(D)issing (C)ollaboration

Something's rotten in the District of Columbia. That appears to be the assessment made by the city's voters in last month's Democratic primary in which they ousted one-term Mayor Adrian Fenty in favor of City Council President Vincent Gray. This effectively makes Gray the next mayor in a city where Republicans are inconsequential in its political system.

Mayor Fenty, of course, hired Michelle Rhee to serve as Schools Chancellor in June 2007. Both have governed in a non-collaborative, take-no-prisoners style and numerous election post mortems have identified that style of leadership -- both his and hers -- as a primary reason for Fenty's defeat.

Here are the three best analyses I've read about how Mayor Adrian Fenty (and, by association, Chancellor Michelle Rhee) lost DC:

(1) Sam Chaltain, 9/15/2010: "Why Adrian Fenty Lost the City -- and How Vincent Gray Can Win It Back"
(2) Judith Warner, New York Times, 10/1/2010: "Is Michelle Rhee's Revolution Over?"
(3) Dana Goldstein, The Daily Beast, 9/15/2010: "Obama Loses a Mayor"

In his blog post, Sam Chaltain draws from his new book -- American Schools: The Art of Creating a Democratic Learning Community -- to underscore how Fenty and Rhee went wrong.

[A]ny organizational leader ... needs to develop three foundational skills: self-awareness, systems thinking, and strategically-deployed collaborative decision-making.... When these three skills start to take root in individuals and the organizational culture of which they’re a part, a palpable shift takes place. Transformational change, and the collective will and clarity needed to achieve it, becomes possible.... To me, the most accurate (and damning) criticism of Adrian Fenty and Michelle Rhee was that they failed to understand, or even value, the importance of addressing the human elements of change.

Judith Warner, in last Sunday's New York Times Magazine, diagnoses the self-destructive leadership style of Michelle Rhee.

[T]he night after the mayoral primary, Rhee appeared at the Washington premiere of Davis Guggenheim’s much-talked-about education documentary, “Waiting for Superman,” and told an assemblage of prominent Washingtonians that the election results “were devastating, devastating. Not for me, I’ll be fine . . . but devastating for the school children of Washington, D.C.”

In the local blogs that buzzed with outrage after Rhee’s comment, a theme became clear: people — even people who seemed destined to most benefit from the work of a committed reformer like Rhee — don’t like to get the message that their communities are on the wrong track. That their schools are no good, the teachers in them subpar; that their decision to back a politician who doesn’t share the reformer’s particular style of quasi-missionary zeal would consign their kids to disaster.

It became clear that people don’t much like stern-faced do-gooders telling them how to think and what to do; that they prefer “a reform agenda that’s being done with people, not to people,” as Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, recently put it. They don’t like collective slap-downs — like the one Rhee managed when she referred to the hundreds of fired teachers indiscriminately in an interview with a business magazine as people who “had hit children, who had had sex with children.” They don’t like to see respected members of their community seemingly compared to dirt, as Rhee unthinkingly did by agreeing to pose on the cover of Time wielding a big broom. They like policy makers who at least appear to be taking their concerns to heart, as Rhee pointedly did not, bluntly telling the magazine: “I’m not going to pretend to solicit your advice so you’ll feel involved, because that’s just fake.”

Dana Goldstein, a Spencer Education Journalism Fellow at Columbia University, writing in The Daily Beast, said:

The words used to describe Fenty by the 53 percent of District residents who opposed his reelection—brash, arrogant, condescending—are really descriptions of his schools chancellor Michelle Rhee, a woman who has said, over and over again, “Collaboration and consensus building are quite frankly overrated in my mind.”

Indeed, the tragedy of Fenty’s loss is that the Michelle Rhee reform agenda may now be aborted before it has been fully implemented, giving education reformers one less data point in their search for strategies that work.

One hopes that if D.C.’s new mayor, Vincent Gray, asks Rhee to stay on, she will. (Gray has been unclear about his intentions on this question.) But one also hopes that, in Fenty’s defeat, Rhee has learned a lesson crucial to any effort at institutional reform: Collaboration and consensus building aren’t overrated, after all.

