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CHAPTER 1

WHY BEFORE HOW: THE MORAL IMPERATIVE OF LEADERSHIP

ABRAHAM LINCOLN IS credited with saving the Union and emancipating the slaves. But as any student of history knows, achieving these goals came at an enormous cost in blood and treasure, and success was not at all certain during the dark days of the early 1860s. Although the Emancipation Proclamation is, in retrospect, regarded as a great victory for the advancement of equality and the pursuit of the Declaration of Independence’s noble goal that “all men are created equal,” even the Northern states did not have consensus on this when the Proclamation was announced. Lincoln faced opposition in his cabinet, in Congress, among many governors in states that had not joined the Confederacy, and, most notably, among the generals leading the Union army.

Presidential scholar and historian Doris Kearns Goodwin (2018) notes that before Ulysses S. Grant secured the surrender of Robert E. Lee at Appomattox Court House, the Union suffered a series of disastrous military leaders, including George McClellan, who regarded emancipation as an abomination and who warned that Northern troops would desert in droves if slavery were abolished. These soldiers, he claimed, fought for the Union, not for the enslaved. McClellan’s failure to pursue Southern armies more vigorously, Goodwin (2018) notes, nearly cost the Union the war. In brief, Lincoln did not wait for buy-in from politicians and generals, but followed the moral authority that he perceived as an unalterable course. He acted on not what was popular but what was right and just. In his address to Congress on the issue, he said:

Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history.… The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation.… In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free—honorable alike in what we give and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth. (Goodwin, 2018, pp. 241–242)

Goodwin (2018) concludes, “It was through the language of his leadership that a moral purpose and meaning was imprinted upon the protracted misery of the Civil War” (p. 242). Lincoln exercised transformational leadership at its best—leadership in pursuit of a moral purpose, not political gain or popularity (Goodwin, 2018).

Moral Authority in Education

In education, leadership based on moral authority is the key to sustaining educational results and organizational health. The title and administrative authority of a leadership role pales in comparison with moral authority, which no title can bestow. Titles are designated; moral authority is earned. This requires leaders who have the will and the courage to lead—to act, and then to persist in the face of adversity and opposition. Whether the leader is a veteran or new to the position, every few months bring new opportunities for beginnings. Every day people get to choose. Hopefully, they will choose to focus on the ultimate moral purpose of schooling—enhancing student learning. The most complex and challenging multiyear objectives, such as building systemwide capacity for technology integration, planning and executing building projects, or overhauling special education services, all begin with moral purpose. Access to technology is an equity issue, bridging the opportunity gap between rich and poor. Planning and executing building projects is not about bricks and mortar, but about providing access and equity for students and creating the most effective educational environment for all students. Architects, masons, welders, bricklayers, plumbers, and carpenters all engage in a school building project with a moral purpose at their core. They are not merely assembling a building, they are creating a learning environment. All of their efforts, ultimately, will have a direct or indirect impact on the quality of education that occurs within a district or school. Their moral purpose today is similar to the craftsmen of medieval times when they were not merely laying bricks, but building a cathedral. Improving special education delivery, whether it involves extending services to students who need them or removing the special education label from wrongly identified students, is an equity issue as well.

A fantasy view of leadership supposes that as long as you have just cause and clear evidence, change will happen naturally, like how children learn to speak or crawl. But organizational change does not happen that way. Leaders must establish the momentum and critical groundwork for success for any initiative in the first one hundred days. It is unreasonable to think that significant cultural change will simply bubble up from the bottom if the leader just gets out of the way and allows it to happen. Effective change is not an all-or-nothing affair in which the leader must lead either domineeringly or submissively. Ironically, meaningful bottom-up leadership requires exceptional top-down leadership in order to flourish (DuFour et al., 2016).

