Case Studies
CASE STUDIES
Changing the Quality of Student Experiences: T h e F i f e Wa y Transfor ming Roles and R e l a t i o n s h i p s : O n e D i s t r i c t ’s Choice to Pursue Greatness
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CHANGING THE QUALITY OF STUDENT EXPERIENCES
The Fife Way Fife Public Schools, outside of Tacoma, Washington, has over the past 10 years realized dramatic changes from the classroom to the boardroom. In this case study, the Schlechty Center chronicles the nature of these changes with special attention to how all changes are connected to students and the experiences the district provides them.
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Changing the Quality of Student Experiences: The Fife Way In his 2006 opening remarks to all staff of the Fife, Washington, public schools, Superintendent Steve McCammon pointed out some of the accomplishments of the school district: I believe that we have created the environment to take our district to unprecedented heights. We have a common purpose, gifted staff, a common language, time created for collaboration, teacher-driven staff development, more student performance data than we have ever had before, focused and aligned building plans, and steadfast school board and community support. This list of accomplishments is the result of ten years of hard work and captures key ways the district, located outside Tacoma, Washington has changed. Furthermore, while celebratory in tone, the Superintendent’s 2006 remarks were much more than a set of opening of school accolades meant to inspire the troops. His listing of district accomplishments was a part of the case he further built in his remarks—a case for continued hard work driven by a set of beliefs: I believe that we have a very difficult task before us to ensure that all students meet the high standards that are set forth. I also firmly believe that if any district can accomplish this important task, none is better prepared for success than ours. At this same opening convocation, Superintendent McCammon then looked out over the faculty and staff gathered and asked those who were new to the school district to stand. Next, he asked those who had been hired in the previous three years to stand. While these newer employees stood surrounded by their veteran colleagues, the superintendent publicly acknowledged that the veteran teachers in Fife had been invited, not required, over the past several years to commit to the district’s new direction, one which makes student engagement central. Veteran staff members had been invited to
2 rethink their roles and their relationship to their students. The superintendent went on to address the newer teachers. “You were hired because you demonstrated to us a commitment to student engagement. Your commitment to our district efforts was a requirement of your hiring.” While the newest faculty and staff remained standing, the superintendent then asked, “Who will join us in this work?” Those who had been sitting created a surge of movement as they rose to join those already standing in symbolic response to their superintendent’s call for commitment. The dogged commitment to organizational transformation grows out of Fife School District’s understanding that impressive accomplishments are not the end point in its work on behalf of children and young people in the communities of Fife, Milton, and Edgewood. Rather, the accomplishments make it possible for the district to press on and do what public school districts have not previously been designed to do—ensure high levels of learning for all students. The Schlechty Center makes the case that if a school district sets out to transform itself, one way of charting its progress is by understanding interrelated system changes and accomplishments in four large categories: changes in student experiences, changes in staff engagement with the district’s core business, changes in organizational structure, and changes in organizational culture.
3 Recognizing that the success in Fife is not a common experience in the effort to improve school performance, and recognizing the desperate need for cases to illustrate how school and school districts might be transformed, the Schlechty Center decided to develop a case study to describe Fife’s experiences. This case study is a summary of the Fife School District’s accomplishments over the past decade. Seven of those years involved a relationship with the Schlechty Center. Information for this case study is drawn from shared work and ongoing conversations over the years with Fife superintendents, teachers, principals, board members, and other district leaders. Additionally, in 2007 information for this case study was formally gathered through a series of individual and group interviews, with all role groups reflecting on the district’s work, the changes staff observed and been a part of, and the significance of the change efforts from their respective points of view.
The short story of Fife’s work includes some answers to the kinds of questions leaders in public education frequently ask themselves and their colleagues: So what’s different in the district and in our schools? How have several years of hard work, including the ebb and flow of energy devoted to innovation, paid off for the Fife Schools?
Student Experiences In Fife, student experiences are carefully assessed and monitored in terms of student engagement and student learning. Increases in both student engagement and student learning have been documented. Additionally, ongoing assessment of student engagement and learning has caused redesign of school experiences for students.
4 Staff Engagement The school district has established and subsequently deepened and sustained a clear sense of purpose, of its core business, and of key organizational values. Throughout the organization, faculty and staff have increased their commitment to the district’s purpose, core business and values. Organizational Structure The roles of student, teacher, principal, district office leader, and board member have dramatically changed to coincide with and support the district’s purpose. Organizational Culture This organization which was once stigmatized by distrust and competing factions is now characterized as remarkably supportive, open, and distinguished by trusting relationships between and among staff, parents, and the larger community. So how do readers here not only come to understand what happened in the Fife Schools, but also use that understanding to make purposeful changes in their own school districts? Using a systems analysis of what has happened over the last decade in Fife may provide educational colleagues from other districts insight into how leaders can refashion their organizations in order to change the quality of student experiences. The basic framework for this case study was developed by Phillip C. Schlechty in his book Creating Great Schools: Six Critical Systems at the Heart of Educational Innovation. However, the Six Critical Systems will merely be the tool for analysis; the voices and experiences of the Fife practitioners will tell the story of their district’s work and subsequent accomplishments.
Fife District Profile and Brief History of Its Change Efforts In the late 1990s, then Superintendent Bob Corley recognized that the Fife School District had some indication that it was doing a good job, but those indicators were not sufficient evidence to warrant his satisfaction that the school district could continue doing
5 what it had traditionally done. School board members recognized that a bitter 1995 teacher strike had left scars on the school district and the community—scars that could not be addressed in any typical way. At an AASA Conference in 2000, Corley heard Phillip Schlechty make a presentation regarding systemic reform and Corley became interested in the Schlechty Center’s work with systems processes. Corley soon headed to the Schlechty Center’s headquarters in Kentucky with his two assistant superintendents, McCammon (now superintendent in Fife) and Marti Harruff (now superintendent in Montesano, Wash.). After extended conversations during which leaders at the Schlechty Center learned much more about the Fife Schools, Fife leaders began thinking that the work of a new Schlechty Center initiative, the Standard-Bearer School District Network, might be just the type of atypical approach to change that Fife needed. What struck the Fife leaders was the emphasis of working on systems, rather than fixing the people. They knew that the Fife Schools hired strong teachers and staff, had a supportive community, and students who performed pretty well. The Fife leaders also recognized that the change efforts required to move such a school district into the future would have to be comprehensive and get at the bedrock of the organization. So the three Fife leaders, with their knowledge of the district context and their early understanding of Schlechty Center work with systems change, was granted board approval to join the Standard-Bearer School District Network in 2000. The network at that time was comprised of 20 school districts committed to assessing and developing their capacity to support change using the framework of 10 District Standards that had been developed by Phil Schlechty and the Schlechty Center staff.
6 Fife’s early work as part of the Standard-Bearer Network involved groups of teachers, principals, district leaders, and board members assessing district capacity rather than performance. Those involved became zealous leaders who understood that capacity would give their district readiness to respond to an ever-changing environment and to consider new possibilities without judging or blaming individual staff members. Simultaneously with the ongoing capacity assessments, teachers and principals were sharing their new learning about student engagement and coming to understand that teachers could purposefully design schoolwork that is more likely to be engaging to students. Teacher leaders began to talk the language of engagement and the 10 Design Qualities, suggested by the Schlechty Center’s Theory of Engagement as central to school improvement in considering the work provided to students. Fife provided opportunities for staff from across the district to learn about this new work through national conferences, through district-sponsored experiences, and, to a lesser extent, through school-based activities. In 2001, at the end of the initial year of Fife’s new effort, Corley left Fife to take a Florida superintendency. The Standard-Bearer work continued under the leadership of the new superintendent, Steve McCammon. Many in the district point to this continuity of direction early in the change process as a defining event in Fife’s later accomplishments. Corley investigated and initiated the systems change effort and McCammon, now as superintendent, pursued ever-deepening, imaginative strategies to bring the changes to fruition. After the first three years in the Standard-Bearer Network, Fife continued as an affiliate member utilizing Schlechty Center conferences for ongoing district capacity
7 development. The Working on the Work conference, the Principals Academy, and the Key Leaders conference became the primary means for Fife Schools to stay abreast of the Schlechty Center’s latest ideas and tools, to support and develop new staff members, and, increasingly, to provide development for school board members. From 2002 to 2007, the Schlechty Center utilized selected Fife staff as Fellows (practitioners who work alongside Schlechty Center senior associates for specific purposes) at conferences, and even as leaders of development work in neighboring districts. The superintendent served as an adjunct Schlechty Center associate for the last five years, because the Schlechty Center valued his talents and commitment to transformation, and the Fife school board recognized the cutting-edge resources such experiences made available to their school district.
Six Critical Systems: The Framework for a Systems Analysis The successful employment of disruptive innovations requires dramatic alteration in both the structure and the culture of a school or school system. Most important, such innovations require changes in the ways vital functions are carried out: the way new members are recruited and inducted, the way knowledge is transmitted, the way power and authority are distributed, the way people and programs are evaluated, the way directions and goals are set, and the way boundaries that determine who is inside and who is outside the school are defined Understanding these six critical systems is key to dramatically changing the way schools do their business. (Schlechty, 2005) The Schlechty Center assumes that public schools do not currently have the capacity to make student engagement central. Therefore, schools currently have limited potential to make sure that students will learn those things that schools, parents and community members want all children to learn to be considered well educated. As Fife realized as part of their change efforts, if schools are to increase their capacity to change
8 the quality of student experiences, the school district will be required to transform itself. The Schlechty Center argues that this means transforming from bureaucracies that produce compliance to learning organizations that nurture engagement for students and for the adults in the school district. So what must school districts do to transform themselves? The Schlechty Center recommends that school leaders should pursue organizational transformation by working on the six Critical Systems which Schlechty explicates in his 2005 book. These systems regulate behavior in schools, both those schools that are bureaucracies and those that are learning organizations. In order to realize the kind of transformation that districts such as Fife desire, school leaders must refashion both the nature and the substance of each of the six Critical Systems, as well as change the order of emphasis from the order given these systems in a bureaucracy. An explanation of the focus of each system is briefly described as follows: •
The Directional System: The systems through which goals are set, priorities are determined, and when things go awry corrective actions are initiated.
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The Knowledge Development and Transmission System: The formal and informal systems of education, training, and socialization through which organizational members are brought to know and understand what they need to know and understand to uphold organizational norms and to function effectively in the organization.
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The Recruitment and Induction System: The systems through which new members are identified and attracted to the organization and brought to understand and embrace the norms and values they must understand and embrace
9 to be full members of the organization. They are also the systems through which current members are brought to understand and embrace the norms and values of an organization undergoing important change. •
The Boundary System: The systems that define who and what are inside the organization, and are therefore subject to the control of the organization, and who and what are outside the organization, and are therefore beyond the reach of the systems that make up the organization.
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The Evaluation system: The systems through which measures of merit and worth are assigned, status is determined, honor is bestowed, and the method and timing of negative sanctions are set.
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The Power and Authority System: The systems that legitimize the use of sanctions, define the proper exercise of power, and determine status relationships. As for the order of emphasis, in a learning organization leaders understand the
primacy of the Directional, Knowledge Development and Transmission, and Recruitment and Induction Systems. Furthermore, in a learning organization, the Directional System is given more attention and emphasis than any other system and is not only fully developed, clear and coherent, but it becomes the system which shapes and determines emphasis of all the other systems. So in addition to substantive changes required for each system, organizational transformation would result in a changed order of emphasis, meaning the weight of leaders’ time and attention might be reflected in the order below. • • •
Directional System Knowledge Development and Transmission System Recruitment and Induction
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Boundary System Evaluation System Power and Authority System
This is in contrast to bureaucracies, which put much more emphasis on Boundary, Evaluation, and Power and Authority Systems. In an attempt to chronicle major changes and accomplishments of the Fife Schools, attention will be given to analysis of how the Fife School District refashioned these six Critical Systems and how they changed the relative emphasis between and among these systems thereby creating the capacity to change the quality of student experiences.
Directional System Pointing Our Boats in the Same Direction The systems through which goals are set, priorities are determined, and when things go awry corrective actions are initiated. (Schlechty, 2005) Dramatic change in the quality of student experiences grows out of the fact that the Fife School District is now crystal clear about its direction. In that same 2006 allstaff presentation, the superintendent articulated the district’s core business—that is, what the district spends most of its intellectual and fiscal resources pursuing. He said: What is our core business (or common result)? To produce work that engages students—work that is so compelling that students persist when they experience difficulties. Work that is so challenging that students have a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction when they successfully complete it. His laser-like clarity leaves no room for doubt that this district knows what it is about. McCammon’s other remarks that day included chronicling his beliefs: •
I believe that in Fife School District we have the finest collection of educators in the state, and that the administration and support staff around them are second to none.
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I believe that we have a very difficult task before us to ensure that all students meet the high standards that are set forth. I also firmly believe that if any district can accomplish this important task, none is better prepared for success than ours.
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I really do believe that teachers are designers and leaders and that we should not work on the teachers or the students, instead we should work on improving the work that we design for students to complete. This should be done both individually and, whenever possible, collaboratively around our lesson design.
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I believe that there is very real power in collaboration. While we cannot collaborate around every problem and lesson, we are better as a whole when we take advantage of our collective talent. The talent and experience is abundant in this district and we have the common language and trust in place to make it happen.
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I truly believe that as a district our focus is precisely where it should be and that is on the student work. If we are truly focusing on aligning what we teach and creating more engaging lessons, the test scores will take care of themselves and will be but one important indicator of our success with every student.
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I have grown to deeply believe that effort affects learning outcomes at least as much as does intellectual ability and that it is our utmost responsibility to engage all of our students in the work. This is the most difficult task in our business, but also the most important one.
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I believe that it is nothing more than common sense that if we are reflective in our teaching and embed more Design Qualities in our lessons, then more students will become engaged and therefore more learning will take place.
In conversations with principals, teachers, central office leaders and board members, the district’s focus on engagement, on providing meaningful, engaging work that increases the likelihood that students will learn required content and skills, is a part of everyone’s conversation. A veteran principal contrasted her earlier years as a principal with her current experiences in Fife. “The direction is set by the superintendent.” She explains that there is no question in her mind what the district focus is, and she is given a
12 range of support in order to maintain her focus. A middle school dean says, “Our boats are all pointed in the same direction, but we have autonomy to do it in the way we want. There is no Big Brother. The superintendent may bring us in and ask us what we need.” So how do teachers see the district’s direction? A high school teacher who is also the Fife Education Association president expresses his observations about the district’s journey to establish a direction: Probably, the biggest moment was—I can’t put a date on it—was when somewhere along the line the critical mass realized that what we’re talking about is the engagement of students. We’re talking about students and what they’re getting out of this. It’s not just about what you are teaching. Because the way we are teaching changed rather dramatically over a period of years. The focus now is really about are the kids learning this or not. I use to be a great teacher, but now it’s all bout the kids being good learners. A Fife third grade teacher describes how the vision for her own classroom grows out of the district core business: The shift for me is that I hope my room is getting better and better, and it is not all about me and what I want but about the students, their wants and motives. Then, the classroom evolves out of that. Rather than, “Okay, this is it. You will fit into the hole I designed.” Now I recognize that I have squares or triangles or rectangles and how am I going to create the holes that each will fit in. Another veteran elementary teacher says, “I’m constantly looking at projects, ways, and work that I engage them in and can get concepts across without having to use dry materials that aren’t interesting to kids.” Another teacher provides some historical contrast and notes that for a long time the district had a goal which was to teach children and make them learners. However, she added, “I don’t think we had any vision of where or how we should do that. You’d come to work and do the job. You’d pull the ditto out that you’d been using for 10 years and you’d do it again.” Fife teachers resoundingly describe a different world of school today than the one this last teacher describes.
13 Central office leaders echo that same kind of understanding. One speaks from the basis of more than 26 years in the district. When asked about the “essence” of the Fife School District she says, “It’s pretty basic, pretty easy, because we’ve learned it so well. It’s student engagement. As an employee, it’s not about me. It’s the end result of how students come out of their learning experience.” The school board is a vital part of articulating, celebrating and sustaining the main focus of the school district. For example, a seventeen-year veteran school board member explains what he has always hoped will happen as the result of the district’s efforts to transform itself. “Our goal is that when your kids come home, they want to tell you what they did in school. They’ll want your opinion to learn more about what they’re doing. They want to be working on it.” And then that board member goes on to tell a story about a recent board meeting where elementary students were demonstrating bridgebuilding in science. One student’s father stood up and testified that this assignment was the first time his daughter came home and actually expressed interest in learning more about some content, because she was excited about building bridges. In fact, the father described to the board how she wanted to go on the Internet with her father’s help to get more information. The veteran school board member proclaims that youngster’s experience and her father’s joy as great indicators of realizing for that youngster the district’s vision—creating excitement and student desire for learning. Fife staff seems to understand clearly the direction of the district and how that direction is used as a reference point for all district work. They know the answers to key questions that are part of the Directional System: Who are our customers? What is our business? What is our product? The school district is at a point in its transformation
14 where students are understood to be the primary customers; designing engaging work focused on the right content is the district’s business; and the satisfying, challenging schoolwork that holds promise for each child is the product of the school district’s core business. Ten years ago, Fife had no such clarity, and therefore lacked the capacity to lead its staff, parents and community in a common direction.
Knowledge Development and Transmission System Building Trust The formal and informal systems of education, training, and socialization through which organizational members are brought to know and understand what they need to know and understand to uphold organizational norms and to function effectively in the organization. (Schlechty, 2005) Even though leaders may be clear about a school district’s direction, without a well-designed Knowledge Development and Transmission System, that direction may remain the well-kept secret of a few leaders or, regrettably, a promising kernel of organizational purpose without substance. Over the last several years, the Fife School District has developed powerful systems of transmitting the social norms that shape behavior throughout the district. As it refashioned its Knowledge Development and Transmission System, the staff gained new-found respect and trust in one another. While opportunities for staff development were once much more random and, according to all role groups, unfocused or individually focused, rather than being focused on school and district goals and direction, today the Fife system for developing, importing, evaluating and transmitting knowledge could accurately be called tightly focused and adaptable to new circumstances and information.