Undoubtedly, DC schools have made progress under Fenty/Rhee on numerous metrics. Test scores. Student enrollment. Supplies. Basic functioning. I have been both complimentary and critical of Michelle Rhee in past blog posts. But the lesson of the election perhaps is that substance and results should carry the day, but style is not inconsequential, especially when it gets in the way.

Leadership style matters in any enterprise, even in education, despite denials by prognosticators (such as The New Republic's Seyward Darby who said "the future of D.C. public education doesn't rest on personal style") and reformers (such as Andy Rotherham AKA Eduwonk who dismissed the style issue and said the "more serious problem is intense organized opposition to what she’s trying to do." I reject these notions that Rhee's longevity is irrelevant and that opposition to Rhee was purely substantive. Compare her to Ronald Reagan, a president who maintained strong personal support through much of his presidency even when the public disagreed with numerous of his public policy stances. He achieved that through a tremendous force of personality, an uncanny sense of people, and an upbeat vision of America -- and got more done as a result. A very different approach to leadership.

Leadership -- and personal -- style matters for urban school superintendents because it is directly related to their longevity and to the sustainability and breadth of their reforms. And they are closer to the ground, addressing issues related to people's children and to teachers' careers, where everything is more personal. They need to engage with stakeholders and connect with them. It gets to Larry Cuban's excellent point about sprinters versus marathoners. "A sprinter in D.C., however, may not last to change how nearly 4,000 teachers teach and 55,000 students learn. Or look at San Diego Superintendent Alan Bersin who ran out of gas in 2005." In short, we need the latter, Cuban says.

A key part of leadership style is inclusiveness and collaboration. It is apparent that the absence of effective partnerships -- or even willing dialogue -- between the Fenty/Rhee team and teachers, parents and the school community (and DC's African-American community, in particular) may have been exactly what led to the dissolution of this political partnership between the mayor and his city. Rhee's rhetoric, including claiming falsely that unspecified numbers of teachers were dismissed because they had sexually assaulted students probably wasn't a good way to build community either -- and her public image, seared into public consciousness as the broom lady on the cover of TIME magazine, simply made things worse. None of that -- none of it -- was necessary to get the job done. In fact, it made it more difficult and has put the entire enterprise in jeopardy.

Now, there were those who were critical of Rhee since day one because of the content of her reform agenda. Perhaps those naysayers never could have been brought along. And there were others whose support was undoubtedly lost by the wave of changes advocated and unleashed by Rhee. That's an unavoidable consequence of leadership. But there were many others who could have been and should have been brought along. The problem was that there has appeared to be an overarching focus on doing reform TO people as opposed to adopting reforms WITH people. Substantively, the balance was off a bit as well. Rhee's decision to rhetorically highlight and prioritize teacher evaluation (and the resulting teacher firings) and to downplay efforts to build teacher capacity is telling. DC's winning Race to the Top proposal arguably has the least focus on teacher professional development, mentoring and induction of any of the 36 Phase Two proposals submitted to the U.S. Department of Education.

Rhee has been unwilling to admit, at least publicly, that her style contributed to Fenty's downfall -- and potentially her early departure from the District. And that's not surprising given her past comments basically shitting on collaboration and consensus building. Rather, Rhee has chalked up the defeat to a failure to communicate "why we were making the decisions that we did." That's certainly a piece of it, as Matthew Yglesias recently argued, saying: "Michelle Rhee unquestionably ended up doing this city a disservice with her habit of spending more time courting a nationwide constituency than on painful block-by-block selling of her message in skeptical communities."

But there were some, like Robert Pondisico ('Michelle Rhee Is Scaring Me', 12/1/2008), who can rightly say that they saw this coming:

Here’s what worries me: accurate or inaccurate, fair or unfair, the increasingly confrontational, impatient, blunt, even rude public persona that’s affixing itself to the Washington, DC schools chancellor runs the risk of getting in the way of what Michelle Rhee wants to accomplish. I’ll put it bluntly: piss off enough people whose help is essential to your success, and your failure becomes inevitable, a consummation devoutly to be wished. Then for years to come, the answer to the reforms anyone proposes becomes, “Oh yes, we tried that in Washington under Michelle Rhee and you remember how that worked out.” If she fails, Michelle Rhee’s failure will not be hers alone. At worst, she runs the risk of damaging the ed reform “brand” for a generation.