Essential Elements of Leadership

What leaders aspire to do often differs greatly from what they actually accomplish. The question, then, is, What leadership behaviors have links to improved results? A synthesis of the best research on the relationship between leadership and student achievement (Reeves, 2016b) reveals seven essential elements of leadership.

1. Purpose

2. Trust

3. Focus

4. Leverage

5. Feedback

6. Change

7. Sustainability

Consider the evidence behind each of these elements.

Purpose

Ordinary leaders might ask a colleague, “What do you do?” or “What is your job?” Extraordinary leaders instead ask, “What are you passionate about?” Real purpose stems not from a job requirement, but from passion. An excellent way to use a staff meeting is to ask your colleagues to complete the following sentence frame: “Because I passionately believe _______, I am committed to _______.” For example, a teacher may say, “Because I passionately believe that all students deserve the opportunity to succeed, I am committed to ensuring that every student receives personal encouragement, feedback, and support every day.” The leader does not simply launch into a workshop on formative assessment or effective feedback practices, but rather first taps into the passionate beliefs of the faculty.

A survey of teachers reveals that teachers are far less likely to change their practices due to administrative requirements than due to evidence and collegial interaction (Education Week, 2018). According to this survey, twice as many teachers receive their ideas from conferences and interactions with colleagues as teachers who receive their ideas from social media—a margin of 78 percent to 40 percent (Education Week, 2018). And how do teachers turn ideas into practice? Three times as many teachers say that evidence is their primary motivator as teachers who receive their primary motivation from endorsements from their administrators—a margin of 39 percent to 13 percent (Education Week, 2018). This strongly suggests that administrative commands will not influence teaching and learning as much as compelling cases that leaders make with evidence and passion.

Some leaders think that they will create a sense of purpose with their mission and vision statements. Rick DuFour used to joke that he could create a mission statement generator that would automatically produce what committees come up with after pondering and laboring for hours with the help of a strategic planning consultant. It would come up with something like this:

Our mission is to create productive citizens of the 21st century who will excel in creativity, critical thinking, communication, and every other alliterative word or phrase that we can think of as they prepare for a multicultural world, ready to face the challenges, blah, blah, blah, while valuing the unique contributions and skills of every stakeholder irrespective of differences in learning style or preference, and enhancing the blah, blah, blah.

You get the idea. The only people who remember mission statements like this, if only for a few days, are the people who wrote them.

Contrast the ponderous and useless mission statements that are so prevalent in schools with that of the Advent School (n.d.) in Boston: “Learn with passion, act with courage, and change the world.” A seven-year-old at this school could explain what the statement means.

• How do students learn with passion? “I go to the library anytime I want, not just when it’s library time!”

• How do students act with courage? “My friend has dyslexia, but she’s really smart. When the teacher gave her an easy book, I said, ‘She’s not stupid—she just doesn’t read very fast—and she should be reading the same hard books that I get.’”

• How do students change the world? “We collect canned goods for the homeless shelter, and we pick up trash on the street. We even came up with some ideas about how to not pollute water and how to make the playground safer.”

We’re not suggesting that this is the right mission statement for your school, but this experience does suggest a couple of acid-test questions. First, can a seven-year-old explain what your mission statement means? Second, does the mission statement resonate with everyone in the school who can use it as a springboard for guiding daily actions?

Trust

In their landmark leadership study, James M. Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner (2011) identify credibility as the most important attribute for leadership success. Staff will forgive leaders for their mistakes in data analysis, communication, charisma, and myriad other leadership requirements as long as staff trust them. But if leaders lose credibility, it doesn’t matter how competent they are in other fields. Data analysis and charisma mean nothing without credibility. Credible leaders do what they say they will do. Therefore, within the first one hundred days of taking a leadership role, we recommend a rhythm of “promises made, promises kept” for every meeting: “Last week, I promised that I would do this, and here is how I have kept that promise.” Credible leaders should make this phrase the hallmark of every single encounter with their staff. This commitment to promises made, promises kept is an obligation of not merely the leader, but the entire system. It creates reciprocal accountability in which the leader makes and keeps promises and the staff do the same. Here are some examples of promises made, promises kept.

