, parents, and society as a whole add a component to school that is equally as challenging to deal with as the governmental laws and regulations we have just discussed. The human experience of education plays a major role in how school culture forms and ultimately how well a school operates. The unique human experiences individuals bring into the school are called predeterminations. There are three major forms of predetermination: (1) perceptual, (2) intrinsic, and (3) institutional.

Perceptual Predetermination

Perceptual predetermination involves an educator’s own socialization and the impact of that socialization on his or her practice in the classroom, including expectations for student performance. Robert L. Green (2005) defines teacher expectations as “inferences that teachers make about the present and future academic achievement and general classroom behavior of their students” (p. 29). Green (2005) goes on to find that these expectations for student success have a two-fold effect in the classroom:

Teacher expectations affect student achievement primarily in two ways: first, teachers teach more material more effectively and enthusiastically to students for whom they have high expectations; second, teachers respond more favorably to students for whom high expectations are held—in a host of often subtle ways that seem to boost students’ expectations for themselves. (p. 29)

So the experiences and perceptions that an educator has before he or she becomes an education professional play a powerful role in how he or she perceives and serves students. Thus, the educator’s socialization is as important as his or her professional preparation. Green (2005) points out teachers generally develop positive or negative expectations around the following set of student characteristics: race, gender, social class, disability status, limited English proficiency, student history, physical attractiveness, handwriting, communication, and speech pattern. If educators have developed negative opinions about people in regard to these characteristics, students may start each class period with strikes against them.

We might assume that this problem could be eliminated if a teacher’s experience or background was similar to that of his or her students. If the achievement gap is most prevalent in communities with high-minority populations and homes with high poverty, perhaps we should simply hire more teachers with the same backgrounds. Unfortunately, there are not enough certified teachers to fill this demand. A 2015 report from the Shanker Institute finds that Latino and African American students make up nearly 40 percent of American public school students, but only 7.8 percent of American teachers are Latino, and 6.8 percent are African American (Di Carlo, 2015).

Upon further review of the research, we find that the teacher’s race and background do not have to be a major factor in forming student expectations. In fact, the research finds that low student expectations cross racial, ethnic, and social class lines. Teachers of similar race and class to their students are just as prone to developing low expectations.

Black students may not be at a disadvantage because of the “mismatch” between student and teacher race. In other words, black teachers are not always more likely to give black students more support and attention than white teachers would, because there may be other factors more powerful in guiding teacher behavior beside race like social class and generational differences. In fact, some black teachers appear to have similarly low expectations for black students as non-black teachers (Ferguson, 1998).

Ron Ferguson (1998) goes on to reveal that this mix of high and low expectations of students among teachers may help explain why poor and minority students fail to gain academic momentum and therefore fall behind students from other groups. A 2015 study of teacher quality in Washington State reveals that the teacher-quality crisis in high-risk schools goes well beyond teacher expectations. The study reveals that for the teachers of students of poverty, as well as African American and Latino students, quality indicators are lower than other teachers in the state of Washington on every measurable category including years of experience and licensure scores (Goldhaber, Lavery, & Theobald, 2015).

In a study done at five of Philadelphia’s lowest-performing middle schools, researchers spoke with students to get feedback from them about the kinds of teachers they needed and wanted. The students wanted teachers who were strict but fair, nice and respectful, and who took the time to explain their lessons to them clearly and effectively (Wilson & Corbett, 2001). They wanted teachers who believed in them and taught them in the ways that they learned best. These sound like very reasonable expectations. All these characteristics are cornerstones of a healthy school culture. It is amazing that students have figured out what they need better than the adults in the school and the so-called experts responsible for guiding these professionals.

Teacher expectations clearly play a role in how much students learn, and high expectations can be a very powerful tool if we can create conditions that allow teachers to have a favorable image of students and their ability. This involves the resocializing of those within our schools who have unfavorable expectations of student performance. We must somehow help them replace their existing belief systems with a more informed and accurate assessment of student potential. We will address this issue in chapter 6 (page 77).

Intrinsic Predetermination

Intrinsic predetermination is the student’s perception of his or her probability of achieving success in school. The messages students receive from their environment—the home, community, and school—can either build their confidence or work to destroy it. Students who come from homes or communities where high academic achievement is not the norm develop what Ron Ferguson (1998) calls a self-fulfilling prophecy. The overwhelming message these students receive says that success in school is not likely. Unfortunately, for students who grow up in communities where poor academic performance is the norm, school becomes a place to hang out until you are old enough to do something else—not a place to prepare for a bright future. In fact, this message is so strong in some communities that students may feel that if they achieve in school, their peers will view them unfavorably. One study of African American students in a very prominent suburb of Cleveland, Ohio, finds that many African American students are afraid of cooperating with teachers and achieving academically because of the risk of being perceived by their fellow African American peers as “acting white” (Ogbu, 2003). This type of cultural resistance to academic excellence makes the job of creating a healthy school culture even more difficult.