Change never was going to come easy to DC Public Schools given its historic dysfunction. Rhee, as Schools Chancellor, has made major strides in three years on the job and set the system on a course for future improvement. But one has to wonder if she had included even an occasional spoonful of sugar to doses of her brand of medicine -- or at least thought about asking folks which flavor they might prefer -- whether things might have turned out just a bit differently.

10/7/2010 UPDATE: Check out Robert McCartney's highly relevant piece in the 10/7/2010 Washington Post -- and this recent Baltimore Sun story -- about the new teachers contract achieved by a collaborative approach between Baltimore schools chief Andres Alonso and AFT head Randi Weingarten.

10/8/2010 UPDATE: "Fenty says education reform cost him re-election" (Mike DeBonis/Washington Post)

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Race To The Top: Under The Hood

My colleagues and I at the New Teacher Center submitted revised language during the public comment period to strengthen proposed Race to the Top (RttT) regulations. (8/28/2009: "RttT: Redefining Teacher Effectiveness".) I am delighted that most of our suggestions were adopted. Specifically, three changes I am pleased to see in the final RttT regulations and state application released by the U.S. Department of Education today are:

(1) A focus on multiple measures in teacher evaluation.

We have defined effective teacher to mean “a teacher whose students achieve acceptable rates (e.g., at least one grade level in an academic year) of student growth (as defined in this notice). States, LEAs, or schools must include multiple measures, provided that teacher effectiveness is evaluated, in significant part, by student growth (as defined in this notice). Supplemental measures may include, for example, multiple observation-based assessments of teacher performance.”

We have revised criterion (D)(2)(ii) to read, “Design and implement rigorous, transparent, and fair evaluation systems for teachers and principals that (a) differentiate effectiveness using multiple rating categories that take into account data on student growth (as defined in this notice) as a significant factor, and (b) are designed and developed with teacher and principal involvement.”

(2) A stronger focus on school leaders and the inclusion of positive teaching and learning conditions in the definition of effective principal.

We have changed the definition of effective principal as follows: (a) replaced “States may supplement this definition as they see fit” with “States, LEAs, or schools must include multiple measures;” (b) added ”Supplemental measures may include, for example, high school graduation rates and college enrollment rates, as well as evidence of providing supportive teaching and learning conditions, strong instructional leadership, and positive family and community engagement;” and (c) replaced “so long as principal effectiveness is judged, in significant measure by student growth” with “provided that principal effectiveness is evaluated, in significant part, by student growth.”

(3) Greater attention to the need for high-quality teacher induction, mentoring and professional development.

We agree that induction programs and coaching by accomplished teachers and principals can be important and effective strategies for supporting novice teachers and principals upon their entering the profession. We are revising the criterion to clarify that States’ plans in response to this criterion should provide for coaching and induction programs as supports for teachers and principals. Changes: We have revised criterion (D)(5)(i) to clarify that plans should include providing effective, data-informed “coaching” and “induction.”

We agree that professional development, including mentoring and coaching, are important aspects of teacher effectiveness. For this reason, criterion (D)(2)(iv)(a) focuses on using evaluations to inform decisions regarding developing effective teachers and principals, including by providing relevant coaching, induction support, and/or professional development. Criterion (D)(5) also provides for evaluation of the extent to which a State has a high-quality plan for its participating LEAs to provide effective, data-informed professional development, coaching, induction, and common planning and collaboration time to teachers and principals.

Sources of great analysis on the final RttT regulations here:

• Education Week (Michele McNeil): "Rules Set for $4 Billion 'Race to Top' Contest"
• New York Times (Sam Dillon): "After Criticism, The Administration Is Praised for Final Rules on Education Grants"
  
• Teacher Beat: "Teacher Elements of Final Race to the Top Guidelines"
  
• Eduflack: "Just The Race Facts"
• Eduflack: "The Race Officially Begins ... Now"
• Eduwonk: "Racing To The Top"

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Research: Attracting New Teachers to Urban Schools

New research led by Tony Milanowski of the University of Wisconsin-Madison provides more evidence that increasing teacher pay may not be the best approach to attract new teachers to high-need, hard-to-staff urban schools. A key finding of the study -- published in the International Journal of Education Policy and Leadership -- which explored job factors important to pre-service educators was that "working conditions factors, especially principal support, had more influence on simulated job choice than pay level."