15 When the district began its efforts to focus on student engagement and the district changes necessary to support the work, the superintendent and his two assistant superintendents assumed key roles in learning about the nature of the work and then involving principals and teacher leaders in deepening the foundational understanding necessary for district transformation. A school board member says: We had three people at the top committed to the process, doing a lot of work with the process, and it was at that time an educational process. They didn’t really force anyone to do it; we started to learn the language. You’ve got to know what you’re talking about so you can talk to each other. The district provided all role groups opportunities to attend national Schlechty Center conferences, to participate in assessing district capacity, and for some to become part of an early District Development Team which identified, coordinated and led the district’s ongoing change efforts. In the first few years of the district’s Standard-Bearer efforts, principals and teachers customized activities and processes that would be invitational and yet offer people ways to learn about engagement, about district standards, and about efforts the district was making to build its capacity to change. So while top district leaders were immersing themselves in understanding the district standards for transformation and the nature of student engagement, other staff members were invited— not coerced—to participate. As a junior high teacher puts it, “It’s been the softest hammer imaginable.” Sometimes the learning experiences were orchestrated by district leaders. For example, teachers and principals recalled 2001, the first year of McCammon’s superintendency, when the superintendent modeled and led a structured process for looking at student work in order to inquire about student engagement and the design of the work provided them. He would visit individual schools and lead or participate in the
16 Descriptive Review process, helping to establish a focus on students and the work provided them. During the 2001–02 school year, a districtwide staff development day involved all teachers participating in the Descriptive Review process with the superintendent in the middle of that work. A 5th grade teacher remembers those early learning activities. “It was a huge experience, teachers listening to each other. For a new teacher, it was huge to sit down with experienced teachers—some of 20 years or more—and they were actually listening to suggestions from other people.” As Fife embarked on some dramatically different ways for adults to learn together, they were experiencing some of what adults should typically experience in a learning organization. A learning organization assumes that adults can create new knowledge together given a discipline—a coherent set of ideas and accompanying processes—by which to create that new knowledge. Of course, new knowledge may also be imported from others outside the school district, and Fife continued its efforts to learn from other school districts in the Standard-Bearer School District Network. Each year since 2000, Fife has sent teachers, principals, and district leaders to the Working on the Work conference. Fife teachers or district leaders were often asked to be co-presenters or facilitators at those conferences, working and learning with teachers and others from across the country. As a result of such cross-district collaboration, the Orange Schools, outside of Cleveland, Ohio, had at least two occasions to visit in Fife and for teachers and district leaders from each district to share good ideas which demonstrated serious changes underway. One example of an idea imported from the Orange Schools is the early WOW Academies at Fife—specific opportunities for teachers
17 to work together to design work that might increase engagement. The district carved out the time and supportive resources for teachers to attend the Academy during the school day and, much as Orange did, teacher needs and interests figured prominently in the choices of what the work under design might focus on. Over time, the WOW Academy has evolved into a sophisticated hybrid of what it once was. During the 2006–07 school year the district introduced to teams of teachers the Coaching for Design process led by an experienced, well-prepared Fife teacher leader. Throughout the year 79 teachers participated in three sessions of the WOW Academy which now incorporates Coaching for Design. Today, participation in the district WOW Academies is competitive; teams of teachers submit proposals about what they want to design and why it will be high-leverage for their students. Although not all proposals are funded for participation in the district WOW Academy, schools have discretionary money at the campus level to support teachers in similar design work, so if teachers are not invited to the district Academy, they still get support on their campuses for original design work. Teachers and principals talk with great excitement and appreciation of this latest iteration of the WOW Academy, calling it a real breakthrough in the school district’s efforts to provide engaging work for students. Enhanced by electronic sharing made possible by a district-designed portal, following the two-day Academy teachers’ collaborative creativity has been elevated to new levels of effectiveness, according to Fife staff. An experienced elementary teacher says: A defining event for me was I just went to my first WOW Academy. We came out with a three-week unit, with engaging activities with my grade level. And I just can’t believe we were given that time—two days to work with our group. And to get to these activities I can use tomorrow. And it’s on the portal, so anyone can use it, too. Giving us this gift of time, I think staff really appreciates that.
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This example of the WOW Academy in its initial iteration and the most recent version illustrates well how adept Fife is at continuing to import new learning from outside the district and then enhancing and recreating their internal processes, incorporating that new learning. In creating processes for developing, importing and transmitting knowledge, Fife recognizes that it has built a foundation which provides readiness for new work like the Coaching for Design. A high school teacher says, “The Coaching for Design was for us the right time and the right place. We had the foundation, so it is even more powerful because of that.” A teacher at Columbia Junior High talks of the way that foundation was built. “It was a skillful, slow building process. … the WOW Academy as it is now, that couldn’t have been in Year One. That would have blown people out of the water.” In the fall of 2006, a group of teachers, principals, and district leaders went to a Working on the Work Conference specifically to learn more about Coaching for Design. One teacher in that group commented repeatedly throughout the interview about the importance of having foundational work in place so that powerful subsequent processes—such as Coaching for Design—have a real chance of taking hold and making a difference. The foundational work she described included processes for widespread understanding of engagement, of understanding and embracing the role of teachers in designing that work, and of the role of principals and district leaders in creating opportunities for teachers to design the work. Six years ago in contract negotiations, the district and the Fife Education Association mutually agreed on six days which would become professional development half days to focus on engagement and district change. For a school district that experienced in 1995 what was at the time the longest teacher strike in the history of
19 Washington public education, the collaboration resulting in that contract provision represents huge changes in shared understanding, commitments and new relationships. In recent years, negotiation sessions have averaged no more than three meetings in order to reach consensus on teacher contracts. In earlier times, the negotiation process had been slow and somewhat contentious The way the Knowledge Development and Transmission System was changed over time involved care for and understanding of the needs and interests of teachers. For example, a junior high teacher explains from his point of view the district’s early steps: One of the first steps was opening up the door to classrooms and not making such a secret what went on in there. That was a key with convincing people that what you do behind your doors is a good thing and you should let other people see it. Every single teacher has this terrible fear that if you open the door people will find out that you don’t know what you are doing. You’ll be exposed as the fraud you are, sent off in shame. The volunteerism involved in the early sharing of work and collaborative design work kept fear out of the process. A 27-year veteran elementary teacher explains what has changed for her: I thought in my last few years of teaching I was just going to coast. I thought I’d just basically be able to skate during the last 10 years or so. …Now, the notion of collaboration is what really excites us. It’s just rejuvenating. It’s making my job fun again. This teacher knows well that the district did not always value and support teacher collaboration: Everything we did was in isolation. Every teacher, almost every teacher, did things in their own rooms in their own way. There was no collaboration. If you had a problem, you stayed in your bunker and figured it out yourself. When you think about where we were pre-2000, a bitter, bitter, strike, it’s really amazing where we are now.
20 Another elementary teacher also remembers his earlier years in Fife: “Collaboration was, ‘I’m running a set of copies, do you want me to run you a set?’” From the point of view of the school board, members see how collaboration now flourishes. The most veteran board member, who first served on the board in 1990 and is still serving in 2007, believes the district’s biggest problem in the 1990’s was trust. He believes that developing trust, beginning with Corley’s leadership and then continuing and deepening now during McCammon’s tenure is the “start of our whole story.” This school board member recalls how Corley made the financial statements transparent and invited anyone to come and talk with him. Over time, the district found a framework by which to rethink itself and continued to build the trust needed for ongoing growth and development. This board member also recalls how surprised he was in his earlier years on the board to discover that in this small district, individual schools did not work together. The way schools work has changed so that now when they share their current work and their future plans with board members, individual school efforts are parallel with one another. Today, principals gather at their annual retreat and use data and the district direction to think through the next steps for the upcoming year. Subsequently the vast majority of the district’s staff development dollars and ultimate support flow through school plans that are created among Learning Improvement Teams. The plans are approved and subsequent support provided, as long as they are in line with the district’s vision of focusing on student engagement. Another school board member who has served less than five years describes how trust operates between the Fife board and the school district staff:
21 That trust is a huge thing. And it’s not blind trust. I’ve been married for 30 some years and if I tell my wife that I’m going to do this, this, and this . . . sure she trusts me, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t ask questions, the kind of dialogue of questions we’ve talked about. Tell me why this is important to you and we’re going to spend the money on this. Sure she trusts me. She still asks the questions. And I do as well. Let’s make sure we’re on the same ground. This board member’s example demonstrates some key variables related to the Knowledge Development and Transmission System. First, in a learning organization, conversation, dialogue, and discussion are the primary means for developing and transmitting information. Second, the nature of that conversation is determined, among other things, by the respect and value people hold for one another, rather than rigid reference to positions. Finally, when the board member talks about “making sure we’re on the same ground,” he is actually referring to clarity about the Directional System. Discussions and decisions should constantly be referencing the Directional System in a learning organization. The veteran board member relayed a 2003 incident involving the school district’s attempt to be innovative in working with the Fife Education Association. During McCammon’s second full year as superintendent, teachers throughout the state were called to go to Olympia and picket on behalf of budget changes. The superintendent, with full support of the board and in collaboration with the teacher association, proposed an innovative approach intended to be a win-win for the district and the Fife Education Association. They offered to use district school buses to transport citizens from the community who would go to Olympia and picket on behalf of teachers. Not only would the community add a powerful dimension to the statewide demonstration, but this plan would permit teachers and kids to stay in school. As the plans unfolded, regulations would not permit the schools to use the district buses for private citizens to travel to
22 Olympia. Therefore, the district did have to shut the schools down, and, as it happened, citizens still accompanied teachers in picketing Olympia. The board member comments on this jettisoned innovation: “I think it showed our teachers, too, that you can go out and try something new and different, and if it doesn’t work out it’s no big deal. We’ll work around it and figure out something.” Another board member heartily agreed, commenting, “What it showed is that we were all willing to work together. It didn’t turn out exactly how anyone had thought was the best, but we came up with the best possible solution.” Moving from what the superintendent calls “random acts of staff development” to highly focused formal and informal processes for learning together, the members of the Fife school district utilize the many facets of their Knowledge Development and Transmission System to move the district toward realizing its vision for a desired future.
Recruitment and Induction System Raising Staff Up in the Fife Way Recruitment has to do with those processes by which schools (or any other organizations) identify new members and gain from those who are identified an agreement to participate in the life of the school. Induction has to do with those processes employed in the effort to ensure that recruits are aware of and become committed to the norms that guide behavior in the school. Induction also has to do with the way existing members are retrained and resocialized when systems are undergoing changes that redefine rules, roles, and relationships and when changes modify the normative order in substantial ways. (Schlechty, 2005) Fife principals’ comments exhibit a strong understanding of and commitment to providing new staff with quality experiences which will increase the possibility that they embrace the district’s norms. One Fife principal who was a teacher leader in the early days of district transformation work recognizes that induction has not always been
23 intentional in the school district. She describes the important role the superintendent plays today in articulating the district focus for new staff and in making time for extended conversations with new staff so that they hear directly from him what is most important in the school district. She also commented on how the district leaders’ annual retreat is a means for ongoing induction for experienced building and district office leaders to hear from the superintendent about district direction and to focus on its primary business. This particular principal is acutely aware of the important role she must play in leading induction efforts at her school, because of the large number of teachers new to her school—thirty percent of her teaching staff was new to that building in 2006-07. When new staff members are hired, they are expected to gain some understanding of student engagement and to have a desire to contribute to the district direction as it pursues becoming a learning organization. As the deputy superintendent says: “I think you want to work in Fife because you are given the freedom to do your job. And you are given the time and the incentives to collaborate with others to make sure the job is done and done right.” Once new members are hired, the combined efforts at the district level and the school building continue the induction process and provide principals with the naïve and often most telling, insights of novices. A Fife principal recounts how new teachers in his building help his school recognize discrepancies between what his school and district want the focus to be and what may be pockets of the less fully committed. New teachers will ask questions and seek support based on the district’s preachments, and he understands that their insights help him see what work still needs to be done. Central office leaders hired in the last few years provide insight into the unique characteristics of the Fife Schools in contrast to other districts they each served. For
24 example, one explains that Fife’s focused professional development is a major difference from other districts she knows. “I’ve never seen an emphasis at a superintendent level on professional development,” she says. “I may have seen an emphasis at the level of curriculum director, but it comes and goes. It may come one year and go away. It’s never stuck on for years.” She also says that although she has been integrally involved in implementing other reform models elsewhere, she has not experienced anywhere else the sustained commitment that she sees in Fife. Both of these district office leaders admit that they may lack a sense of just how comprehensive the changes in Fife have been, because they have not been in the district throughout the whole process. However, their experiences in Fife give them ample information to understand how different it is from many other districts. While Fife staff indicate that there is still work to be done on the Recruitment and Induction System, in recent years the district and to some extent individual schools have made important changes in how new staff “enters” the district. One experienced junior high school teacher believes new teachers are embracing the district’s direction: “The young teachers, those who have been with us less than four years, they’re on board and they’re doing these things. It’s kind of the Fife Way.” Not all teachers interviewed agreed that new teachers were totally enthusiastic about a focus on student engagement and on teacher as designer and leader, but they had no doubt that new teachers are now provided ample opportunity to understand and embrace what the district cares about most. That same junior high school teacher describes the contrast between his own induction and the processes new teachers currently experience: So we kind of raised each other (he and two other colleagues). So while that was good, it wasn’t necessarily good for the district or the building. Now the whole
25 idea is that there is a consciousness of raising all the teachers in a similar way, helping people, consciously putting them in groups—that’s a big difference. I came into, “Here are the grammar books. See you in June.” Today, we work much harder to raise teachers up in a Fife Way. So is the Fife Recruitment and Induction System everything it could be according to Fife leaders? It seems unlikely that it is. Is the Fife Recruitment and Induction System intentional? Absolutely. Does induction begin at the point of first contact with prospective employees? Are the processes involved in Recruitment and Induction shared between the central office and the school buildings? And, do district office, school, and teacher leaders all understand that a Recruitment and Induction System is about supporting new staff in becoming fully committed members of the learning organization? The answer to all these questions is a resounding yes. Similarly, staff seems well aware that over the past several years the way district leaders successfully gained the commitment of veteran employees to its new direction was primarily through invitation and significant support. As one veteran high school teacher puts it, “He (the superintendent) has never promised anything and not delivered.”
Boundary System From Outsiders to Full Members The systems that define who and what are inside the organization, and are therefore subject to the control of the organization, and who and what are outside the organization, and are therefore beyond the reach of the systems that make up the organization. (Schlechty, 2005) One of the strongest illustrations of Boundary System change in the Fife Schools is the way the school board’s perception of its role has changed. Frequently, in school districts driven by bureaucratic tendencies focused on power and control, the school board views itself as overseer and monitor. As such, school board members see themselves as operating outside the school district, looking in evaluatively at school
26 district operations. For Fife, this once was the role of the school board. The seventeen year veteran school board member provides a historical perspective about how the board’s role has changed. Pre-beginning of the journey, I saw [my role] as a caretaker, an overseer, a representative of the community. We were just there to bring problems to the administration. That was part of our role. Now, … I see myself more as a consultant to them. He goes on to describe how the board now sees itself as a partner in a dialogue focused on processes used, rather than on specific decisions made. “This has become a norm on our board—looking at the process.” Teachers talk about the board as partners in the change process. Teachers mention that board members go to conferences, regularly hear from teachers and students about schoolwork and, most recently, sit in on WOW Academies. When board members participate in learning alongside teachers and other district leaders, they are entering into a different role than that of executives exercising oversight. And as learners alongside district employees, they have crossed the boundary of the organization and are now insiders rather than outsiders looking at and judging the insiders. A board member describes the role he now plays in assisting parents and other community members to understand role changes. He talks about explaining what board members do and don’t do, encouraging conversations between disgruntled parents and school staff. He goes on to say, “…we are becoming community leaders. Our board is not made up of people who are out there as public speakers. We’re plain folk types. That’s the way we deal . . . on a one-to-one level.” He goes on to explain that in order for board members to have useful one-on-one conversations they must really understand the district’s change efforts. For example, board members have had opportunities to attend WOW Academies, to hear about teachers’ collaborative efforts, and to learn about
27 student perceptions of their work. Such experiences give board members the understanding they need to talk to their neighbors and the larger community on behalf of the district’s work. The current school board president who came on the board five years ago when changes were well underway recalls that the relationship between the school district and the community seemed quite healthy and constructive at that time. However, he, too, originally thought he would be serving the district by providing oversight of the operations of the schools—not because they were going in a bad direction but because that had been the board’s role. He describes what his role is today: I realize we play a much larger role as a support to the beliefs of the superintendent, central staff and teachers . . . to what their vision is. We should play more of a support role. And, obviously, you can’t support something you don’t believe in, so we’ve gone through processes to gain knowledge. He describes the important work of the board in enlisting the community to join in leadership with the school district. This board member’s commitment to the community and to the school district, which he says is the heart of the community, has not changed. What has changed dramatically over the past five years, as he describes it, is how he views the way he can contribute as a board member. For his work today as a part of the board he must view himself as an insider, a full member of the school district. A second major indicator of Boundary System changes in the Fife Schools relates to the nature of student membership in the organization. Frequently, school districts treat students as problems to be fixed; raw material to be acted upon. In listening to Fife teachers and other district leaders, it becomes clear that students are seen as customers and potential partners in learning, which indicates a pretty rare point of view in public education. However, teachers did not automatically embrace this view of students. A
28 teacher of 27 years remembers her own reaction when it was first suggested that teachers think about their students as customers. She recalls thinking, “I’m in charge here. Now wait a minute.” Today her view is totally different: I teach kindergarten. It’s hard to explain, but I never even thought that they’d have an opinion about the teaching. They’re only five. But they do. They have an opinion about what’s going on in the classroom. And then if you open that up to them, then they even have more. I have never enjoyed teaching so much. I loved teaching before, but now I really love it because the kids are so wonderful. They’re really involved. Another elementary teacher contends that in thinking back to the year 2000, it was very rare in Fife to find anyone who asked their students about the work provided them. She suggests that now it is hard to find a building where questions about the quality of the work provided them are not asked of students. Evidence of listening to students is found throughout Fife’s schools; the district has created a special vehicle for sharing teacher and student work known as Walls that Teach. Each building displays student work accompanied by a teacher-provided explanation of the learning focus of that work, some of the thinking involved in the teacher design of the work (often this includes the Design Qualities used and the reasons for those specific Design Qualities), and student remarks indicating what they thought about the work. The superintendent explains that originally Walls that Teach was meant as a way of drawing parents into the district’s efforts. He concludes, however, that this public sharing of work has actually fueled teacher collaboration. To an outside observer, Walls that Teach presents clear evidence that student voice lives in the schools of Fife. Within the Fife School District, school board members see themselves as genuine members of the organization and students are also viewed as such. Unlike highly bureaucratic school districts where maintaining boundaries between the district
29 employees and all others saps the time and attention of the superintendent and other leaders, Fife has exerted serious effort to focus less on who is not a member and more on redefining the nature of membership—specifically for the school board and students—in keeping with its core values, its primary business, and its vision of a desired future.
Evaluation System Invitation to Growth and Reflection The systems through which measures of merit and worth are assigned, status is determined, honor is bestowed, and the method and timing of negative sanctions are set. (Schlechty, 2005) Starting with the superintendent, there is an understanding in the Fife Schools that enlisting staff involvement and commitment in the change effort could never be mandated. Both the superintendent who initiated the work and the current superintendent understood well that what the district wants is staff engagement, thus the district puts a great deal of effort into creating inviting experiences for volunteers. Concurrently, district leaders understand that the Evaluation System is not the means by which the district achieves change in attitude, practice, and commitment. For several years, teachers in the district have had the option of participating in either a conventional personnel evaluation process with the principal sitting in the back of the room noting the teacher performance, or instead participating in the formative evaluation, which was always more reflective and teacher-driven. In another instance of district creativity, several years ago Fife revised the formative process, embedding Standard-Bearer language, the Classroom Standards, and the concept of the teacher as leader and designer. Teachers still may choose between the two options—they can pursue a conventional evaluation or the latest iteration of the formative process—and the
30 choices they are making indicate their growing commitment. The superintendent says, “The neat thing is that without us pushing it, more and more teachers say every year that they’d rather use the reflective piece which includes the Classroom Standards to identify a couple of things they need to work on. That’s a celebration.” First, the way that the district revised its reflective process, as well as the numbers of teachers choosing that process, clearly illustrate what it means to have an organization use its Directional System to make changes in the Evaluation System. Regrettably, too often districts embark on change efforts with leaders attempting to use the Evaluation System as a “big stick” to get staff to go along with a new direction. Such efforts tend to result in compliance at best and may result in rebellion and sabotage of district change efforts. Additionally, when school board members say they may initiate dialogue about why some action or decision is recommended, they are talking about opening dialogue about whether or not the recommendations are congruent with the values of the district, and how any action taken will support those values. And each time substantive discussion occurs about what the district values, the Directional System is accessed and strengthened, and potential actions are evaluated in light of the district’s purpose and beliefs. In the course of a group interview with Fife principals, it was noted that throughout their responses to a series of reasonably open-ended questions about the district, they never once brought up the issue of state-required testing. On the one hand, this seemed particularly interesting, because many districts maintain that the current testfrenzied environment serves as a deterrent to change efforts. Additionally, since Fife’s test scores have always been reasonably good, and have in the last several years shown
31 marked gains, the principals might have used this opportunity to tout those gains. When it was noted that they had been energetically talking about their work without once mentioning testing, they readily explained its absence thus far in the conversation. They described testing as some of the information they draw on to pursue what is truly important in the district—designing engaging work for students. Clearly they were not mouthing platitudes when they gave their explanation. One principal explained it well when he said, “We have a framework to respond to learning needs based on the test information.” While many who work outside school districts today might maintain that tests are one source of information about learning, far too few public educators today say those words and mean them. One of the three elementary principals went on to explain that the design of work is based in part on test results, but also based on classroom assessment and assessment of engagement. The high school principal underscored that the classroom standards are tools to gain more information that should inform teachers’ design work. He notes that more teachers than ever are kid-focused not test-focused. He describes the ways the high school has gone about making assessing student engagement a regular part of the way the high school faculty works. “We pay attention to student voice.” In an interview with the superintendent he says: The biggest conversation we’re having now at retreat is that we have to be very clear about what the data say and where we need to go. I’m certainly not just talking about the WASL (Washington Assessment of Student Learning). We talk about what teachers are seeing in classrooms; what we see as weaknesses in the curriculum; where our kids tell us they’re not engaged. I tell our staff continually that if our students are struggling with certain concepts then we are morally and professionally obligated to do one of two things: if the curriculum is not aligned then we must align it, and if we determine that it is aligned and our students are still struggling with a concept then we must redesign the work to make it more engaging and meaningful for our learners.