• “At our last meeting, we agreed to bring student work for collaborative scoring to our team meetings, and this week, we have that work and are ready to go.”

• “At our last meeting, we agreed to bring a list of individual students who need intervention and specific strategies to help them succeed, and this week, we have that list right here.”

In the ideal world we advocate, every board meeting, cabinet meeting, department meeting, grade-level meeting, and collaborative team meeting has the same rhythm of promises made, promises kept.

Focus

We can all agree that the amount of incoming information educational leaders, teachers, students, and society at large have exposure to has expanded markedly since the early 1980s. Yet it’s safe to say that the amount of learning has not markedly increased. Where does all of this transmitted but unused information go? It is lost to fragmentation, the inevitable result of futile attempts to multitask and absorb information at an increasingly frantic pace. Fragmentation, not focus, is the norm in the 21st century. Our research suggests, however, that focus—the prioritization of no more than six initiatives for any school or system—is strongly related to gains in student learning (Reeves, 2011b). Unfortunately, focus is elusive. Fragmentation does not occur due to malice on anyone’s part; it stems from noble motives. Have lots of high-poverty students? Here’s a new program! Have lots of English learners? Here’s another new program! Have lots of special education students? Here’s another new initiative! But however noble the motivations, fragmentation is associated with significantly lower levels of student learning. Indeed, schools with high concentrations of students from low-income families, students learning English, and special education students are the least likely to have high levels of focus (Reeves, 2011b). In our studies of more than two thousand schools, those with six or fewer initiatives have the greatest gains in student achievement (Reeves, 2011b).

We are aware that the danger of focus is FOMO—fear of missing out. If a neighboring district has a new initiative and you don’t, then you think that you might fall behind. This logic undermines deep implementation of initiatives. We have seen this many times in schools as they journey to become PLCs.

Leverage

Archimedes (n.d.) said, “Give me a place to stand on and with a lever I will move the whole world.” He was right, as any high school physics student can tell you. It would require a very, very long lever to move the mass of the earth (though probably not any longer than the lever required to move schools and classrooms). Educational leaders face a bewildering array of strategies that claim to work—that is, practices that influence student achievement. But this “What works?” approach to making choices is ultimately futile because, as John Hattie (2009) has joked, anything with a pulse works. The more insightful question to ask is, “What works best; what has the most leverage?” Leaders need to make the distinction between the much-vaunted standard of statistical significance and the more important standard of practical significance, or what in medicine is called clinical significance. Although marketing literature overflows with claims of statistical significance, usually followed by multiple exclamation points, statistical significance is actually a very low bar. A difference in student achievement of only a few percentage points may be statistically significant—that is, the difference between the control group and the experimental group is unlikely due to random variation. In general, the larger the sample size, the easier it is to establish statistical significance, even if that difference is very small.

The more relevant question for educational leaders and teachers to ask is: “Does this proposal have practical significance—does it have so great an impact that we should stop doing other things in order to start doing this new initiative?” Most educational systems adopt initiatives one on top of another—the additive mode. But the principle of leverage suggests that you can’t move the earth while you are also attempting to move every other planet. In order to move the educational planet, leaders must stop attempting to move everything else in the solar system and focus on those elements of leverage that have the greatest potential for student gains.

So, what are the leverage points in education? Our research suggests three central points of leverage. The first leverage point is the comprehensive use of PLCs as the central organizing principle for every school. In a review of 196 schools including more than a quarter million students (Reeves, 2016b), we find that when schools implement PLCs at Work® with depth and duration, significant student achievement gains in reading, mathematics, and science occur. The longer the implementation, the greater the gains. This clearly distinguishes the schools that go to a conference, gain superficial buy-in, declare victory, and move on from those that have long-term commitments to PLCs. The greatest gains happen in those schools that, year after year, maintain a laser-like focus on successful and deep PLC implementation. With each additional year after initial implementation, achievement gains grow, from three to five to seven to ten years (Reeves, 2010). This dogged persistence and focus prevents schools from yielding to the siren call of the latest fad and helps them remain committed to the collaborative processes that matter most for student results.