'Policy implications' include:

• "[M]oney might be better spent to attract, retain, or train better principals than to provide higher beginning salaries to teachers in schools with high-poverty or a high proportion of students of color."
• "[I]nduction programs and curricular flexibility are important to new teachers. The finding that induction programs are attractive, combined with evidence that such programs can be
  effective in reducing teacher turnover (e.g., Ingersoll and Kralick, 2004; Smith and Ingersoll, 2004), suggests that urban districts may want to implement high-qualityinduction and mentoring programs, especially for new teachers in schools with high proportions of poor students or students of color."

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The Quality of Leadership

Reading Sunday's New York Times I was struck by a phrase used repeatedly by our president in describing a quality he seeks in Supreme Court justices. Not only must a candidate be smart, but also s/he should demonstrate the "depth and breadth of one's empathy."

Struck, quietly, struck.

This is why Barack Obama is my president.

He has the ability to elevate a personal attribute that many would consider "soft" to a high-level criteria for a most important job. To do it seriously, and cast it as pragmatic as well.

Imagine if more of the leaders in our daily lives were a bit less concerned with the bottom line, and a bit more capable of recognizing "who the weak are and who the strong are in our society." What if instead of protecting the powerful, the employed, the well-schooled, they instead emphasized the need to protect the powerless (even from themselves)?

Obama said, “I will seek someone who understands that justice isn’t about some abstract legal theory or footnote in a case book,” he said. “It is also about how our laws affect the daily realities of people’s lives, whether they can make a living and care for their families, whether they feel safe in their homes and welcome in their own nation.”

We could replace "justice" and "laws" with "education" and "policies" or "practices" so easily. Just think about it.

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FY 2010 Federal Education Budget

The Obama Administration released details of the President's FY 2010 federal budget today.

Here is a fact sheet from the Office of Management and Budget.
Here is full education budget proposal.

In education, there are number of notable increases with regard to teaching and learning:

• The Teacher Incentive Fund would receive a five-fold increase and would focus on more than just teacher compensation reform, but also a broader range of activities to improve teaching quality
  
• A seven-fold increase in School Improvement Grants -- which can be used for professional development -- from $606 million to $4.5 billion
  
• A $15 million appropriation for Teach For America
• $100 million more for the ARRA-authorized What Works and Innovation Fund
• $10 million increase to the School Leadership program to expand efforts to recruit, train, and retain principals and assistant principals in high-need school districts

There are also several initiatives and programs focused on college access and completion:

• The maximum Pell Grant award is increased by $200, to $5,550. It also shifts the Pell program to the mandatory side of the budget and ties future Pell increases to the Consumer Price Index-plus-1 percentage point.
  
• $500 million in 2010 for a new five-year Access and Completion Incentive Fund to support innovative state efforts to help low-income students succeed and complete their college education.
  

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$29 Billion Buys You A New Education System?

On Wednesday the Forum for Education and Democracy released a proposal to "transform the federal role in education." The conveners are a group of high-profile academics and educators, including Linda Darling-Hammond, John Goodlad, Gloria Ladson-Billings, Deborah Meier, and Ted Sizer.

The cynic in me might call this a $29 billion spending proposal which would result in a 75 percent increase in federal education spending ... but I'm an optimist, so I'll call it a proposed investment. And, in many ways, it is. There are many policy ideas worthy of consideration. I'm not sure it's transformational however.

First, the bad news: What it is, is a tough sell politically. The authors were aware of this, and noted that its cost is equivalent to the monthly price tag of the war in Iraq. But they could have done much more to suggest ways to use current educational resources more efficiently. For instance, what about all the federal funds squandered on spray 'n' pray professional development? Gotta be some savings there. And it would drape at least a paper-thin cloak of fiscal austerity over an otherwise jaw-dropping spending proposal.