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The principals’ comments about how student experiences are evaluated (made in an interview without the superintendent present) coincide with the superintendent’s point of view. As with the personnel appraisal dimension of the Evaluation System, the critical functions of determining approach, allocating resources, or discontinuing efforts which are also a part of the Evaluation System are driven by what the district consistently says is at the heart of the school district’s work.
Power and Authority System Using Influence and Providing Support The systems that legitimize the use of sanctions, define the proper exercise of power, and determine status relationships (Schlechty, 2005) In the Fife Schools, examples of how the Power and Authority System now operates, as well as some insight into how it has changed over the last decade, arise primarily through discussion and description of roles and relationships. District office leaders provide ample discussion of how Fife is different from other districts, and possibly what accounts at least in part for its success in transforming itself. One leader suggests that there is less kingdom-building in Fife than in most other school districts. She describes kingdom-building as grabbing and hoarding resources, competing with other leaders, and, through such actions, effectively bringing to a halt much good work. She describes McCammon as a superintendent who is intolerant of kingdom-building. Another district office leader describes her role: “I remove barriers so others can concentrate on student engagement.” Relationships in Fife are expected to be constructive and to support the primary work.
33 The three elementary principals agree that their healthy relationship as colleagues continues to deepen. During the 2006–07 school year they initiated a development activity that involved having their staffs come together to learn more about one of their schools, to view the Walls that Teach in one of the buildings, and to have cross-school faculty conversations. This was a first in that it was principal-initiated, cross-school development work. In general, principals talk about one another’s schools and one another’s faculty and staff as sources for learning rather as competitors. Principals were especially pleased that some of the team proposals for the WOW Academies involved cross-school teams. Another district leader also pointed out how special education teachers, who did not always see themselves as fully integrated into the change efforts, were part of these cross-school teams. In the first few years of Fife’s transformation work, the district office convened a District Development Team led by district office staff, and this group generated most of the change efforts. Today, as is evident in his 2006 opening convocation, the superintendent exercises his moral authority, sets the course and celebrates progress along the journey, while expecting principals with teams in their schools to determine the specific routes to pursue the direction. Buildings have development funds to be used in support of their work. For the first time, during the 2007–08 school year the district will provide a Working on the Work Coordinator to serve all buildings, especially in the design of student work and in the coaching process related to work design. That person brings expertise and experience in Coaching for Design and will assist school staff in bringing more of the design work to the building level. The superintendent views his role
34 and the role of other district leaders as doing whatever is necessary and possible to assist principals in leading their buildings. Teachers are very much aware of how the role of principal has changed. One experienced secondary teacher says of his principal: “He’s a welcome presence in the classroom, and I solicit his advice. I do that with the assistant principal and the counselor as well. I think there’s a change in their attitudes about their job. We’re doing it together.” Teachers talk about the mutual respect between teachers and principals, which is vastly different from the status-laden roles of many school districts where teachers claim principals don’t understand or appreciate their work. An elementary teacher captures the nature of that change when she says, “Now it feels like there’s a team. When I first came it was us/them. Now it feels more like we. People still have distinct roles, but it feels more like a team.” If an organization has no clarity about beliefs to guide it or about a preferred future toward which everyone should work, then individuals who control budgets or who are perceived to have greater importance can unfortunately wield their influence based on the size of their budgets or the specifics of their position. In an organization that has established clarity about beliefs and overarching purpose, status and influence stem from how one contributes to the organization’s purpose whether that someone happens to be a relatively novice teacher or a veteran principal. The Power and Authority System in Fife operates well guided by the district compass, its Directional System. It should come as no surprise to public educators that the kind of customized systems change that Fife made does not come quickly or easily. In fact, the superintendent identifies Year Three as a crucial year; he says that it took until Year
35 Three to establish well—with increased trust and clarity of purpose—the district’s core business, the business of providing all students engaging work. As one of the secondary teachers says about current practice in Fife: “Instead of just throwing information out to kids and hoping some of it will land on them, now you’re watching what they’re doing and seeing if they are engaged. We’re going to do better; we’ll try something different.” And for the Fife Schools and, specifically, for the children they serve, that has made all the difference.
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TRANSFORMING ROLES AND RELATIONSHIPS
One District’s Choice to Pursue Greatness Today, Orange Schools’ values, its commitments to students and staff, its sense of purpose and focus, as well as the relationships between teachers and principals, between students and the adults in the district, between staff and the school board, and between the superintendent and other leaders across the district, are markedly different than what they were in 1997. The Schlechty Center tells the story of this northeastern Ohio school district’s transformation in this case study.
Transforming Roles and Relationships: One District’s Choice to Pursue Greatness Greatness is not a function of circumstance. Greatness, it turns out, is largely a matter of conscious choice, and discipline. Jim Collins, 2005 Change in School District Culture While teacher associations and other labor unions in school districts are too often cited as stumbling blocks to educational reform and, more often, accused of being at the root of education’s problems, one school district in northeastern Ohio negotiated and settled three contracts in a short time and with unprecedented goodwill during the spring and early summer of 2005. Not only were the negotiations free of posturing and accusations, the discussions resulted in unprecedented opportunities for union and association members to assume leadership in creating a public school district focused on the needs and interests of children and responsive as well to the needs and interests of all employees. The story of changing roles and relationships in the Orange Schools is demonstrated in the 2005 negotiations and resulting contracts, but the transformation itself has been taking place since 1997. Tom Bonda, current school board president, Cindy Eickhoff, school board member, and Cathy Keith, former school board member, all refer to the district change as an evolution. Bonda even says he recalls no single defining event marking changed relationships in the Orange Schools; rather, he refers to the change process as a long-term one with no sharp turns. Likewise, in keeping with the recollections of a multitude of Orange informants, the 2005 negotiations should be viewed within a multi-year context of organizational change undertaken by the Orange leadership. The spirit and style of the 2005 negotiations were possible because of a collaborative environment, changes in how district leaders and union leaders view themselves and one another, and a range of district efforts undertaken to change its culture since 1997. Today, the Orange Schools’ values, its commitments to students and staff, its sense of purpose and focus, as well as the relationships between teachers and principals,
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between students and the adults in the district, between staff and the school board, and between the superintendent and other leaders across the district are markedly different than what they were in 1997. Dennis Hansen, the Orange Teachers Association (OTA) President, says that the Association used to think of itself as the “guardian of teachers’ rights” and “guardian of the contract.” In the 2005 contract negotiations, the OTA sought, in partnership with the school district, what the OTA leadership refers to as “what would be in the best interest of the school district.” Likewise, Jim Ventura, President of the Local Ohio Association of Public School Employees (OAPSE), describes the changed relationship between the school district and his union when he describes the membership’s current point of view: “Their service is valued; they want to make that service better for the children; they are not treated as servants.” Likewise, Marcy Fludine, President of the Clerical and Educational Support Services Association (CESSA) Local, explained to the district administrators during the negotiation process that her membership— teacher assistants, lunchroom managers and workers, and others—did not yet feel valued within the district. She reports being hopeful about the district’s current willingness to demonstrate its respect for all employees; since negotiations concluded, Fludine has formally been included in the major district leadership vehicle known as Key Leaders, a group convened by the superintendent regularly to think about the future of the school district. In November, Fludine was invited for the first time to accompany some of the other district Key Leaders to a conference in Boston. Phil Dickinson, Director of Business for the Orange Schools, described the changed atmosphere surrounding the 2005 negotiations: I was used to coming out of negotiations and having to wear a bulletproof vest for about 6 months. We didn’t lose it this time. We didn’t get into conflicts. We didn’t take a step backwards. It’s really the leadership of the unions that have kept our work moving. It shows they are really key leaders. So what has contributed to this school district’s internally-driven reform efforts? What made this school district choose to hold a mirror up to itself, to invest hours in organizational and © SCHLECHTY CENTER FOR LEADERSHIP IN SCHOOL REFORM, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. TRANS.
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staff development, to put conflicts and shortcomings on the table in order to address them? How did a school district with high test scores, satisfied parents, and successful graduates arrive at making changes in the power relationships and the labor relations for all role groups?
The Role of Executive Leadership To understand what contributed to changes in the school district’s culture requires exploring the Orange Schools as Superintendent Daniel Lukich came to know the district in 1997. Lukich joined the district for some very specific reasons. As an experienced superintendent who had served previously in Ohio and more recently in Michigan, he was drawn to Orange because it was “someplace very good.” Being that “someplace very good,” however, was not all that Lukich sought. He sought a school district that had the potential—the readiness—to pursue deep, significant organizational change. In Michigan, Lukich had been exposed for the first time to the ideas of W. Edwards Deming, management thinker, writer, and innovator. Deming believed that: ... people should have joy in their work, that the system within which they work should be designed to make this possible ... that the system is management’s responsibility ... . www.deming.org Lukich was drawn to Deming’s emphasis on building systems that support and enhance quality. Lukich also first heard educational thinker and writer Phillip Schlechty’s ideas in Michigan in the early 1990s. He found that Schlechty’s message about the urgent need to change schools through a systems approach resonated with his own feelings and beliefs as a school superintendent. Schlechty maintains: I am persuaded, in fact, that only through revitalizing and redirecting the action of district-level operations can the kind of widespread and radical change that must occur become possible. Schlechty, 1997, p. 78 Lukich was interested in leading a district that was poised to reinvent itself and that would be willing to pursue a systems approach, rather than the piecemeal, programmatic approaches that litter the field of educational reform. Most importantly, Lukich sensed in the Orange school board
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a willingness to pursue a course of change that would be long-lasting, would outlive specific leaders, and would demonstrate to other districts what could be done to make a good district a great one. Although Lukich eventually opened the door to rigorous organizational self-examination and invited others throughout the organization to seek new ways for the district to create its future, that work did not begin simultaneously with his arrival. Making changes in district office leadership and addressing critically outdated facilities were first on his agenda. The personnel changes and the facilities improvement efforts provided, in his view, foundations for the organizational culture changes ahead.
Confronting the Brutal Facts In his 2001 book, Good to Great, Jim Collins presents a compelling analysis of what it takes for good companies to become great, including the willingness to “confront the brutal facts.” Collins suggests that when leadership makes it possible for people to hold a mirror up to the organization without fear and without potential reprisal, then such an organization stands a much better chance of achieving greatness. Yes, leadership is about vision. But leadership is equally about creating a climate where the truth is heard and the brutal facts confronted. There’s a huge difference between the opportunity to “have your say” and the opportunity to be heard. The good-to-great leaders understood this distinction, creating a culture wherein people had a tremendous opportunity to be heard and, ultimately, for the truth to be heard. Collins, 2001, p. 74. The Orange Schools, with an enrollment of 2,300 students, serves 8 municipalities: Hunting Valley, Orange Village, Pepper Pike, Woodmere, Moreland Hills, and portions of Bedford Heights, Solon, and Warrensville Heights. Although parts of its enrollment area reflect all the signs of suburban affluence—upscale businesses and restaurants and well-appointed homes—the district is growing in its diversity, both racial/ethnic and socioeconomic. Given its many indicators
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of success, the district might have followed the all too common practice of public schools who feel they are victims of public opinion: Let others throw stones at us and identify our shortcomings, but we will tout our strengths and good works, because no one else will. The Orange Schools had and still have much to tout, including exceptional test scores, healthy parental and community support, college-bound graduates, and admirable staff. So why did they not simply stay the course, continue their good work, and bask in the satisfaction of being a high-performing school district? Today, district leaders in all role groups would say that all was not well, despite the high test scores. In the view of many district leaders—particularly teacher association leaders, school board members, and the other unions’ leadership—there was much evidence in the late 1990s that the school district had no common direction, no clear, strong focus on students, and little trust in the relationships between and among teachers, district leaders, the school board, and the association and union leaders. If the district had not eventually confronted the massive distrust within the organization, lack of open communication between the board and the rest of the school district, and the stereotypical antagonistic posturing between the unions and the school administration, the cultural change so dramatically illustrated by the 2005 contract negotiations would never have happened. And the fact that in this era of external accountability when school districts can choose to merely comply with state and federal goals, the Orange Schools could have simply kept on “being good.” Before the Orange staff could confront the brutal facts about its dysfunctional relationships, however, they had to experience a series of unsatisfactory efforts at collaborative work. Teachers, support staff, and district administration recall attempts by staff in 1998 to address two issues: mold problems at one of the school buildings, and, subsequently, plans for a new school. Gatherings to deal with those issues stand today as concrete examples of just how dysfunctional the school district was. Individuals and representatives of groups in the district were inexperienced at talking together constructively, let alone working together to solve problems. The OTA leadership remembers feeling as though they were being blamed for the mold problems, simply because © SCHLECHTY CENTER FOR LEADERSHIP IN SCHOOL REFORM, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. TRANS.
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they had brought the issue to the table. Director of Business Services Phil Dickinson, newly hired into his position, found himself needing to tell teachers and others that he understood if they did not immediately trust him. He asked that they watch how he operated and, subsequently, judge him based on the extent to which he demonstrated his belief that those affected by a problem were in the best position to respond to the problem. Cindy Eickhoff suggests that it had definitely not been a school district practice to involve employees in such problem-solving processes: If there was ever an example of communication not working, that would be it. We had people dealing with a problem they didn’t understand. Getting the right people in the right chairs has been very important. Communication was totally broken. Lukich remembers that such meetings involved much sparring between and among people who carried baggage that was often unrelated to the issue at hand. And OTA President Hansen suggests that hostility and frustration related to addressing the mold problems at the old elementary school became the problem that “broke the camel’s back.” Everyone recognized that they were tired of the dysfunction, of the way they had done things: “We wanted to do things differently, make things better.” When in 1998 the community passed a bond issue that made it possible to build a new elementary school and redesign the existing middle school, an Education Specifications (Ed Specs) Group was formed to imagine possibilities for the new facilities. Phil Dickinson remembers the work of the group as a turning point: “… Ed Specs was an experience of trying to work together, a breakthrough experience to work with parents and varied municipalities. It became a source of hope.” He recalls the group thinking about science rooms, a multi-use building, and the layout of the elementary school. He also recalls how the group managed to work together, in stark contrast to how the district group confronting the mold problem had not worked effectively together. It should be noted, however, that some district leaders recall that those around the table of the Ed Specs Group were not yet a focused group, thinking and deliberating on behalf of the district’s
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beliefs and direction. They spoke from their wants and needs as individuals, not as part of a school district. Looking back on the Ed Specs’ work, district leaders today agree that it represented new possibilities for the future. Though the group lacked organizational direction and trust across role groups and buildings, its very existence paved the way for future work which would ultimately create district clarity about purpose and direction while establishing collaborative processes as part of what the district now refers to as “The Color of Orange.” Finally, Lukich cites the 2000 negotiations with the teacher association as a last dramatic example of hostile discussions, accusations, and mistrust that would conclude an era in which teachers and administrators viewed one another as natural antagonists and during which the school board and teachers operated at cross-purposes. Though the contract was settled, the school district had not yet “won” as a district; only the disparate groups—teachers, administrators, school board—could claim respective wins and losses in the usual war.
Pursuing Systemic Change: Becoming a Standard-Bearer School District In the early days of the Lukich tenure, the school district made some preliminary connections with the work of the Schlechty Center for Leadership in School Reform, based in Louisville, Kentucky. The Ohio Council of Academic Excellence had contracted with the Schlechty Center to do a series of workshops focused on what the Center proposes should be the core business of schools: providing all students with engaging work. Superintendent Lukich, the three principals, Director of Educational Programs Nancy Wingenbach, and several teachers attended workshops in Columbus, Ohio, where they first met Schlechty Center Senior Associate Judy Hummel and Schlechty Center President George Thompson. These district leaders were sufficiently impressed with the ideas presented in the workshops that they decided to invite Founder and CEO Phil Schlechty to come to the district to speak to the entire staff. That particular early experience with the Schlechty Center is remembered by various staff members as a less than auspicious occasion. Teachers and principals recall a snowy professional © SCHLECHTY CENTER FOR LEADERSHIP IN SCHOOL REFORM, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. TRANS.
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development day in 1999 when teachers were asked to report to school to hear a speaker, despite bad weather and cancellation of school for students. Not only were teachers resentful of being part of a command performance by some guru from Kentucky, but some of them felt uninformed as to why he was there or what his message might contribute to them or the district. Dave Tirpak, Brady Middle School teacher, recalls that all but a small group of the faculty resisted Schlechty’s message about the importance of focusing on student engagement—and how such a focus would require significant school and district change. Tirpak remembers conversations with other teachers to the effect that the speaker must not have known anything about Orange. Support staff, who were also in attendance, had little idea of what value the speaker’s ideas might have for them. Superintendent Lukich could have decided then and there, given the initial teacher response, to forget about student engagement and the accompanying system changes required by focusing on engagement. Fortunately for the district, he did not. Instead he took another approach. He invited teachers, principals, and district office staff to think together about what it would take for the district to be open enough to hear and consider Schlechty’s message. From the group’s wisdom emerged the understanding that the OTA could be instrumental in leading the initiative; over the next two years all exploration of work with the Schlechty Center was undertaken by cross-role groups led by the superintendent but always including the formal leadership of the OTA. Over time this collaborative approach would grow into the Key Leaders group, including the involvement of the two other unions’ leadership, school board members, the principals, and district office leaders. The superintendent now relies on this group to think together with him about district strategy. Recalling how the superintendent would invite various district leaders to consider new approaches and new ideas, Brady Middle School Principal Steve Hegner says: Dan invited a group of us to go to that first conference ... and asked us what we thought. And he’s done that with other initiatives, topics, and speakers. It wasn’t like “this is what we’re going to do.” He wanted to know what we thought this would mean for Orange. Several such experiences blossomed into what staff throughout the district recognize and value: a culture of collaboration. 8
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In 2001, the school district entered into a formal partnership with the Schlechty Center to pursue its reform work as a member of a network of like-minded districts from across the country convened by the Schlechty Center, the Standard-Bearer School District Network. Member districts used the Schlechty Center’s District Standards both to assess strengths and to guide developmental work. Because these district standards are designed to measure organizational capacity, rather than individual performance, they provided an appropriate vehicle around which former district antagonists might rally.