Feedback

Feedback is the second leverage point. Of all the tools that teachers and leaders have available to influence student achievement, effective feedback has some of the greatest impact on student results. No matter how good the curriculum, data analysis, projects, or other elements of instruction that schools use, all of these have little value without effective feedback. Indeed, we have argued that many tests masquerading as formative assessments are better described as uninformative assessments (Reeves, 2011b). Even the most sophisticated assessments are useless unless teachers use the results to inform teaching and learning. The most elegant curriculum is valueless if educators merely deliver it and do not accompany it with effective feedback on the degree to which students are learning it.

The acronym FAST summarizes the four elements of effective feedback: (1) fair, (2) accurate, (3) specific, and (4) timely (Reeves, 2016a). You can identify feedback you have received—from, say, a great coach or music director—that energized or encouraged you. Similarly, you can think of times when you received demoralizing and inconsequential feedback. Imagine that during your anniversary dinner, your spouse announces, “Honey, it’s time for your annual performance review. Here are some areas where you have exceeded my expectations, and here are some developmental opportunities.” If that example makes you cringe, then so should the vast majority of educational feedback systems, which provide vague, inconsistent information to students, teachers, and leaders, and deliver it long after anyone can do anything about it.

The greatest potential for leaders to improve feedback and achieve great short-term, 100-day goals lies in two areas: (1) how leaders provide feedback to teachers and (2) how teachers provide feedback to students. Most teacher evaluation systems are the opposite of FAST; they are unfair (different administrators evaluate the same performance differently), they are inaccurate (observation rubrics are ambiguous and student learning scores are widely inaccurate), they are ambiguous (teachers do not routinely get specific feedback to improve performance), and they are late (end-of-year observations are toxic and demoralizing).

Similarly, the way that teachers grade students’ work violates every element of the FAST framework. Fairness is all about consistency, and our research reveals that the same student could receive grades of A, B, C, D, or F for identical performance, based on differences in teachers’ idiosyncratic grading systems (Reeves, 2015). Grades are notoriously inaccurate because the grade may reflect not the student’s proficiency in the subject being graded, but a host of other factors, ranging from parental support to literacy. Grades are rarely specific, as four students could receive a grade of C for entirely different reasons, such as proficiency, attitude, participation, and parental advocacy. And grades are rarely timely—the first sign of trouble is a low mark at the end of the semester when, in fact, schools know within the first two weeks of the semester whether students are in danger of failure. We have seen schools that have elaborate and sophisticated data warehouses and the information they need to identify and intervene for students who are at grave risk of failure, but they fail to transform this information into decisive leadership actions. It is as if the students are patients who submit to an expensive and detailed diagnostic procedure that yields important information for life-saving treatment but the hospital sends them home without a treatment plan or a word from the physician.

In sum, even though leaders know that feedback is a critical ingredient of success, they often squander this essential resource, and the feedback to teachers and students fails to meet the essential requirements of effectiveness.

The third leverage point is nonfiction writing. When students write to describe, compare, evaluate, or persuade, they engage their critical-thinking faculties and build literacy skills. Our research concludes that nonfiction writing is associated not only with improved composition skills but also with improvements in reading comprehension, mathematics, science, and social studies (Reeves, 2002). Our research in successful high-poverty schools reveals the profound impact of nonfiction writing. In low-performing schools, the vast majority of student writing was fiction, fantasy, poetry, or personal narrative. In high-performing schools with similar demographic characteristics, there was a much more balanced approach in student writing, including expository, persuasive, and descriptive writing (Reeves, in press).

Change