Now, the good news: The report is right to call for additional federal investments to build human capital--particularly in so-called hard-to-staff and low-performing schools. In my opinion, the No Child Left Behind Act's biggest failures are (1) its lack of a serious focus on developing highly effective teachers and (2) its focus on punitive sanctions for 'failing' schools and districts rather than the provision of capacity building assistance to turn those schools around.

Let's stipulate two things. Number one, teacher quality is the most important school-based variable impacting student success. Number two, educational accountability is not a silver bullet.

(1) The 'highly qualified' teacher requirement is a meaningless designation. In most states, every teacher is highly qualified. What NCLB lacks is a coherent and sustained vision to enhance teacher development during the initial years in the profession and beyond. To the Forum's credit, it offers up some worthy ideas to move us off the dime: induction programs and teacher residencies as well as stronger school leadership preparation.

New educator support programs currently are allowable uses of NCLB's Title II, Part A dollars, but few of those monies are spent in such impactful ways. In 2006-07, U.S. school districts received nearly $3 billion under Title II, Part A--but 79 percent of the funds were used either to reduce class sizes (47%) or for professional development (32%). [See U.S. Department of Education Survey on the Use of Funds Under Title II, Part A (July 2007)]

(2) Educational accountability alone cannot transform schools. As one of my colleagues like to say, "You don't know what you don't know." Indeed. But the inherent presumption in educational accountability is that educators need a kick in the pants--and kids will learn. This--plus school choice--was W's and many social conservatives' primary argument for NCLB. But that's not how it works.

A main reason why educators in low-performing schools are unsuccessful is because they don't know how to work better or work differently--not because they're lazy or feckless. Changing this requires not just strengthening individual knowledge and skills but also organization-wide transformations in the conditions and culture of teaching and learning. Some of the Forum's ideas would move us in that direction.

Harvard's Dick Elmore makes this point quite cogently in a 2002 Education Next article:

"The working theory behind test-based accountability is seemingly—perhaps fatally—simple. Students take tests that measure their academic performance in various subject areas. The results trigger certain consequences for students and schools—rewards, in the case of high performance, and sanctions for poor performance. Having stakes attached to test scores is supposed to create incentives for students and teachers to work harder and for school and district administrators to do a better job of monitoring their performance.... The threat of such measures is supposed to be enough to motivate students and schools to ever-higher levels of performance.

This may have the ring of truth, but it is in fact a naïve, highly schematic, and oversimplified view of what it takes to improve student learning.... The ability of a school to make improvements has to do with the beliefs, norms, expectations, and practices that people in the organization share, not with the kind of information they receive about their performance. Low-performing schools aren’t coherent enough to respond to external demands for accountability.

The work of turning a school around entails improving the knowledge and skills of teachers—changing their knowledge of content and how to teach it—and helping them to understand where their students are in their academic development. Low-performing schools, and the people who work in them, don’t know what to do. If they did, they would be doing it already.

Test-based accountability without substantial investments in capacity ... is unlikely to elicit better performance from low-performing students and schools."


In sum, I don't begrudge the Forum for setting forth these ideas for improving American public education. I just don't think that federal policymakers or presidential candidates are in the market for something with a $29 billion price tag. Targeted investments to strengthen teacher quality in high-need schools and districts--such as those proposed in U.S. Senator Ted Kennedy and Congressman George Miller's TEACH Act or in U.S. Senator Jack Reed's School Improvement Through Teacher Quality Act--are much more likely to pass the political smell test and find their way into a reauthorized NCLB.

Further, during NCLB reauthorization (now likely to move forward in 2009-2010), one can hope that federal policymakers look toward capacity building strategies (such as those proposed in this report) to replace punitive sanctions and the use of external supplemental service providers. We have a good sense of what is takes to transform struggling schools and districts -- but it's gonna take more than cajoling, demanding and hoping to get the job done. It's going to require a financial and intellectual investment in strengthening the teaching profession and redesigning school leadership.

UPDATE: U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings's proposed rules for NCLB utterly ignore the capacity building needs I have articulated above. It's more of the same old-same old accountability and contracting out of services without support. This will not address the capacity of districts or schools to improve. See Education Week story here.

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