Expanding Collaborative Efforts The assessment of capacity required Orange staff to ask themselves hard questions about evidence of commitment to a central focus on students and student engagement, by looking at school district policies, procedures, programs, and practices. The assessment became for the Orange Schools a powerful way to confront the brutal facts about district incapacity to pursue a new vision of schooling. As recalled by various staff members, the assessment process became a hallmark of new collaborative work. One of the first district assessment teams illuminated the school district’s lack of articulated beliefs and shared vision for a desired future—and its reliance on bureaucratic management structures and processes. One strategy for fostering coordination of effort requires a system of rationalized rules and procedures combined with a formal set of rewards and sanctions that support compliance with expectations. A second strategy for fostering coordinated effort requires the development of shared beliefs, commitments, and values that have become sufficiently internalized by group members that they are routinely applied to almost all decisions, combined with heavy reliance on informal control and self-control as the primary mechanisms for enforcement. Schlechty, 2005, p. 157 At that time, the three contracts in the Orange Schools provided coordination by rationalized rules and procedures: contract provisions spelled out who did what for how long, and under what circumstances.
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Jim Ventura describes the nature of the former bureaucratic relationships: In the self-evaluation process I realized that the only place that Orange had any structure to our organization was in the labor contracts themselves. Besides the big issues of economics and health care, there were all the rules of daily operations of the school system. Because of the legal strength of a negotiated agreement in Ohio these rules of operations superceded the law as well as any school board policy. This caused a lot of conflict between administration, management, and labor. When management wanted to operate in what they believed was an efficient manner, the contract almost all the time dictated different terms and conditions. These terms and conditions were usually frozen in place for three to four years. Details of expectations, rewards, and punishments were spelled out with bureaucratic precision, along with detailed descriptions of procedures to be followed to obtain redress if either party— administration or employee—fell down in the expectations. The 2005 contracts still include some of the typical language spelling out rules, roles, and relationships, but the contracts also include atypical provisions leaving some of the daily operations and processes “open-ended,” so that the membership might participate on committees and work groups to actually determine the rules and procedures. The work today of the Orange Schools is coordinated less by regulation and bureaucratic procedures than by widespread collaboration and commitment to an organizational direction. So how did the Orange Schools use their district assessment to develop beliefs and articulate vision? Although not a teacher, Jim Ventura served on both the assessment team and the development team that subsequently created district beliefs for review and adoption. Ventura notes: “After the first self-evaluation process the teacher union leadership quickly started to develop new beliefs and core values. I was part of some of this work.” Furthermore, he credits his experience in the assessment and development process with giving him a range of ideas that he uses today in his work with his membership. Former school board member Cathy Keith remembers this process, specifically, as fundamental to making the school district the kind of place it is today. Nancy Wingenbach characterizes what happened relative to clarifying values and beliefs as a “…central focus on kids. If we keep that focus, we can do just about anything.” © SCHLECHTY CENTER FOR LEADERSHIP IN SCHOOL REFORM, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. TRANS.
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To clarify a district focus, various role groups from across the district revised existing beliefs and gave voice to a new set of beliefs and a sense of the district’s future. What beliefs and vision emerged from this process, and how do they now reframe district work and relationships?
Beliefs We believe that, in order to meet the needs of all students: • The core business of the Orange Schools is to make learning valuable, satisfying and challenging for all students. • All students will learn when engaged in and enthusiastic about their work. • The learning environment must be positive, supportive, nurturing and safe. • All students need adult advocates. • All individuals must have a commitment to quality in the services they provide to students and to each other. • Collaboration among the school district, home and community is vital to the success of all students. Vision Orange Schools will set the standard as an academically excellent educational environment where our students and community come to be authentically engaged in their work.
Beliefs Drive Collaborative Action Once created and published, such statements sometimes become perfunctory prefaces to district documents that gather dust on office shelves. To the contrary, evidence suggests that the Orange statements became living beliefs propelling action, specifically a series of organizational development efforts over the next several years. Highlights from some of these organizational development efforts include the following: •
Teacher Academies—development opportunities designed by and for teachers, led by Orange teacher leaders;
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Teacher Appraisal Groups (TAG)—a process designed over the course of two
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years by Orange teachers and administrators as an alternative teacher appraisal process; •
Goals Process—a means to encourage teachers to develop professional career and teaching practice goals that are based on the Standard-Bearer Design Qualities during each stage of their careers. (This process provides opportunities for intellectual discussion, inquiry learning and research about an area of interest and need identified by teachers.)
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Recruitment and Induction process—a system designed by teachers and administrators to ensure staff commitment to district values and direction;
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Learning Communities—efforts within each building to address specific needs of students;
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Interest-Based Bargaining—an approach used for the 2005 negotiations.
Each of these processes, structures, or subsystems is illustrative of district design work based on beliefs and fashioned collaboratively by district staff. The intentional design of collaborative groups in the school district plays an important role in the cultural shift. Dan Hanstein, Orange High School principal, Steve Hegner, Brady Middle School principal, and Mark Haag, Moreland Hills Elementary principal, are members of the Key Leaders group. While Hanstein has been working with staff in his school about changing how time is used for students and staff during the school day, he has also served on district teams refining how results are defined and identified for the district as a whole. Hegner and Haag were key members of teams that redesigned the district’s Evaluation System and that created a Recruitment and Induction System—at the same time that they each led work in their buildings to create processes for teachers to focus on engagement and to address the needs of an increasingly diverse student body. In the Orange Schools, principals who serve both a school and the district as a whole will be key contributors to the district’s future.
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By intentionally redefining the roles of all staff, Orange has established new and productive relationships between and among people, thus making it possible to have a collaborative culture that puts students and the work provided them at the center of the organization. As Nancy Wingenbach puts it: As we work to continuously improve our capacity to promote student learning, there has been a shift in focus. Previously, we paid attention to “teaching,” and now, as a result of our understanding of our “real work,” our attention is on “learning.” A significant aspect of that shift is the need to assess student progress, build in interventions, and actively design instructional strategies and lessons that engage our students in learning. The district leadership has marshaled the energy and imagination of a host of its employees, without restricting anyone because of role group, to take on the demanding and sometimes painful work of self-examination and, subsequently, the design work of creating new processes, structures, and subsystems.
Teacher Collaboration This story of cultural change would not be complete without highlighting what the leadership of the two non-teacher unions have to say about the role of teacher leadership in contributing to the changes they have seen between their unions and the district. Both OAPSE and CESSA leaders believe that the teachers led the way for them and their organizations to become full members in the school district. Dennis Hansen identifies the Teacher Academies begun in 2001–02 as a benchmark for changes in teacher and administrator relationships. The Academies made it possible for teachers to have new professional experiences working with one another—and to lead the design of that work. ... it is becoming clear that the way an organization deals with change is determined in large part by the systems devised to support the creation, importation, and diffusion of knowledge within the organization, as well as by the way knowledge is shared between the organization and the larger environment. Schlechty, 2005, p. 88
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Lukich understood that if student engagement were to become the centerpiece of district work, more than a handful of district employees would need to know what student engagement could mean for the district. Nancy Wingenbach assumed lead responsibility for rethinking how teachers might learn about student engagement—and how that knowledge might enhance their work. Wingenbach began work with the Schlechty Center’s Judy Hummel to consider a new approach to teacher learning. They sought to design a vehicle for teacher learning that would reflect a specific moral norm—that teachers, like students, should be treated as volunteers in learning processes; that their needs and interests should be taken into account. Wingenbach and Hummel sought to create experiences for teachers that would be invitational and that would capture their attention and commitment. Historically Orange had provided its teachers staff development experiences focused on classroom management, differentiated instruction, and other such topics, but the sessions were typically focused on teacher performance rather than on student needs and interests. Dave Tirpak, who has been a building representative for the OTA throughout the change process, says, “We didn’t really focus on the students. We took them for granted. They did well. Now we focus on students and on their engagement.” Wingenbach was determined to make what would become the Teacher Academies intellectually stimulating and professionally meaningful and useful, so that they would result in growing interest and commitment to student engagement throughout the district. The Academies would be a departure from conventional professional development experiences: The fact remains, however, that in spite of serious efforts at improvement, staff development and continuing education offered by schools and in the context of schools is even now too often pallid and intellectually vacuous. Rather than being viewed by teachers as a learning opportunity to be embraced, staff development is a requirement to be endured. Schlechty, 2005, p. 98 Initially, Hummel and Wingenbach designed a two-day experience for teachers which would give them an introduction to the Schlechty Center’s Working on the Work framework,
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which focuses on student engagement and design qualities that teachers might use to increase engagement. As part of the two-day experience, teachers worked together to create lessons or units that they could take back to their classrooms and use. They also had an opportunity to use a structured process to look at student work, draw inferences about student engagement, and analyze the work provided to students for evidence of qualities that were likely to engage them. The Teacher Academies became a vehicle for stimulating, productive collaborative work by teachers. At the conclusion of the first two-day Academy, Wingenbach did something very simple and straightforward that was to become very significant: She asked the first group if they thought other teachers should have a similar opportunity to learn together and design work together. They clearly recommended that the district should provide other teachers such an opportunity, and so the district scheduled additional sessions. The simple practice of seeking teachers’ ideas and recommendations demonstrated what would become common practice. Teachers would come to feel respected and valued; the former era associated with cantankerous discussions about a moldy building and hostile contract negotiations was passing. Dave Tirpak comments as well that, whereas teachers had previously been highly competitive with one another, trying to outdo one another in terms of making a “classroom splash,” they now talk with pride about their role in facilitating an Academy, or about the work they designed as a part of an Academy. Steve Hegner recalls a proposal drafted by a Brady Middle School teacher leader after the early Teacher Academies. The proposal outlined what would become Brady’s Teacher Lead Team, a vehicle for teachers to work with the principal in leading building initiatives. After word spread to the elementary and high schools, each level created their distinct version of this vehicle, which has become a way for teachers to identify issues unique to the building and address them collaboratively with the principals. Hegner attributes the creation and evolution of the Teacher Lead Team to the common ground teachers found as a part of the Teacher Academies.
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Unfreezing the System: Redesigning Power and Authority Relationships Those in roles of authority in learning organizations rely much less on the power which comes from their positions than on human relationships and influence guided by an organization’s values. What Wingenbach initiated from an administrative position became, eventually, the property of the teachers themselves. Not so long ago, power and authority relationships in Orange inhibited the school district from making students its focus; the system was frozen into separate role groups, each with disparate interests: school board, superintendent and district office, principals, teachers, and support staff. Cheryl McDonald, OTA Secretary, identifies the way the Teacher Academies utilized teacher leaders to facilitate sessions as a critical shift in the way the district did business: “It was so powerful to have our own teachers leading the Academies.” When teachers facilitate sessions or lead other teachers there is a much stronger possibility of influence on teaching and learning than if strangers or supervisors act as experts. Furthermore, two district decisions related to Teacher Academies reflect a change in power and authority relationships: not only were teachers asked to lead the sessions, but also participants were asked to volunteer. This invitation to learn together in the Teacher Academies continues as part of district practice today. The district created a context very different from the typical school bureaucracy, in which teachers are mandated to attend certain staff training sessions, begrudgingly put in their seat time, and leave with little or no change in their thinking—and little sense that the district respects them. When Orange Key Leaders reflect on changes they believe are significant in the Orange Schools, Steve Hegner shares how the organization has opened the possibility for many to gain full membership and to assume leadership: We used to have star teachers who had influence, were recognized, invited to conferences—and then there was everyone else. Since Standard-Bearer, anyone who works hard on behalf of the district can contribute. Participation is not based just on seniority and an inner circle. A call is put out and folks can choose to answer. I think of all the different teachers, including new ones, who have been to conferences. It’s not a tenure thing. People are not “chosen.” The extent of your involvement is up to you. © SCHLECHTY CENTER FOR LEADERSHIP IN SCHOOL REFORM, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. TRANS.
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Bob Coyne, former OTA president, recalls how little respect administrators formerly showed him as a high school teacher. In fact, Coyne embraced a legacy of hardball union tactics learned from his police officer and union negotiator father, because he saw no other way to get the attention of the administration around important issues of teaching and learning. Coyne contrasts former days with his current relationship with Superintendent Lukich: “We went from slamming the door on each other to patting one another on the back.” A turning point in Coyne’s thinking about what might be possible between administration, school boards, and association leadership occurred in the spring of 2002 at a Schlechty Center Key Leaders Conference in Baltimore, Maryland. First, Coyne recalls that he had never been invited to attend a conference before with district administrators and school board members. Furthermore, he had never experienced conversations—both those formally a part of the conference and informally as part of the natural flow of discussion when people travel together—in which the district leaders cared about his reactions and ideas. He was accustomed to presenting positions, concerns, and grievances on behalf of the OTA to the district, but he had no experience in pursuing genuine discussion as the group did in Baltimore. Furthermore, the keynote guest speaker, Adam Urbanski, President of the Rochester Teachers Association and Director of the national Teacher Union Reform Network, had a profound impact on Coyne and others. Urbanski provided Coyne with a picture of what is possible when district leaders—superintendent, school board, and teacher leaders—choose to work together on behalf of the school district. Coyne admits that such a vision was one that he had, up to that conference, held no hope of realizing. “I started to believe this might work. Board members were there with us. The conference agenda was designed to bring us together.” Coyne also recalls the difficulties he faced when he returned to the school district. Teachers were not immediately ready to imagine different kinds of relationships among the district administration, the teacher association, and the school board. “I had to convince teachers that I wasn’t being bought. Some of my colleagues thought I had become ‘too soft.’” Although Coyne is © SCHLECHTY CENTER FOR LEADERSHIP IN SCHOOL REFORM, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. TRANS.
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no longer an officer in the OTA, the current OTA leadership refer to Coyne’s work as critical in refashioning relationships within the school district; others in the Orange Key Leaders group all mention Coyne as someone who not only carries much of the history of the school district’s culture—past and present—but who also is a leader who helped cause the culture to change. Former school board member Keith recalls that same Baltimore conference from a different perspective. She had not looked forward to traveling and participating with Bob Coyne, who has since become a trusted colleague. She viewed him in 2002 as simply an aggressive, hard-headed union leader. But over the course of the conference Keith gained new insights into Coyne as a teacher, a leader, and a human being: Adam Urbanski talked about what unions could be. That began what we have become. We had defining discussions about what unions should look like. It was a great few days. Later, Bob Coyne stood up and spoke on behalf of what was possible and I never thought he would. We now have a better idea of what it can look like. We have a fragile structure that we have created. Marilyn Mauck, former OTA president, characterizes OTA’s earlier relationship with the school administration as a “long walk across Chagrin Boulevard,” the road separating the school campuses from the administration building. In truth the physical distance is a short stroll, but in practice the distance was lengthened by a history of disputes, distrust of both parties, and destructive definitions of roles which separated individuals and kept them from working together. Mauck recalls that personal battles between the OTA and the Orange administration led to some initial changes, but that ultimately, the redefinition of roles and relationships has led to changes so significant that she has had to ask herself, “Could this be real?” In discussing the 2005 negotiations, Mauck observes that the district demonstrated real compassion for teachers and sought their perspective. Mauck goes on to say, “It’s not personal anymore.” Today, Mauck confidently predicts that any problem at the heart of the district—concerning students or learning—will be solved and will best be addressed by teachers working with district office leaders and the school board.
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In reflecting on the way the school board works with the district, Tom Bonda says: Now there’s a sense that there’s nothing we cannot fix by working together—this group of Key Leaders expects to find a solution for any problem or issue. We will ask—what’s the best thing for this district, not about individuals or different groups.
Future Orientation The processes, structures, and subsystems that Orange has built through collaborative effort indicate the likelihood that this school district is poised to address future challenges in healthy and creative ways. Key Leaders throughout the district are optimistic, though some express caution about being too congratulatory too soon, given their understanding of the complexity of social systems such as school districts. Cindy Eickhoff recognizes that ensuring that the district’s culture runs deep is critical, ongoing work. She even says that there is a “fragile” quality to the changes the district has made. As she elaborates on the nature of such fragility, she discusses the importance of thinking about continuity of leadership, of ensuring that the next superintendent hired, the next director hired, and the next school board member elected will participate deeply in learning and understanding what the current Key Leaders believe, value, and have attempted to build into the organization. (Three of the school board’s five members are new as of January, 2006, and Dr. Lukich is providing them an ongoing induction experience.) In looking toward the future of Orange Mark Haag recognizes both accomplishment and unfinished business: Yes, a lot of progress has been made and we, over the last couple of years, recognized this, but there is a certain amount of “it’s fragile” and there’s still a challenge there. While we’re celebrating and recognizing progress we’ve made, there’s still work ahead of us to keep the momentum going. Jim Ventura characterizes unfinished business from his vantage point as providing leadership development experiences for the middle management employees among the membership of OAPSE so that the “living contract” created through 2005 negotiations fulfills its promise to the membership. Dan Hansen talks of developing future leaders among Orange teachers, but he © SCHLECHTY CENTER FOR LEADERSHIP IN SCHOOL REFORM, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. TRANS.
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also addresses the importance of the Orange Schools being a “Standard-Bearer” for other school districts. With more than a little of the idealism that marks a moral leader, Hansen talks about his responsibility to serve the district and his responsibility as part of the Orange leadership to provide a service to other districts with lessons about change and the value of undertaking this sometimes painful work. The 2005 edition of Pride, a school district publication distributed throughout the community, gives some indication of what might be thought of as an organizational “disposition” to confront the brutal facts, a disposition which in this publication identifies some of the substance of future work. Lukich lists a series of questions that serve as recent challenges to this highperforming district: • How do we address the changing demographics of the district as reported by the most recent demographic studies? • How do we support and improve achievement and learning for students from diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds? • How can we meet the needs and improve our program for middle level students at all grade levels? • How can we better support our teaching staff through Induction, Evaluation and Goals process to improve instruction? • How do we create a professional learning community and provide a more flexible building schedule to create time for teacher collaboration? • How do we more directly involve our support staff—OAPSE and CESSA employees—in their search to improve the quality of their work and profession? • How can we support the change needed on a building-by-building basis to meet the needs of elementary, middle school, and high school staff and students? In this front page article, a superintendent could just as well have listed the awards and honors earned and kept the challenges out of the public eye. The fact that Lukich chose not to do so is indicative of an organizational disposition marked by candor, self-appraisal, and relentless pursuit of quality. Lukich recognizes that important future work of the Orange Schools will proceed on the collaborative relationships built and supported by the school district. Some of that future work will be characterized by increased attention to using data about students, and by district support
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for learning communities of teachers in every school addressing the changing needs and interests of students. This district might have basked in the bounty of its favorable circumstances. Rather, the Orange Schools consciously chose a different course marked sometimes by individual hardship and organizational complications. The Orange Schools today have a newly developed strength as an organization—vigorous relationships between administrators, teachers, various union leaders, and school board. Such a cultural shift happens by design, not by accident. It happened in Orange because the leadership was strategic in setting a course for systemic change; its teachers were invited to be partners in leading that change; all union leaders became organizational resources, rather than organizational deficits; and the school board embraced its role as one dimension of a leadership team, working in concert with other key leaders in the school system.
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Changing the Quality of Student Experiences: T h e F i f e Wa y Transfor ming Roles and R e l a t i o n s h i p s : O n e D i s t r i c t ’s Choice to Pursue Greatness
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CHANGING THE QUALITY OF STUDENT EXPERIENCES
The Fife Way Fife Public Schools, outside of Tacoma, Washington, has over the past 10 years realized dramatic changes from the classroom to the boardroom. In this case study, the Schlechty Center chronicles the nature of these changes with special attention to how all changes are connected to students and the experiences the district provides them.
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Changing the Quality of Student Experiences: The Fife Way In his 2006 opening remarks to all staff of the Fife, Washington, public schools, Superintendent Steve McCammon pointed out some of the accomplishments of the school district: I believe that we have created the environment to take our district to unprecedented heights. We have a common purpose, gifted staff, a common language, time created for collaboration, teacher-driven staff development, more student performance data than we have ever had before, focused and aligned building plans, and steadfast school board and community support. This list of accomplishments is the result of ten years of hard work and captures key ways the district, located outside Tacoma, Washington has changed. Furthermore, while celebratory in tone, the Superintendent’s 2006 remarks were much more than a set of opening of school accolades meant to inspire the troops. His listing of district accomplishments was a part of the case he further built in his remarks—a case for continued hard work driven by a set of beliefs: I believe that we have a very difficult task before us to ensure that all students meet the high standards that are set forth. I also firmly believe that if any district can accomplish this important task, none is better prepared for success than ours. At this same opening convocation, Superintendent McCammon then looked out over the faculty and staff gathered and asked those who were new to the school district to stand. Next, he asked those who had been hired in the previous three years to stand. While these newer employees stood surrounded by their veteran colleagues, the superintendent publicly acknowledged that the veteran teachers in Fife had been invited, not required, over the past several years to commit to the district’s new direction, one which makes student engagement central. Veteran staff members had been invited to
2 rethink their roles and their relationship to their students. The superintendent went on to address the newer teachers. “You were hired because you demonstrated to us a commitment to student engagement. Your commitment to our district efforts was a requirement of your hiring.” While the newest faculty and staff remained standing, the superintendent then asked, “Who will join us in this work?” Those who had been sitting created a surge of movement as they rose to join those already standing in symbolic response to their superintendent’s call for commitment. The dogged commitment to organizational transformation grows out of Fife School District’s understanding that impressive accomplishments are not the end point in its work on behalf of children and young people in the communities of Fife, Milton, and Edgewood. Rather, the accomplishments make it possible for the district to press on and do what public school districts have not previously been designed to do—ensure high levels of learning for all students. The Schlechty Center makes the case that if a school district sets out to transform itself, one way of charting its progress is by understanding interrelated system changes and accomplishments in four large categories: changes in student experiences, changes in staff engagement with the district’s core business, changes in organizational structure, and changes in organizational culture.
3 Recognizing that the success in Fife is not a common experience in the effort to improve school performance, and recognizing the desperate need for cases to illustrate how school and school districts might be transformed, the Schlechty Center decided to develop a case study to describe Fife’s experiences. This case study is a summary of the Fife School District’s accomplishments over the past decade. Seven of those years involved a relationship with the Schlechty Center. Information for this case study is drawn from shared work and ongoing conversations over the years with Fife superintendents, teachers, principals, board members, and other district leaders. Additionally, in 2007 information for this case study was formally gathered through a series of individual and group interviews, with all role groups reflecting on the district’s work, the changes staff observed and been a part of, and the significance of the change efforts from their respective points of view.
The short story of Fife’s work includes some answers to the kinds of questions leaders in public education frequently ask themselves and their colleagues: So what’s different in the district and in our schools? How have several years of hard work, including the ebb and flow of energy devoted to innovation, paid off for the Fife Schools?
Student Experiences In Fife, student experiences are carefully assessed and monitored in terms of student engagement and student learning. Increases in both student engagement and student learning have been documented. Additionally, ongoing assessment of student engagement and learning has caused redesign of school experiences for students.
4 Staff Engagement The school district has established and subsequently deepened and sustained a clear sense of purpose, of its core business, and of key organizational values. Throughout the organization, faculty and staff have increased their commitment to the district’s purpose, core business and values. Organizational Structure The roles of student, teacher, principal, district office leader, and board member have dramatically changed to coincide with and support the district’s purpose. Organizational Culture This organization which was once stigmatized by distrust and competing factions is now characterized as remarkably supportive, open, and distinguished by trusting relationships between and among staff, parents, and the larger community. So how do readers here not only come to understand what happened in the Fife Schools, but also use that understanding to make purposeful changes in their own school districts? Using a systems analysis of what has happened over the last decade in Fife may provide educational colleagues from other districts insight into how leaders can refashion their organizations in order to change the quality of student experiences. The basic framework for this case study was developed by Phillip C. Schlechty in his book Creating Great Schools: Six Critical Systems at the Heart of Educational Innovation. However, the Six Critical Systems will merely be the tool for analysis; the voices and experiences of the Fife practitioners will tell the story of their district’s work and subsequent accomplishments.
Fife District Profile and Brief History of Its Change Efforts In the late 1990s, then Superintendent Bob Corley recognized that the Fife School District had some indication that it was doing a good job, but those indicators were not sufficient evidence to warrant his satisfaction that the school district could continue doing
5 what it had traditionally done. School board members recognized that a bitter 1995 teacher strike had left scars on the school district and the community—scars that could not be addressed in any typical way. At an AASA Conference in 2000, Corley heard Phillip Schlechty make a presentation regarding systemic reform and Corley became interested in the Schlechty Center’s work with systems processes. Corley soon headed to the Schlechty Center’s headquarters in Kentucky with his two assistant superintendents, McCammon (now superintendent in Fife) and Marti Harruff (now superintendent in Montesano, Wash.). After extended conversations during which leaders at the Schlechty Center learned much more about the Fife Schools, Fife leaders began thinking that the work of a new Schlechty Center initiative, the Standard-Bearer School District Network, might be just the type of atypical approach to change that Fife needed. What struck the Fife leaders was the emphasis of working on systems, rather than fixing the people. They knew that the Fife Schools hired strong teachers and staff, had a supportive community, and students who performed pretty well. The Fife leaders also recognized that the change efforts required to move such a school district into the future would have to be comprehensive and get at the bedrock of the organization. So the three Fife leaders, with their knowledge of the district context and their early understanding of Schlechty Center work with systems change, was granted board approval to join the Standard-Bearer School District Network in 2000. The network at that time was comprised of 20 school districts committed to assessing and developing their capacity to support change using the framework of 10 District Standards that had been developed by Phil Schlechty and the Schlechty Center staff.
6 Fife’s early work as part of the Standard-Bearer Network involved groups of teachers, principals, district leaders, and board members assessing district capacity rather than performance. Those involved became zealous leaders who understood that capacity would give their district readiness to respond to an ever-changing environment and to consider new possibilities without judging or blaming individual staff members. Simultaneously with the ongoing capacity assessments, teachers and principals were sharing their new learning about student engagement and coming to understand that teachers could purposefully design schoolwork that is more likely to be engaging to students. Teacher leaders began to talk the language of engagement and the 10 Design Qualities, suggested by the Schlechty Center’s Theory of Engagement as central to school improvement in considering the work provided to students. Fife provided opportunities for staff from across the district to learn about this new work through national conferences, through district-sponsored experiences, and, to a lesser extent, through school-based activities. In 2001, at the end of the initial year of Fife’s new effort, Corley left Fife to take a Florida superintendency. The Standard-Bearer work continued under the leadership of the new superintendent, Steve McCammon. Many in the district point to this continuity of direction early in the change process as a defining event in Fife’s later accomplishments. Corley investigated and initiated the systems change effort and McCammon, now as superintendent, pursued ever-deepening, imaginative strategies to bring the changes to fruition. After the first three years in the Standard-Bearer Network, Fife continued as an affiliate member utilizing Schlechty Center conferences for ongoing district capacity
7 development. The Working on the Work conference, the Principals Academy, and the Key Leaders conference became the primary means for Fife Schools to stay abreast of the Schlechty Center’s latest ideas and tools, to support and develop new staff members, and, increasingly, to provide development for school board members. From 2002 to 2007, the Schlechty Center utilized selected Fife staff as Fellows (practitioners who work alongside Schlechty Center senior associates for specific purposes) at conferences, and even as leaders of development work in neighboring districts. The superintendent served as an adjunct Schlechty Center associate for the last five years, because the Schlechty Center valued his talents and commitment to transformation, and the Fife school board recognized the cutting-edge resources such experiences made available to their school district.
Six Critical Systems: The Framework for a Systems Analysis The successful employment of disruptive innovations requires dramatic alteration in both the structure and the culture of a school or school system. Most important, such innovations require changes in the ways vital functions are carried out: the way new members are recruited and inducted, the way knowledge is transmitted, the way power and authority are distributed, the way people and programs are evaluated, the way directions and goals are set, and the way boundaries that determine who is inside and who is outside the school are defined Understanding these six critical systems is key to dramatically changing the way schools do their business. (Schlechty, 2005) The Schlechty Center assumes that public schools do not currently have the capacity to make student engagement central. Therefore, schools currently have limited potential to make sure that students will learn those things that schools, parents and community members want all children to learn to be considered well educated. As Fife realized as part of their change efforts, if schools are to increase their capacity to change
8 the quality of student experiences, the school district will be required to transform itself. The Schlechty Center argues that this means transforming from bureaucracies that produce compliance to learning organizations that nurture engagement for students and for the adults in the school district. So what must school districts do to transform themselves? The Schlechty Center recommends that school leaders should pursue organizational transformation by working on the six Critical Systems which Schlechty explicates in his 2005 book. These systems regulate behavior in schools, both those schools that are bureaucracies and those that are learning organizations. In order to realize the kind of transformation that districts such as Fife desire, school leaders must refashion both the nature and the substance of each of the six Critical Systems, as well as change the order of emphasis from the order given these systems in a bureaucracy. An explanation of the focus of each system is briefly described as follows: •
The Directional System: The systems through which goals are set, priorities are determined, and when things go awry corrective actions are initiated.
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The Knowledge Development and Transmission System: The formal and informal systems of education, training, and socialization through which organizational members are brought to know and understand what they need to know and understand to uphold organizational norms and to function effectively in the organization.
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The Recruitment and Induction System: The systems through which new members are identified and attracted to the organization and brought to understand and embrace the norms and values they must understand and embrace
9 to be full members of the organization. They are also the systems through which current members are brought to understand and embrace the norms and values of an organization undergoing important change. •
The Boundary System: The systems that define who and what are inside the organization, and are therefore subject to the control of the organization, and who and what are outside the organization, and are therefore beyond the reach of the systems that make up the organization.
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The Evaluation system: The systems through which measures of merit and worth are assigned, status is determined, honor is bestowed, and the method and timing of negative sanctions are set.
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The Power and Authority System: The systems that legitimize the use of sanctions, define the proper exercise of power, and determine status relationships. As for the order of emphasis, in a learning organization leaders understand the
primacy of the Directional, Knowledge Development and Transmission, and Recruitment and Induction Systems. Furthermore, in a learning organization, the Directional System is given more attention and emphasis than any other system and is not only fully developed, clear and coherent, but it becomes the system which shapes and determines emphasis of all the other systems. So in addition to substantive changes required for each system, organizational transformation would result in a changed order of emphasis, meaning the weight of leaders’ time and attention might be reflected in the order below. • • •
Directional System Knowledge Development and Transmission System Recruitment and Induction
10 • • •
Boundary System Evaluation System Power and Authority System
This is in contrast to bureaucracies, which put much more emphasis on Boundary, Evaluation, and Power and Authority Systems. In an attempt to chronicle major changes and accomplishments of the Fife Schools, attention will be given to analysis of how the Fife School District refashioned these six Critical Systems and how they changed the relative emphasis between and among these systems thereby creating the capacity to change the quality of student experiences.
Directional System Pointing Our Boats in the Same Direction The systems through which goals are set, priorities are determined, and when things go awry corrective actions are initiated. (Schlechty, 2005) Dramatic change in the quality of student experiences grows out of the fact that the Fife School District is now crystal clear about its direction. In that same 2006 allstaff presentation, the superintendent articulated the district’s core business—that is, what the district spends most of its intellectual and fiscal resources pursuing. He said: What is our core business (or common result)? To produce work that engages students—work that is so compelling that students persist when they experience difficulties. Work that is so challenging that students have a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction when they successfully complete it. His laser-like clarity leaves no room for doubt that this district knows what it is about. McCammon’s other remarks that day included chronicling his beliefs: •
I believe that in Fife School District we have the finest collection of educators in the state, and that the administration and support staff around them are second to none.
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I believe that we have a very difficult task before us to ensure that all students meet the high standards that are set forth. I also firmly believe that if any district can accomplish this important task, none is better prepared for success than ours.
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I really do believe that teachers are designers and leaders and that we should not work on the teachers or the students, instead we should work on improving the work that we design for students to complete. This should be done both individually and, whenever possible, collaboratively around our lesson design.
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I believe that there is very real power in collaboration. While we cannot collaborate around every problem and lesson, we are better as a whole when we take advantage of our collective talent. The talent and experience is abundant in this district and we have the common language and trust in place to make it happen.
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I truly believe that as a district our focus is precisely where it should be and that is on the student work. If we are truly focusing on aligning what we teach and creating more engaging lessons, the test scores will take care of themselves and will be but one important indicator of our success with every student.
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I have grown to deeply believe that effort affects learning outcomes at least as much as does intellectual ability and that it is our utmost responsibility to engage all of our students in the work. This is the most difficult task in our business, but also the most important one.
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I believe that it is nothing more than common sense that if we are reflective in our teaching and embed more Design Qualities in our lessons, then more students will become engaged and therefore more learning will take place.
In conversations with principals, teachers, central office leaders and board members, the district’s focus on engagement, on providing meaningful, engaging work that increases the likelihood that students will learn required content and skills, is a part of everyone’s conversation. A veteran principal contrasted her earlier years as a principal with her current experiences in Fife. “The direction is set by the superintendent.” She explains that there is no question in her mind what the district focus is, and she is given a
12 range of support in order to maintain her focus. A middle school dean says, “Our boats are all pointed in the same direction, but we have autonomy to do it in the way we want. There is no Big Brother. The superintendent may bring us in and ask us what we need.” So how do teachers see the district’s direction? A high school teacher who is also the Fife Education Association president expresses his observations about the district’s journey to establish a direction: Probably, the biggest moment was—I can’t put a date on it—was when somewhere along the line the critical mass realized that what we’re talking about is the engagement of students. We’re talking about students and what they’re getting out of this. It’s not just about what you are teaching. Because the way we are teaching changed rather dramatically over a period of years. The focus now is really about are the kids learning this or not. I use to be a great teacher, but now it’s all bout the kids being good learners. A Fife third grade teacher describes how the vision for her own classroom grows out of the district core business: The shift for me is that I hope my room is getting better and better, and it is not all about me and what I want but about the students, their wants and motives. Then, the classroom evolves out of that. Rather than, “Okay, this is it. You will fit into the hole I designed.” Now I recognize that I have squares or triangles or rectangles and how am I going to create the holes that each will fit in. Another veteran elementary teacher says, “I’m constantly looking at projects, ways, and work that I engage them in and can get concepts across without having to use dry materials that aren’t interesting to kids.” Another teacher provides some historical contrast and notes that for a long time the district had a goal which was to teach children and make them learners. However, she added, “I don’t think we had any vision of where or how we should do that. You’d come to work and do the job. You’d pull the ditto out that you’d been using for 10 years and you’d do it again.” Fife teachers resoundingly describe a different world of school today than the one this last teacher describes.
13 Central office leaders echo that same kind of understanding. One speaks from the basis of more than 26 years in the district. When asked about the “essence” of the Fife School District she says, “It’s pretty basic, pretty easy, because we’ve learned it so well. It’s student engagement. As an employee, it’s not about me. It’s the end result of how students come out of their learning experience.” The school board is a vital part of articulating, celebrating and sustaining the main focus of the school district. For example, a seventeen-year veteran school board member explains what he has always hoped will happen as the result of the district’s efforts to transform itself. “Our goal is that when your kids come home, they want to tell you what they did in school. They’ll want your opinion to learn more about what they’re doing. They want to be working on it.” And then that board member goes on to tell a story about a recent board meeting where elementary students were demonstrating bridgebuilding in science. One student’s father stood up and testified that this assignment was the first time his daughter came home and actually expressed interest in learning more about some content, because she was excited about building bridges. In fact, the father described to the board how she wanted to go on the Internet with her father’s help to get more information. The veteran school board member proclaims that youngster’s experience and her father’s joy as great indicators of realizing for that youngster the district’s vision—creating excitement and student desire for learning. Fife staff seems to understand clearly the direction of the district and how that direction is used as a reference point for all district work. They know the answers to key questions that are part of the Directional System: Who are our customers? What is our business? What is our product? The school district is at a point in its transformation
14 where students are understood to be the primary customers; designing engaging work focused on the right content is the district’s business; and the satisfying, challenging schoolwork that holds promise for each child is the product of the school district’s core business. Ten years ago, Fife had no such clarity, and therefore lacked the capacity to lead its staff, parents and community in a common direction.
Knowledge Development and Transmission System Building Trust The formal and informal systems of education, training, and socialization through which organizational members are brought to know and understand what they need to know and understand to uphold organizational norms and to function effectively in the organization. (Schlechty, 2005) Even though leaders may be clear about a school district’s direction, without a well-designed Knowledge Development and Transmission System, that direction may remain the well-kept secret of a few leaders or, regrettably, a promising kernel of organizational purpose without substance. Over the last several years, the Fife School District has developed powerful systems of transmitting the social norms that shape behavior throughout the district. As it refashioned its Knowledge Development and Transmission System, the staff gained new-found respect and trust in one another. While opportunities for staff development were once much more random and, according to all role groups, unfocused or individually focused, rather than being focused on school and district goals and direction, today the Fife system for developing, importing, evaluating and transmitting knowledge could accurately be called tightly focused and adaptable to new circumstances and information.
15 When the district began its efforts to focus on student engagement and the district changes necessary to support the work, the superintendent and his two assistant superintendents assumed key roles in learning about the nature of the work and then involving principals and teacher leaders in deepening the foundational understanding necessary for district transformation. A school board member says: We had three people at the top committed to the process, doing a lot of work with the process, and it was at that time an educational process. They didn’t really force anyone to do it; we started to learn the language. You’ve got to know what you’re talking about so you can talk to each other. The district provided all role groups opportunities to attend national Schlechty Center conferences, to participate in assessing district capacity, and for some to become part of an early District Development Team which identified, coordinated and led the district’s ongoing change efforts. In the first few years of the district’s Standard-Bearer efforts, principals and teachers customized activities and processes that would be invitational and yet offer people ways to learn about engagement, about district standards, and about efforts the district was making to build its capacity to change. So while top district leaders were immersing themselves in understanding the district standards for transformation and the nature of student engagement, other staff members were invited— not coerced—to participate. As a junior high teacher puts it, “It’s been the softest hammer imaginable.” Sometimes the learning experiences were orchestrated by district leaders. For example, teachers and principals recalled 2001, the first year of McCammon’s superintendency, when the superintendent modeled and led a structured process for looking at student work in order to inquire about student engagement and the design of the work provided them. He would visit individual schools and lead or participate in the
16 Descriptive Review process, helping to establish a focus on students and the work provided them. During the 2001–02 school year, a districtwide staff development day involved all teachers participating in the Descriptive Review process with the superintendent in the middle of that work. A 5th grade teacher remembers those early learning activities. “It was a huge experience, teachers listening to each other. For a new teacher, it was huge to sit down with experienced teachers—some of 20 years or more—and they were actually listening to suggestions from other people.” As Fife embarked on some dramatically different ways for adults to learn together, they were experiencing some of what adults should typically experience in a learning organization. A learning organization assumes that adults can create new knowledge together given a discipline—a coherent set of ideas and accompanying processes—by which to create that new knowledge. Of course, new knowledge may also be imported from others outside the school district, and Fife continued its efforts to learn from other school districts in the Standard-Bearer School District Network. Each year since 2000, Fife has sent teachers, principals, and district leaders to the Working on the Work conference. Fife teachers or district leaders were often asked to be co-presenters or facilitators at those conferences, working and learning with teachers and others from across the country. As a result of such cross-district collaboration, the Orange Schools, outside of Cleveland, Ohio, had at least two occasions to visit in Fife and for teachers and district leaders from each district to share good ideas which demonstrated serious changes underway. One example of an idea imported from the Orange Schools is the early WOW Academies at Fife—specific opportunities for teachers
17 to work together to design work that might increase engagement. The district carved out the time and supportive resources for teachers to attend the Academy during the school day and, much as Orange did, teacher needs and interests figured prominently in the choices of what the work under design might focus on. Over time, the WOW Academy has evolved into a sophisticated hybrid of what it once was. During the 2006–07 school year the district introduced to teams of teachers the Coaching for Design process led by an experienced, well-prepared Fife teacher leader. Throughout the year 79 teachers participated in three sessions of the WOW Academy which now incorporates Coaching for Design. Today, participation in the district WOW Academies is competitive; teams of teachers submit proposals about what they want to design and why it will be high-leverage for their students. Although not all proposals are funded for participation in the district WOW Academy, schools have discretionary money at the campus level to support teachers in similar design work, so if teachers are not invited to the district Academy, they still get support on their campuses for original design work. Teachers and principals talk with great excitement and appreciation of this latest iteration of the WOW Academy, calling it a real breakthrough in the school district’s efforts to provide engaging work for students. Enhanced by electronic sharing made possible by a district-designed portal, following the two-day Academy teachers’ collaborative creativity has been elevated to new levels of effectiveness, according to Fife staff. An experienced elementary teacher says: A defining event for me was I just went to my first WOW Academy. We came out with a three-week unit, with engaging activities with my grade level. And I just can’t believe we were given that time—two days to work with our group. And to get to these activities I can use tomorrow. And it’s on the portal, so anyone can use it, too. Giving us this gift of time, I think staff really appreciates that.
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This example of the WOW Academy in its initial iteration and the most recent version illustrates well how adept Fife is at continuing to import new learning from outside the district and then enhancing and recreating their internal processes, incorporating that new learning. In creating processes for developing, importing and transmitting knowledge, Fife recognizes that it has built a foundation which provides readiness for new work like the Coaching for Design. A high school teacher says, “The Coaching for Design was for us the right time and the right place. We had the foundation, so it is even more powerful because of that.” A teacher at Columbia Junior High talks of the way that foundation was built. “It was a skillful, slow building process. … the WOW Academy as it is now, that couldn’t have been in Year One. That would have blown people out of the water.” In the fall of 2006, a group of teachers, principals, and district leaders went to a Working on the Work Conference specifically to learn more about Coaching for Design. One teacher in that group commented repeatedly throughout the interview about the importance of having foundational work in place so that powerful subsequent processes—such as Coaching for Design—have a real chance of taking hold and making a difference. The foundational work she described included processes for widespread understanding of engagement, of understanding and embracing the role of teachers in designing that work, and of the role of principals and district leaders in creating opportunities for teachers to design the work. Six years ago in contract negotiations, the district and the Fife Education Association mutually agreed on six days which would become professional development half days to focus on engagement and district change. For a school district that experienced in 1995 what was at the time the longest teacher strike in the history of
19 Washington public education, the collaboration resulting in that contract provision represents huge changes in shared understanding, commitments and new relationships. In recent years, negotiation sessions have averaged no more than three meetings in order to reach consensus on teacher contracts. In earlier times, the negotiation process had been slow and somewhat contentious The way the Knowledge Development and Transmission System was changed over time involved care for and understanding of the needs and interests of teachers. For example, a junior high teacher explains from his point of view the district’s early steps: One of the first steps was opening up the door to classrooms and not making such a secret what went on in there. That was a key with convincing people that what you do behind your doors is a good thing and you should let other people see it. Every single teacher has this terrible fear that if you open the door people will find out that you don’t know what you are doing. You’ll be exposed as the fraud you are, sent off in shame. The volunteerism involved in the early sharing of work and collaborative design work kept fear out of the process. A 27-year veteran elementary teacher explains what has changed for her: I thought in my last few years of teaching I was just going to coast. I thought I’d just basically be able to skate during the last 10 years or so. …Now, the notion of collaboration is what really excites us. It’s just rejuvenating. It’s making my job fun again. This teacher knows well that the district did not always value and support teacher collaboration: Everything we did was in isolation. Every teacher, almost every teacher, did things in their own rooms in their own way. There was no collaboration. If you had a problem, you stayed in your bunker and figured it out yourself. When you think about where we were pre-2000, a bitter, bitter, strike, it’s really amazing where we are now.
20 Another elementary teacher also remembers his earlier years in Fife: “Collaboration was, ‘I’m running a set of copies, do you want me to run you a set?’” From the point of view of the school board, members see how collaboration now flourishes. The most veteran board member, who first served on the board in 1990 and is still serving in 2007, believes the district’s biggest problem in the 1990’s was trust. He believes that developing trust, beginning with Corley’s leadership and then continuing and deepening now during McCammon’s tenure is the “start of our whole story.” This school board member recalls how Corley made the financial statements transparent and invited anyone to come and talk with him. Over time, the district found a framework by which to rethink itself and continued to build the trust needed for ongoing growth and development. This board member also recalls how surprised he was in his earlier years on the board to discover that in this small district, individual schools did not work together. The way schools work has changed so that now when they share their current work and their future plans with board members, individual school efforts are parallel with one another. Today, principals gather at their annual retreat and use data and the district direction to think through the next steps for the upcoming year. Subsequently the vast majority of the district’s staff development dollars and ultimate support flow through school plans that are created among Learning Improvement Teams. The plans are approved and subsequent support provided, as long as they are in line with the district’s vision of focusing on student engagement. Another school board member who has served less than five years describes how trust operates between the Fife board and the school district staff:
21 That trust is a huge thing. And it’s not blind trust. I’ve been married for 30 some years and if I tell my wife that I’m going to do this, this, and this . . . sure she trusts me, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t ask questions, the kind of dialogue of questions we’ve talked about. Tell me why this is important to you and we’re going to spend the money on this. Sure she trusts me. She still asks the questions. And I do as well. Let’s make sure we’re on the same ground. This board member’s example demonstrates some key variables related to the Knowledge Development and Transmission System. First, in a learning organization, conversation, dialogue, and discussion are the primary means for developing and transmitting information. Second, the nature of that conversation is determined, among other things, by the respect and value people hold for one another, rather than rigid reference to positions. Finally, when the board member talks about “making sure we’re on the same ground,” he is actually referring to clarity about the Directional System. Discussions and decisions should constantly be referencing the Directional System in a learning organization. The veteran board member relayed a 2003 incident involving the school district’s attempt to be innovative in working with the Fife Education Association. During McCammon’s second full year as superintendent, teachers throughout the state were called to go to Olympia and picket on behalf of budget changes. The superintendent, with full support of the board and in collaboration with the teacher association, proposed an innovative approach intended to be a win-win for the district and the Fife Education Association. They offered to use district school buses to transport citizens from the community who would go to Olympia and picket on behalf of teachers. Not only would the community add a powerful dimension to the statewide demonstration, but this plan would permit teachers and kids to stay in school. As the plans unfolded, regulations would not permit the schools to use the district buses for private citizens to travel to
22 Olympia. Therefore, the district did have to shut the schools down, and, as it happened, citizens still accompanied teachers in picketing Olympia. The board member comments on this jettisoned innovation: “I think it showed our teachers, too, that you can go out and try something new and different, and if it doesn’t work out it’s no big deal. We’ll work around it and figure out something.” Another board member heartily agreed, commenting, “What it showed is that we were all willing to work together. It didn’t turn out exactly how anyone had thought was the best, but we came up with the best possible solution.” Moving from what the superintendent calls “random acts of staff development” to highly focused formal and informal processes for learning together, the members of the Fife school district utilize the many facets of their Knowledge Development and Transmission System to move the district toward realizing its vision for a desired future.
Recruitment and Induction System Raising Staff Up in the Fife Way Recruitment has to do with those processes by which schools (or any other organizations) identify new members and gain from those who are identified an agreement to participate in the life of the school. Induction has to do with those processes employed in the effort to ensure that recruits are aware of and become committed to the norms that guide behavior in the school. Induction also has to do with the way existing members are retrained and resocialized when systems are undergoing changes that redefine rules, roles, and relationships and when changes modify the normative order in substantial ways. (Schlechty, 2005) Fife principals’ comments exhibit a strong understanding of and commitment to providing new staff with quality experiences which will increase the possibility that they embrace the district’s norms. One Fife principal who was a teacher leader in the early days of district transformation work recognizes that induction has not always been
23 intentional in the school district. She describes the important role the superintendent plays today in articulating the district focus for new staff and in making time for extended conversations with new staff so that they hear directly from him what is most important in the school district. She also commented on how the district leaders’ annual retreat is a means for ongoing induction for experienced building and district office leaders to hear from the superintendent about district direction and to focus on its primary business. This particular principal is acutely aware of the important role she must play in leading induction efforts at her school, because of the large number of teachers new to her school—thirty percent of her teaching staff was new to that building in 2006-07. When new staff members are hired, they are expected to gain some understanding of student engagement and to have a desire to contribute to the district direction as it pursues becoming a learning organization. As the deputy superintendent says: “I think you want to work in Fife because you are given the freedom to do your job. And you are given the time and the incentives to collaborate with others to make sure the job is done and done right.” Once new members are hired, the combined efforts at the district level and the school building continue the induction process and provide principals with the naïve and often most telling, insights of novices. A Fife principal recounts how new teachers in his building help his school recognize discrepancies between what his school and district want the focus to be and what may be pockets of the less fully committed. New teachers will ask questions and seek support based on the district’s preachments, and he understands that their insights help him see what work still needs to be done. Central office leaders hired in the last few years provide insight into the unique characteristics of the Fife Schools in contrast to other districts they each served. For
24 example, one explains that Fife’s focused professional development is a major difference from other districts she knows. “I’ve never seen an emphasis at a superintendent level on professional development,” she says. “I may have seen an emphasis at the level of curriculum director, but it comes and goes. It may come one year and go away. It’s never stuck on for years.” She also says that although she has been integrally involved in implementing other reform models elsewhere, she has not experienced anywhere else the sustained commitment that she sees in Fife. Both of these district office leaders admit that they may lack a sense of just how comprehensive the changes in Fife have been, because they have not been in the district throughout the whole process. However, their experiences in Fife give them ample information to understand how different it is from many other districts. While Fife staff indicate that there is still work to be done on the Recruitment and Induction System, in recent years the district and to some extent individual schools have made important changes in how new staff “enters” the district. One experienced junior high school teacher believes new teachers are embracing the district’s direction: “The young teachers, those who have been with us less than four years, they’re on board and they’re doing these things. It’s kind of the Fife Way.” Not all teachers interviewed agreed that new teachers were totally enthusiastic about a focus on student engagement and on teacher as designer and leader, but they had no doubt that new teachers are now provided ample opportunity to understand and embrace what the district cares about most. That same junior high school teacher describes the contrast between his own induction and the processes new teachers currently experience: So we kind of raised each other (he and two other colleagues). So while that was good, it wasn’t necessarily good for the district or the building. Now the whole
25 idea is that there is a consciousness of raising all the teachers in a similar way, helping people, consciously putting them in groups—that’s a big difference. I came into, “Here are the grammar books. See you in June.” Today, we work much harder to raise teachers up in a Fife Way. So is the Fife Recruitment and Induction System everything it could be according to Fife leaders? It seems unlikely that it is. Is the Fife Recruitment and Induction System intentional? Absolutely. Does induction begin at the point of first contact with prospective employees? Are the processes involved in Recruitment and Induction shared between the central office and the school buildings? And, do district office, school, and teacher leaders all understand that a Recruitment and Induction System is about supporting new staff in becoming fully committed members of the learning organization? The answer to all these questions is a resounding yes. Similarly, staff seems well aware that over the past several years the way district leaders successfully gained the commitment of veteran employees to its new direction was primarily through invitation and significant support. As one veteran high school teacher puts it, “He (the superintendent) has never promised anything and not delivered.”
Boundary System From Outsiders to Full Members The systems that define who and what are inside the organization, and are therefore subject to the control of the organization, and who and what are outside the organization, and are therefore beyond the reach of the systems that make up the organization. (Schlechty, 2005) One of the strongest illustrations of Boundary System change in the Fife Schools is the way the school board’s perception of its role has changed. Frequently, in school districts driven by bureaucratic tendencies focused on power and control, the school board views itself as overseer and monitor. As such, school board members see themselves as operating outside the school district, looking in evaluatively at school
26 district operations. For Fife, this once was the role of the school board. The seventeen year veteran school board member provides a historical perspective about how the board’s role has changed. Pre-beginning of the journey, I saw [my role] as a caretaker, an overseer, a representative of the community. We were just there to bring problems to the administration. That was part of our role. Now, … I see myself more as a consultant to them. He goes on to describe how the board now sees itself as a partner in a dialogue focused on processes used, rather than on specific decisions made. “This has become a norm on our board—looking at the process.” Teachers talk about the board as partners in the change process. Teachers mention that board members go to conferences, regularly hear from teachers and students about schoolwork and, most recently, sit in on WOW Academies. When board members participate in learning alongside teachers and other district leaders, they are entering into a different role than that of executives exercising oversight. And as learners alongside district employees, they have crossed the boundary of the organization and are now insiders rather than outsiders looking at and judging the insiders. A board member describes the role he now plays in assisting parents and other community members to understand role changes. He talks about explaining what board members do and don’t do, encouraging conversations between disgruntled parents and school staff. He goes on to say, “…we are becoming community leaders. Our board is not made up of people who are out there as public speakers. We’re plain folk types. That’s the way we deal . . . on a one-to-one level.” He goes on to explain that in order for board members to have useful one-on-one conversations they must really understand the district’s change efforts. For example, board members have had opportunities to attend WOW Academies, to hear about teachers’ collaborative efforts, and to learn about
27 student perceptions of their work. Such experiences give board members the understanding they need to talk to their neighbors and the larger community on behalf of the district’s work. The current school board president who came on the board five years ago when changes were well underway recalls that the relationship between the school district and the community seemed quite healthy and constructive at that time. However, he, too, originally thought he would be serving the district by providing oversight of the operations of the schools—not because they were going in a bad direction but because that had been the board’s role. He describes what his role is today: I realize we play a much larger role as a support to the beliefs of the superintendent, central staff and teachers . . . to what their vision is. We should play more of a support role. And, obviously, you can’t support something you don’t believe in, so we’ve gone through processes to gain knowledge. He describes the important work of the board in enlisting the community to join in leadership with the school district. This board member’s commitment to the community and to the school district, which he says is the heart of the community, has not changed. What has changed dramatically over the past five years, as he describes it, is how he views the way he can contribute as a board member. For his work today as a part of the board he must view himself as an insider, a full member of the school district. A second major indicator of Boundary System changes in the Fife Schools relates to the nature of student membership in the organization. Frequently, school districts treat students as problems to be fixed; raw material to be acted upon. In listening to Fife teachers and other district leaders, it becomes clear that students are seen as customers and potential partners in learning, which indicates a pretty rare point of view in public education. However, teachers did not automatically embrace this view of students. A
28 teacher of 27 years remembers her own reaction when it was first suggested that teachers think about their students as customers. She recalls thinking, “I’m in charge here. Now wait a minute.” Today her view is totally different: I teach kindergarten. It’s hard to explain, but I never even thought that they’d have an opinion about the teaching. They’re only five. But they do. They have an opinion about what’s going on in the classroom. And then if you open that up to them, then they even have more. I have never enjoyed teaching so much. I loved teaching before, but now I really love it because the kids are so wonderful. They’re really involved. Another elementary teacher contends that in thinking back to the year 2000, it was very rare in Fife to find anyone who asked their students about the work provided them. She suggests that now it is hard to find a building where questions about the quality of the work provided them are not asked of students. Evidence of listening to students is found throughout Fife’s schools; the district has created a special vehicle for sharing teacher and student work known as Walls that Teach. Each building displays student work accompanied by a teacher-provided explanation of the learning focus of that work, some of the thinking involved in the teacher design of the work (often this includes the Design Qualities used and the reasons for those specific Design Qualities), and student remarks indicating what they thought about the work. The superintendent explains that originally Walls that Teach was meant as a way of drawing parents into the district’s efforts. He concludes, however, that this public sharing of work has actually fueled teacher collaboration. To an outside observer, Walls that Teach presents clear evidence that student voice lives in the schools of Fife. Within the Fife School District, school board members see themselves as genuine members of the organization and students are also viewed as such. Unlike highly bureaucratic school districts where maintaining boundaries between the district
29 employees and all others saps the time and attention of the superintendent and other leaders, Fife has exerted serious effort to focus less on who is not a member and more on redefining the nature of membership—specifically for the school board and students—in keeping with its core values, its primary business, and its vision of a desired future.
Evaluation System Invitation to Growth and Reflection The systems through which measures of merit and worth are assigned, status is determined, honor is bestowed, and the method and timing of negative sanctions are set. (Schlechty, 2005) Starting with the superintendent, there is an understanding in the Fife Schools that enlisting staff involvement and commitment in the change effort could never be mandated. Both the superintendent who initiated the work and the current superintendent understood well that what the district wants is staff engagement, thus the district puts a great deal of effort into creating inviting experiences for volunteers. Concurrently, district leaders understand that the Evaluation System is not the means by which the district achieves change in attitude, practice, and commitment. For several years, teachers in the district have had the option of participating in either a conventional personnel evaluation process with the principal sitting in the back of the room noting the teacher performance, or instead participating in the formative evaluation, which was always more reflective and teacher-driven. In another instance of district creativity, several years ago Fife revised the formative process, embedding Standard-Bearer language, the Classroom Standards, and the concept of the teacher as leader and designer. Teachers still may choose between the two options—they can pursue a conventional evaluation or the latest iteration of the formative process—and the
30 choices they are making indicate their growing commitment. The superintendent says, “The neat thing is that without us pushing it, more and more teachers say every year that they’d rather use the reflective piece which includes the Classroom Standards to identify a couple of things they need to work on. That’s a celebration.” First, the way that the district revised its reflective process, as well as the numbers of teachers choosing that process, clearly illustrate what it means to have an organization use its Directional System to make changes in the Evaluation System. Regrettably, too often districts embark on change efforts with leaders attempting to use the Evaluation System as a “big stick” to get staff to go along with a new direction. Such efforts tend to result in compliance at best and may result in rebellion and sabotage of district change efforts. Additionally, when school board members say they may initiate dialogue about why some action or decision is recommended, they are talking about opening dialogue about whether or not the recommendations are congruent with the values of the district, and how any action taken will support those values. And each time substantive discussion occurs about what the district values, the Directional System is accessed and strengthened, and potential actions are evaluated in light of the district’s purpose and beliefs. In the course of a group interview with Fife principals, it was noted that throughout their responses to a series of reasonably open-ended questions about the district, they never once brought up the issue of state-required testing. On the one hand, this seemed particularly interesting, because many districts maintain that the current testfrenzied environment serves as a deterrent to change efforts. Additionally, since Fife’s test scores have always been reasonably good, and have in the last several years shown
31 marked gains, the principals might have used this opportunity to tout those gains. When it was noted that they had been energetically talking about their work without once mentioning testing, they readily explained its absence thus far in the conversation. They described testing as some of the information they draw on to pursue what is truly important in the district—designing engaging work for students. Clearly they were not mouthing platitudes when they gave their explanation. One principal explained it well when he said, “We have a framework to respond to learning needs based on the test information.” While many who work outside school districts today might maintain that tests are one source of information about learning, far too few public educators today say those words and mean them. One of the three elementary principals went on to explain that the design of work is based in part on test results, but also based on classroom assessment and assessment of engagement. The high school principal underscored that the classroom standards are tools to gain more information that should inform teachers’ design work. He notes that more teachers than ever are kid-focused not test-focused. He describes the ways the high school has gone about making assessing student engagement a regular part of the way the high school faculty works. “We pay attention to student voice.” In an interview with the superintendent he says: The biggest conversation we’re having now at retreat is that we have to be very clear about what the data say and where we need to go. I’m certainly not just talking about the WASL (Washington Assessment of Student Learning). We talk about what teachers are seeing in classrooms; what we see as weaknesses in the curriculum; where our kids tell us they’re not engaged. I tell our staff continually that if our students are struggling with certain concepts then we are morally and professionally obligated to do one of two things: if the curriculum is not aligned then we must align it, and if we determine that it is aligned and our students are still struggling with a concept then we must redesign the work to make it more engaging and meaningful for our learners.
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The principals’ comments about how student experiences are evaluated (made in an interview without the superintendent present) coincide with the superintendent’s point of view. As with the personnel appraisal dimension of the Evaluation System, the critical functions of determining approach, allocating resources, or discontinuing efforts which are also a part of the Evaluation System are driven by what the district consistently says is at the heart of the school district’s work.
Power and Authority System Using Influence and Providing Support The systems that legitimize the use of sanctions, define the proper exercise of power, and determine status relationships (Schlechty, 2005) In the Fife Schools, examples of how the Power and Authority System now operates, as well as some insight into how it has changed over the last decade, arise primarily through discussion and description of roles and relationships. District office leaders provide ample discussion of how Fife is different from other districts, and possibly what accounts at least in part for its success in transforming itself. One leader suggests that there is less kingdom-building in Fife than in most other school districts. She describes kingdom-building as grabbing and hoarding resources, competing with other leaders, and, through such actions, effectively bringing to a halt much good work. She describes McCammon as a superintendent who is intolerant of kingdom-building. Another district office leader describes her role: “I remove barriers so others can concentrate on student engagement.” Relationships in Fife are expected to be constructive and to support the primary work.
33 The three elementary principals agree that their healthy relationship as colleagues continues to deepen. During the 2006–07 school year they initiated a development activity that involved having their staffs come together to learn more about one of their schools, to view the Walls that Teach in one of the buildings, and to have cross-school faculty conversations. This was a first in that it was principal-initiated, cross-school development work. In general, principals talk about one another’s schools and one another’s faculty and staff as sources for learning rather as competitors. Principals were especially pleased that some of the team proposals for the WOW Academies involved cross-school teams. Another district leader also pointed out how special education teachers, who did not always see themselves as fully integrated into the change efforts, were part of these cross-school teams. In the first few years of Fife’s transformation work, the district office convened a District Development Team led by district office staff, and this group generated most of the change efforts. Today, as is evident in his 2006 opening convocation, the superintendent exercises his moral authority, sets the course and celebrates progress along the journey, while expecting principals with teams in their schools to determine the specific routes to pursue the direction. Buildings have development funds to be used in support of their work. For the first time, during the 2007–08 school year the district will provide a Working on the Work Coordinator to serve all buildings, especially in the design of student work and in the coaching process related to work design. That person brings expertise and experience in Coaching for Design and will assist school staff in bringing more of the design work to the building level. The superintendent views his role
34 and the role of other district leaders as doing whatever is necessary and possible to assist principals in leading their buildings. Teachers are very much aware of how the role of principal has changed. One experienced secondary teacher says of his principal: “He’s a welcome presence in the classroom, and I solicit his advice. I do that with the assistant principal and the counselor as well. I think there’s a change in their attitudes about their job. We’re doing it together.” Teachers talk about the mutual respect between teachers and principals, which is vastly different from the status-laden roles of many school districts where teachers claim principals don’t understand or appreciate their work. An elementary teacher captures the nature of that change when she says, “Now it feels like there’s a team. When I first came it was us/them. Now it feels more like we. People still have distinct roles, but it feels more like a team.” If an organization has no clarity about beliefs to guide it or about a preferred future toward which everyone should work, then individuals who control budgets or who are perceived to have greater importance can unfortunately wield their influence based on the size of their budgets or the specifics of their position. In an organization that has established clarity about beliefs and overarching purpose, status and influence stem from how one contributes to the organization’s purpose whether that someone happens to be a relatively novice teacher or a veteran principal. The Power and Authority System in Fife operates well guided by the district compass, its Directional System. It should come as no surprise to public educators that the kind of customized systems change that Fife made does not come quickly or easily. In fact, the superintendent identifies Year Three as a crucial year; he says that it took until Year
35 Three to establish well—with increased trust and clarity of purpose—the district’s core business, the business of providing all students engaging work. As one of the secondary teachers says about current practice in Fife: “Instead of just throwing information out to kids and hoping some of it will land on them, now you’re watching what they’re doing and seeing if they are engaged. We’re going to do better; we’ll try something different.” And for the Fife Schools and, specifically, for the children they serve, that has made all the difference.
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TRANSFORMING ROLES AND RELATIONSHIPS
One District’s Choice to Pursue Greatness Today, Orange Schools’ values, its commitments to students and staff, its sense of purpose and focus, as well as the relationships between teachers and principals, between students and the adults in the district, between staff and the school board, and between the superintendent and other leaders across the district, are markedly different than what they were in 1997. The Schlechty Center tells the story of this northeastern Ohio school district’s transformation in this case study.
Transforming Roles and Relationships: One District’s Choice to Pursue Greatness Greatness is not a function of circumstance. Greatness, it turns out, is largely a matter of conscious choice, and discipline. Jim Collins, 2005 Change in School District Culture While teacher associations and other labor unions in school districts are too often cited as stumbling blocks to educational reform and, more often, accused of being at the root of education’s problems, one school district in northeastern Ohio negotiated and settled three contracts in a short time and with unprecedented goodwill during the spring and early summer of 2005. Not only were the negotiations free of posturing and accusations, the discussions resulted in unprecedented opportunities for union and association members to assume leadership in creating a public school district focused on the needs and interests of children and responsive as well to the needs and interests of all employees. The story of changing roles and relationships in the Orange Schools is demonstrated in the 2005 negotiations and resulting contracts, but the transformation itself has been taking place since 1997. Tom Bonda, current school board president, Cindy Eickhoff, school board member, and Cathy Keith, former school board member, all refer to the district change as an evolution. Bonda even says he recalls no single defining event marking changed relationships in the Orange Schools; rather, he refers to the change process as a long-term one with no sharp turns. Likewise, in keeping with the recollections of a multitude of Orange informants, the 2005 negotiations should be viewed within a multi-year context of organizational change undertaken by the Orange leadership. The spirit and style of the 2005 negotiations were possible because of a collaborative environment, changes in how district leaders and union leaders view themselves and one another, and a range of district efforts undertaken to change its culture since 1997. Today, the Orange Schools’ values, its commitments to students and staff, its sense of purpose and focus, as well as the relationships between teachers and principals,
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between students and the adults in the district, between staff and the school board, and between the superintendent and other leaders across the district are markedly different than what they were in 1997. Dennis Hansen, the Orange Teachers Association (OTA) President, says that the Association used to think of itself as the “guardian of teachers’ rights” and “guardian of the contract.” In the 2005 contract negotiations, the OTA sought, in partnership with the school district, what the OTA leadership refers to as “what would be in the best interest of the school district.” Likewise, Jim Ventura, President of the Local Ohio Association of Public School Employees (OAPSE), describes the changed relationship between the school district and his union when he describes the membership’s current point of view: “Their service is valued; they want to make that service better for the children; they are not treated as servants.” Likewise, Marcy Fludine, President of the Clerical and Educational Support Services Association (CESSA) Local, explained to the district administrators during the negotiation process that her membership— teacher assistants, lunchroom managers and workers, and others—did not yet feel valued within the district. She reports being hopeful about the district’s current willingness to demonstrate its respect for all employees; since negotiations concluded, Fludine has formally been included in the major district leadership vehicle known as Key Leaders, a group convened by the superintendent regularly to think about the future of the school district. In November, Fludine was invited for the first time to accompany some of the other district Key Leaders to a conference in Boston. Phil Dickinson, Director of Business for the Orange Schools, described the changed atmosphere surrounding the 2005 negotiations: I was used to coming out of negotiations and having to wear a bulletproof vest for about 6 months. We didn’t lose it this time. We didn’t get into conflicts. We didn’t take a step backwards. It’s really the leadership of the unions that have kept our work moving. It shows they are really key leaders. So what has contributed to this school district’s internally-driven reform efforts? What made this school district choose to hold a mirror up to itself, to invest hours in organizational and © SCHLECHTY CENTER FOR LEADERSHIP IN SCHOOL REFORM, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. TRANS.
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staff development, to put conflicts and shortcomings on the table in order to address them? How did a school district with high test scores, satisfied parents, and successful graduates arrive at making changes in the power relationships and the labor relations for all role groups?
The Role of Executive Leadership To understand what contributed to changes in the school district’s culture requires exploring the Orange Schools as Superintendent Daniel Lukich came to know the district in 1997. Lukich joined the district for some very specific reasons. As an experienced superintendent who had served previously in Ohio and more recently in Michigan, he was drawn to Orange because it was “someplace very good.” Being that “someplace very good,” however, was not all that Lukich sought. He sought a school district that had the potential—the readiness—to pursue deep, significant organizational change. In Michigan, Lukich had been exposed for the first time to the ideas of W. Edwards Deming, management thinker, writer, and innovator. Deming believed that: ... people should have joy in their work, that the system within which they work should be designed to make this possible ... that the system is management’s responsibility ... . www.deming.org Lukich was drawn to Deming’s emphasis on building systems that support and enhance quality. Lukich also first heard educational thinker and writer Phillip Schlechty’s ideas in Michigan in the early 1990s. He found that Schlechty’s message about the urgent need to change schools through a systems approach resonated with his own feelings and beliefs as a school superintendent. Schlechty maintains: I am persuaded, in fact, that only through revitalizing and redirecting the action of district-level operations can the kind of widespread and radical change that must occur become possible. Schlechty, 1997, p. 78 Lukich was interested in leading a district that was poised to reinvent itself and that would be willing to pursue a systems approach, rather than the piecemeal, programmatic approaches that litter the field of educational reform. Most importantly, Lukich sensed in the Orange school board
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a willingness to pursue a course of change that would be long-lasting, would outlive specific leaders, and would demonstrate to other districts what could be done to make a good district a great one. Although Lukich eventually opened the door to rigorous organizational self-examination and invited others throughout the organization to seek new ways for the district to create its future, that work did not begin simultaneously with his arrival. Making changes in district office leadership and addressing critically outdated facilities were first on his agenda. The personnel changes and the facilities improvement efforts provided, in his view, foundations for the organizational culture changes ahead.
Confronting the Brutal Facts In his 2001 book, Good to Great, Jim Collins presents a compelling analysis of what it takes for good companies to become great, including the willingness to “confront the brutal facts.” Collins suggests that when leadership makes it possible for people to hold a mirror up to the organization without fear and without potential reprisal, then such an organization stands a much better chance of achieving greatness. Yes, leadership is about vision. But leadership is equally about creating a climate where the truth is heard and the brutal facts confronted. There’s a huge difference between the opportunity to “have your say” and the opportunity to be heard. The good-to-great leaders understood this distinction, creating a culture wherein people had a tremendous opportunity to be heard and, ultimately, for the truth to be heard. Collins, 2001, p. 74. The Orange Schools, with an enrollment of 2,300 students, serves 8 municipalities: Hunting Valley, Orange Village, Pepper Pike, Woodmere, Moreland Hills, and portions of Bedford Heights, Solon, and Warrensville Heights. Although parts of its enrollment area reflect all the signs of suburban affluence—upscale businesses and restaurants and well-appointed homes—the district is growing in its diversity, both racial/ethnic and socioeconomic. Given its many indicators
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of success, the district might have followed the all too common practice of public schools who feel they are victims of public opinion: Let others throw stones at us and identify our shortcomings, but we will tout our strengths and good works, because no one else will. The Orange Schools had and still have much to tout, including exceptional test scores, healthy parental and community support, college-bound graduates, and admirable staff. So why did they not simply stay the course, continue their good work, and bask in the satisfaction of being a high-performing school district? Today, district leaders in all role groups would say that all was not well, despite the high test scores. In the view of many district leaders—particularly teacher association leaders, school board members, and the other unions’ leadership—there was much evidence in the late 1990s that the school district had no common direction, no clear, strong focus on students, and little trust in the relationships between and among teachers, district leaders, the school board, and the association and union leaders. If the district had not eventually confronted the massive distrust within the organization, lack of open communication between the board and the rest of the school district, and the stereotypical antagonistic posturing between the unions and the school administration, the cultural change so dramatically illustrated by the 2005 contract negotiations would never have happened. And the fact that in this era of external accountability when school districts can choose to merely comply with state and federal goals, the Orange Schools could have simply kept on “being good.” Before the Orange staff could confront the brutal facts about its dysfunctional relationships, however, they had to experience a series of unsatisfactory efforts at collaborative work. Teachers, support staff, and district administration recall attempts by staff in 1998 to address two issues: mold problems at one of the school buildings, and, subsequently, plans for a new school. Gatherings to deal with those issues stand today as concrete examples of just how dysfunctional the school district was. Individuals and representatives of groups in the district were inexperienced at talking together constructively, let alone working together to solve problems. The OTA leadership remembers feeling as though they were being blamed for the mold problems, simply because © SCHLECHTY CENTER FOR LEADERSHIP IN SCHOOL REFORM, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. TRANS.
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they had brought the issue to the table. Director of Business Services Phil Dickinson, newly hired into his position, found himself needing to tell teachers and others that he understood if they did not immediately trust him. He asked that they watch how he operated and, subsequently, judge him based on the extent to which he demonstrated his belief that those affected by a problem were in the best position to respond to the problem. Cindy Eickhoff suggests that it had definitely not been a school district practice to involve employees in such problem-solving processes: If there was ever an example of communication not working, that would be it. We had people dealing with a problem they didn’t understand. Getting the right people in the right chairs has been very important. Communication was totally broken. Lukich remembers that such meetings involved much sparring between and among people who carried baggage that was often unrelated to the issue at hand. And OTA President Hansen suggests that hostility and frustration related to addressing the mold problems at the old elementary school became the problem that “broke the camel’s back.” Everyone recognized that they were tired of the dysfunction, of the way they had done things: “We wanted to do things differently, make things better.” When in 1998 the community passed a bond issue that made it possible to build a new elementary school and redesign the existing middle school, an Education Specifications (Ed Specs) Group was formed to imagine possibilities for the new facilities. Phil Dickinson remembers the work of the group as a turning point: “… Ed Specs was an experience of trying to work together, a breakthrough experience to work with parents and varied municipalities. It became a source of hope.” He recalls the group thinking about science rooms, a multi-use building, and the layout of the elementary school. He also recalls how the group managed to work together, in stark contrast to how the district group confronting the mold problem had not worked effectively together. It should be noted, however, that some district leaders recall that those around the table of the Ed Specs Group were not yet a focused group, thinking and deliberating on behalf of the district’s
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beliefs and direction. They spoke from their wants and needs as individuals, not as part of a school district. Looking back on the Ed Specs’ work, district leaders today agree that it represented new possibilities for the future. Though the group lacked organizational direction and trust across role groups and buildings, its very existence paved the way for future work which would ultimately create district clarity about purpose and direction while establishing collaborative processes as part of what the district now refers to as “The Color of Orange.” Finally, Lukich cites the 2000 negotiations with the teacher association as a last dramatic example of hostile discussions, accusations, and mistrust that would conclude an era in which teachers and administrators viewed one another as natural antagonists and during which the school board and teachers operated at cross-purposes. Though the contract was settled, the school district had not yet “won” as a district; only the disparate groups—teachers, administrators, school board—could claim respective wins and losses in the usual war.
Pursuing Systemic Change: Becoming a Standard-Bearer School District In the early days of the Lukich tenure, the school district made some preliminary connections with the work of the Schlechty Center for Leadership in School Reform, based in Louisville, Kentucky. The Ohio Council of Academic Excellence had contracted with the Schlechty Center to do a series of workshops focused on what the Center proposes should be the core business of schools: providing all students with engaging work. Superintendent Lukich, the three principals, Director of Educational Programs Nancy Wingenbach, and several teachers attended workshops in Columbus, Ohio, where they first met Schlechty Center Senior Associate Judy Hummel and Schlechty Center President George Thompson. These district leaders were sufficiently impressed with the ideas presented in the workshops that they decided to invite Founder and CEO Phil Schlechty to come to the district to speak to the entire staff. That particular early experience with the Schlechty Center is remembered by various staff members as a less than auspicious occasion. Teachers and principals recall a snowy professional © SCHLECHTY CENTER FOR LEADERSHIP IN SCHOOL REFORM, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. TRANS.
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development day in 1999 when teachers were asked to report to school to hear a speaker, despite bad weather and cancellation of school for students. Not only were teachers resentful of being part of a command performance by some guru from Kentucky, but some of them felt uninformed as to why he was there or what his message might contribute to them or the district. Dave Tirpak, Brady Middle School teacher, recalls that all but a small group of the faculty resisted Schlechty’s message about the importance of focusing on student engagement—and how such a focus would require significant school and district change. Tirpak remembers conversations with other teachers to the effect that the speaker must not have known anything about Orange. Support staff, who were also in attendance, had little idea of what value the speaker’s ideas might have for them. Superintendent Lukich could have decided then and there, given the initial teacher response, to forget about student engagement and the accompanying system changes required by focusing on engagement. Fortunately for the district, he did not. Instead he took another approach. He invited teachers, principals, and district office staff to think together about what it would take for the district to be open enough to hear and consider Schlechty’s message. From the group’s wisdom emerged the understanding that the OTA could be instrumental in leading the initiative; over the next two years all exploration of work with the Schlechty Center was undertaken by cross-role groups led by the superintendent but always including the formal leadership of the OTA. Over time this collaborative approach would grow into the Key Leaders group, including the involvement of the two other unions’ leadership, school board members, the principals, and district office leaders. The superintendent now relies on this group to think together with him about district strategy. Recalling how the superintendent would invite various district leaders to consider new approaches and new ideas, Brady Middle School Principal Steve Hegner says: Dan invited a group of us to go to that first conference ... and asked us what we thought. And he’s done that with other initiatives, topics, and speakers. It wasn’t like “this is what we’re going to do.” He wanted to know what we thought this would mean for Orange. Several such experiences blossomed into what staff throughout the district recognize and value: a culture of collaboration. 8
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In 2001, the school district entered into a formal partnership with the Schlechty Center to pursue its reform work as a member of a network of like-minded districts from across the country convened by the Schlechty Center, the Standard-Bearer School District Network. Member districts used the Schlechty Center’s District Standards both to assess strengths and to guide developmental work. Because these district standards are designed to measure organizational capacity, rather than individual performance, they provided an appropriate vehicle around which former district antagonists might rally.
Expanding Collaborative Efforts The assessment of capacity required Orange staff to ask themselves hard questions about evidence of commitment to a central focus on students and student engagement, by looking at school district policies, procedures, programs, and practices. The assessment became for the Orange Schools a powerful way to confront the brutal facts about district incapacity to pursue a new vision of schooling. As recalled by various staff members, the assessment process became a hallmark of new collaborative work. One of the first district assessment teams illuminated the school district’s lack of articulated beliefs and shared vision for a desired future—and its reliance on bureaucratic management structures and processes. One strategy for fostering coordination of effort requires a system of rationalized rules and procedures combined with a formal set of rewards and sanctions that support compliance with expectations. A second strategy for fostering coordinated effort requires the development of shared beliefs, commitments, and values that have become sufficiently internalized by group members that they are routinely applied to almost all decisions, combined with heavy reliance on informal control and self-control as the primary mechanisms for enforcement. Schlechty, 2005, p. 157 At that time, the three contracts in the Orange Schools provided coordination by rationalized rules and procedures: contract provisions spelled out who did what for how long, and under what circumstances.
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Jim Ventura describes the nature of the former bureaucratic relationships: In the self-evaluation process I realized that the only place that Orange had any structure to our organization was in the labor contracts themselves. Besides the big issues of economics and health care, there were all the rules of daily operations of the school system. Because of the legal strength of a negotiated agreement in Ohio these rules of operations superceded the law as well as any school board policy. This caused a lot of conflict between administration, management, and labor. When management wanted to operate in what they believed was an efficient manner, the contract almost all the time dictated different terms and conditions. These terms and conditions were usually frozen in place for three to four years. Details of expectations, rewards, and punishments were spelled out with bureaucratic precision, along with detailed descriptions of procedures to be followed to obtain redress if either party— administration or employee—fell down in the expectations. The 2005 contracts still include some of the typical language spelling out rules, roles, and relationships, but the contracts also include atypical provisions leaving some of the daily operations and processes “open-ended,” so that the membership might participate on committees and work groups to actually determine the rules and procedures. The work today of the Orange Schools is coordinated less by regulation and bureaucratic procedures than by widespread collaboration and commitment to an organizational direction. So how did the Orange Schools use their district assessment to develop beliefs and articulate vision? Although not a teacher, Jim Ventura served on both the assessment team and the development team that subsequently created district beliefs for review and adoption. Ventura notes: “After the first self-evaluation process the teacher union leadership quickly started to develop new beliefs and core values. I was part of some of this work.” Furthermore, he credits his experience in the assessment and development process with giving him a range of ideas that he uses today in his work with his membership. Former school board member Cathy Keith remembers this process, specifically, as fundamental to making the school district the kind of place it is today. Nancy Wingenbach characterizes what happened relative to clarifying values and beliefs as a “…central focus on kids. If we keep that focus, we can do just about anything.” © SCHLECHTY CENTER FOR LEADERSHIP IN SCHOOL REFORM, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. TRANS.
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To clarify a district focus, various role groups from across the district revised existing beliefs and gave voice to a new set of beliefs and a sense of the district’s future. What beliefs and vision emerged from this process, and how do they now reframe district work and relationships?
Beliefs We believe that, in order to meet the needs of all students: • The core business of the Orange Schools is to make learning valuable, satisfying and challenging for all students. • All students will learn when engaged in and enthusiastic about their work. • The learning environment must be positive, supportive, nurturing and safe. • All students need adult advocates. • All individuals must have a commitment to quality in the services they provide to students and to each other. • Collaboration among the school district, home and community is vital to the success of all students. Vision Orange Schools will set the standard as an academically excellent educational environment where our students and community come to be authentically engaged in their work.
Beliefs Drive Collaborative Action Once created and published, such statements sometimes become perfunctory prefaces to district documents that gather dust on office shelves. To the contrary, evidence suggests that the Orange statements became living beliefs propelling action, specifically a series of organizational development efforts over the next several years. Highlights from some of these organizational development efforts include the following: •
Teacher Academies—development opportunities designed by and for teachers, led by Orange teacher leaders;
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Teacher Appraisal Groups (TAG)—a process designed over the course of two
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years by Orange teachers and administrators as an alternative teacher appraisal process; •
Goals Process—a means to encourage teachers to develop professional career and teaching practice goals that are based on the Standard-Bearer Design Qualities during each stage of their careers. (This process provides opportunities for intellectual discussion, inquiry learning and research about an area of interest and need identified by teachers.)
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Recruitment and Induction process—a system designed by teachers and administrators to ensure staff commitment to district values and direction;
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Learning Communities—efforts within each building to address specific needs of students;
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Interest-Based Bargaining—an approach used for the 2005 negotiations.
Each of these processes, structures, or subsystems is illustrative of district design work based on beliefs and fashioned collaboratively by district staff. The intentional design of collaborative groups in the school district plays an important role in the cultural shift. Dan Hanstein, Orange High School principal, Steve Hegner, Brady Middle School principal, and Mark Haag, Moreland Hills Elementary principal, are members of the Key Leaders group. While Hanstein has been working with staff in his school about changing how time is used for students and staff during the school day, he has also served on district teams refining how results are defined and identified for the district as a whole. Hegner and Haag were key members of teams that redesigned the district’s Evaluation System and that created a Recruitment and Induction System—at the same time that they each led work in their buildings to create processes for teachers to focus on engagement and to address the needs of an increasingly diverse student body. In the Orange Schools, principals who serve both a school and the district as a whole will be key contributors to the district’s future.
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By intentionally redefining the roles of all staff, Orange has established new and productive relationships between and among people, thus making it possible to have a collaborative culture that puts students and the work provided them at the center of the organization. As Nancy Wingenbach puts it: As we work to continuously improve our capacity to promote student learning, there has been a shift in focus. Previously, we paid attention to “teaching,” and now, as a result of our understanding of our “real work,” our attention is on “learning.” A significant aspect of that shift is the need to assess student progress, build in interventions, and actively design instructional strategies and lessons that engage our students in learning. The district leadership has marshaled the energy and imagination of a host of its employees, without restricting anyone because of role group, to take on the demanding and sometimes painful work of self-examination and, subsequently, the design work of creating new processes, structures, and subsystems.
Teacher Collaboration This story of cultural change would not be complete without highlighting what the leadership of the two non-teacher unions have to say about the role of teacher leadership in contributing to the changes they have seen between their unions and the district. Both OAPSE and CESSA leaders believe that the teachers led the way for them and their organizations to become full members in the school district. Dennis Hansen identifies the Teacher Academies begun in 2001–02 as a benchmark for changes in teacher and administrator relationships. The Academies made it possible for teachers to have new professional experiences working with one another—and to lead the design of that work. ... it is becoming clear that the way an organization deals with change is determined in large part by the systems devised to support the creation, importation, and diffusion of knowledge within the organization, as well as by the way knowledge is shared between the organization and the larger environment. Schlechty, 2005, p. 88
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Lukich understood that if student engagement were to become the centerpiece of district work, more than a handful of district employees would need to know what student engagement could mean for the district. Nancy Wingenbach assumed lead responsibility for rethinking how teachers might learn about student engagement—and how that knowledge might enhance their work. Wingenbach began work with the Schlechty Center’s Judy Hummel to consider a new approach to teacher learning. They sought to design a vehicle for teacher learning that would reflect a specific moral norm—that teachers, like students, should be treated as volunteers in learning processes; that their needs and interests should be taken into account. Wingenbach and Hummel sought to create experiences for teachers that would be invitational and that would capture their attention and commitment. Historically Orange had provided its teachers staff development experiences focused on classroom management, differentiated instruction, and other such topics, but the sessions were typically focused on teacher performance rather than on student needs and interests. Dave Tirpak, who has been a building representative for the OTA throughout the change process, says, “We didn’t really focus on the students. We took them for granted. They did well. Now we focus on students and on their engagement.” Wingenbach was determined to make what would become the Teacher Academies intellectually stimulating and professionally meaningful and useful, so that they would result in growing interest and commitment to student engagement throughout the district. The Academies would be a departure from conventional professional development experiences: The fact remains, however, that in spite of serious efforts at improvement, staff development and continuing education offered by schools and in the context of schools is even now too often pallid and intellectually vacuous. Rather than being viewed by teachers as a learning opportunity to be embraced, staff development is a requirement to be endured. Schlechty, 2005, p. 98 Initially, Hummel and Wingenbach designed a two-day experience for teachers which would give them an introduction to the Schlechty Center’s Working on the Work framework,
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which focuses on student engagement and design qualities that teachers might use to increase engagement. As part of the two-day experience, teachers worked together to create lessons or units that they could take back to their classrooms and use. They also had an opportunity to use a structured process to look at student work, draw inferences about student engagement, and analyze the work provided to students for evidence of qualities that were likely to engage them. The Teacher Academies became a vehicle for stimulating, productive collaborative work by teachers. At the conclusion of the first two-day Academy, Wingenbach did something very simple and straightforward that was to become very significant: She asked the first group if they thought other teachers should have a similar opportunity to learn together and design work together. They clearly recommended that the district should provide other teachers such an opportunity, and so the district scheduled additional sessions. The simple practice of seeking teachers’ ideas and recommendations demonstrated what would become common practice. Teachers would come to feel respected and valued; the former era associated with cantankerous discussions about a moldy building and hostile contract negotiations was passing. Dave Tirpak comments as well that, whereas teachers had previously been highly competitive with one another, trying to outdo one another in terms of making a “classroom splash,” they now talk with pride about their role in facilitating an Academy, or about the work they designed as a part of an Academy. Steve Hegner recalls a proposal drafted by a Brady Middle School teacher leader after the early Teacher Academies. The proposal outlined what would become Brady’s Teacher Lead Team, a vehicle for teachers to work with the principal in leading building initiatives. After word spread to the elementary and high schools, each level created their distinct version of this vehicle, which has become a way for teachers to identify issues unique to the building and address them collaboratively with the principals. Hegner attributes the creation and evolution of the Teacher Lead Team to the common ground teachers found as a part of the Teacher Academies.
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Unfreezing the System: Redesigning Power and Authority Relationships Those in roles of authority in learning organizations rely much less on the power which comes from their positions than on human relationships and influence guided by an organization’s values. What Wingenbach initiated from an administrative position became, eventually, the property of the teachers themselves. Not so long ago, power and authority relationships in Orange inhibited the school district from making students its focus; the system was frozen into separate role groups, each with disparate interests: school board, superintendent and district office, principals, teachers, and support staff. Cheryl McDonald, OTA Secretary, identifies the way the Teacher Academies utilized teacher leaders to facilitate sessions as a critical shift in the way the district did business: “It was so powerful to have our own teachers leading the Academies.” When teachers facilitate sessions or lead other teachers there is a much stronger possibility of influence on teaching and learning than if strangers or supervisors act as experts. Furthermore, two district decisions related to Teacher Academies reflect a change in power and authority relationships: not only were teachers asked to lead the sessions, but also participants were asked to volunteer. This invitation to learn together in the Teacher Academies continues as part of district practice today. The district created a context very different from the typical school bureaucracy, in which teachers are mandated to attend certain staff training sessions, begrudgingly put in their seat time, and leave with little or no change in their thinking—and little sense that the district respects them. When Orange Key Leaders reflect on changes they believe are significant in the Orange Schools, Steve Hegner shares how the organization has opened the possibility for many to gain full membership and to assume leadership: We used to have star teachers who had influence, were recognized, invited to conferences—and then there was everyone else. Since Standard-Bearer, anyone who works hard on behalf of the district can contribute. Participation is not based just on seniority and an inner circle. A call is put out and folks can choose to answer. I think of all the different teachers, including new ones, who have been to conferences. It’s not a tenure thing. People are not “chosen.” The extent of your involvement is up to you. © SCHLECHTY CENTER FOR LEADERSHIP IN SCHOOL REFORM, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. TRANS.
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Bob Coyne, former OTA president, recalls how little respect administrators formerly showed him as a high school teacher. In fact, Coyne embraced a legacy of hardball union tactics learned from his police officer and union negotiator father, because he saw no other way to get the attention of the administration around important issues of teaching and learning. Coyne contrasts former days with his current relationship with Superintendent Lukich: “We went from slamming the door on each other to patting one another on the back.” A turning point in Coyne’s thinking about what might be possible between administration, school boards, and association leadership occurred in the spring of 2002 at a Schlechty Center Key Leaders Conference in Baltimore, Maryland. First, Coyne recalls that he had never been invited to attend a conference before with district administrators and school board members. Furthermore, he had never experienced conversations—both those formally a part of the conference and informally as part of the natural flow of discussion when people travel together—in which the district leaders cared about his reactions and ideas. He was accustomed to presenting positions, concerns, and grievances on behalf of the OTA to the district, but he had no experience in pursuing genuine discussion as the group did in Baltimore. Furthermore, the keynote guest speaker, Adam Urbanski, President of the Rochester Teachers Association and Director of the national Teacher Union Reform Network, had a profound impact on Coyne and others. Urbanski provided Coyne with a picture of what is possible when district leaders—superintendent, school board, and teacher leaders—choose to work together on behalf of the school district. Coyne admits that such a vision was one that he had, up to that conference, held no hope of realizing. “I started to believe this might work. Board members were there with us. The conference agenda was designed to bring us together.” Coyne also recalls the difficulties he faced when he returned to the school district. Teachers were not immediately ready to imagine different kinds of relationships among the district administration, the teacher association, and the school board. “I had to convince teachers that I wasn’t being bought. Some of my colleagues thought I had become ‘too soft.’” Although Coyne is © SCHLECHTY CENTER FOR LEADERSHIP IN SCHOOL REFORM, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. TRANS.
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no longer an officer in the OTA, the current OTA leadership refer to Coyne’s work as critical in refashioning relationships within the school district; others in the Orange Key Leaders group all mention Coyne as someone who not only carries much of the history of the school district’s culture—past and present—but who also is a leader who helped cause the culture to change. Former school board member Keith recalls that same Baltimore conference from a different perspective. She had not looked forward to traveling and participating with Bob Coyne, who has since become a trusted colleague. She viewed him in 2002 as simply an aggressive, hard-headed union leader. But over the course of the conference Keith gained new insights into Coyne as a teacher, a leader, and a human being: Adam Urbanski talked about what unions could be. That began what we have become. We had defining discussions about what unions should look like. It was a great few days. Later, Bob Coyne stood up and spoke on behalf of what was possible and I never thought he would. We now have a better idea of what it can look like. We have a fragile structure that we have created. Marilyn Mauck, former OTA president, characterizes OTA’s earlier relationship with the school administration as a “long walk across Chagrin Boulevard,” the road separating the school campuses from the administration building. In truth the physical distance is a short stroll, but in practice the distance was lengthened by a history of disputes, distrust of both parties, and destructive definitions of roles which separated individuals and kept them from working together. Mauck recalls that personal battles between the OTA and the Orange administration led to some initial changes, but that ultimately, the redefinition of roles and relationships has led to changes so significant that she has had to ask herself, “Could this be real?” In discussing the 2005 negotiations, Mauck observes that the district demonstrated real compassion for teachers and sought their perspective. Mauck goes on to say, “It’s not personal anymore.” Today, Mauck confidently predicts that any problem at the heart of the district—concerning students or learning—will be solved and will best be addressed by teachers working with district office leaders and the school board.
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In reflecting on the way the school board works with the district, Tom Bonda says: Now there’s a sense that there’s nothing we cannot fix by working together—this group of Key Leaders expects to find a solution for any problem or issue. We will ask—what’s the best thing for this district, not about individuals or different groups.
Future Orientation The processes, structures, and subsystems that Orange has built through collaborative effort indicate the likelihood that this school district is poised to address future challenges in healthy and creative ways. Key Leaders throughout the district are optimistic, though some express caution about being too congratulatory too soon, given their understanding of the complexity of social systems such as school districts. Cindy Eickhoff recognizes that ensuring that the district’s culture runs deep is critical, ongoing work. She even says that there is a “fragile” quality to the changes the district has made. As she elaborates on the nature of such fragility, she discusses the importance of thinking about continuity of leadership, of ensuring that the next superintendent hired, the next director hired, and the next school board member elected will participate deeply in learning and understanding what the current Key Leaders believe, value, and have attempted to build into the organization. (Three of the school board’s five members are new as of January, 2006, and Dr. Lukich is providing them an ongoing induction experience.) In looking toward the future of Orange Mark Haag recognizes both accomplishment and unfinished business: Yes, a lot of progress has been made and we, over the last couple of years, recognized this, but there is a certain amount of “it’s fragile” and there’s still a challenge there. While we’re celebrating and recognizing progress we’ve made, there’s still work ahead of us to keep the momentum going. Jim Ventura characterizes unfinished business from his vantage point as providing leadership development experiences for the middle management employees among the membership of OAPSE so that the “living contract” created through 2005 negotiations fulfills its promise to the membership. Dan Hansen talks of developing future leaders among Orange teachers, but he © SCHLECHTY CENTER FOR LEADERSHIP IN SCHOOL REFORM, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. TRANS.
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also addresses the importance of the Orange Schools being a “Standard-Bearer” for other school districts. With more than a little of the idealism that marks a moral leader, Hansen talks about his responsibility to serve the district and his responsibility as part of the Orange leadership to provide a service to other districts with lessons about change and the value of undertaking this sometimes painful work. The 2005 edition of Pride, a school district publication distributed throughout the community, gives some indication of what might be thought of as an organizational “disposition” to confront the brutal facts, a disposition which in this publication identifies some of the substance of future work. Lukich lists a series of questions that serve as recent challenges to this highperforming district: • How do we address the changing demographics of the district as reported by the most recent demographic studies? • How do we support and improve achievement and learning for students from diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds? • How can we meet the needs and improve our program for middle level students at all grade levels? • How can we better support our teaching staff through Induction, Evaluation and Goals process to improve instruction? • How do we create a professional learning community and provide a more flexible building schedule to create time for teacher collaboration? • How do we more directly involve our support staff—OAPSE and CESSA employees—in their search to improve the quality of their work and profession? • How can we support the change needed on a building-by-building basis to meet the needs of elementary, middle school, and high school staff and students? In this front page article, a superintendent could just as well have listed the awards and honors earned and kept the challenges out of the public eye. The fact that Lukich chose not to do so is indicative of an organizational disposition marked by candor, self-appraisal, and relentless pursuit of quality. Lukich recognizes that important future work of the Orange Schools will proceed on the collaborative relationships built and supported by the school district. Some of that future work will be characterized by increased attention to using data about students, and by district support
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for learning communities of teachers in every school addressing the changing needs and interests of students. This district might have basked in the bounty of its favorable circumstances. Rather, the Orange Schools consciously chose a different course marked sometimes by individual hardship and organizational complications. The Orange Schools today have a newly developed strength as an organization—vigorous relationships between administrators, teachers, various union leaders, and school board. Such a cultural shift happens by design, not by accident. It happened in Orange because the leadership was strategic in setting a course for systemic change; its teachers were invited to be partners in leading that change; all union leaders became organizational resources, rather than organizational deficits; and the school board embraced its role as one dimension of a leadership team, working in concert with other key leaders in the school system.
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