Thank you, Jenny and Carol. I appreciate the invitation to be here. As I look out in the audience I see a lot of old friends and people who I have labored in the vineyards with over the years and I'm delighted to be here to play the role to, I think kind of frame this conversation that you're going to be having for the balance of the day. I want you to know that I approached this task with a fair degree of humility, because I think we're all working in a domain right now where we're discovering knowledge, we're experimenting with new roles, we're breaking new pathways, crossing some borders that haven't been crossed in some time, and reinventing a set of relationships to fit the environment that we find ourselves in now. And so it is discovery work that we're in the process of doing and I don't want to pretend to you to (a) be an expert on the work that you're doing day in and day out or (b) to have the answers to a lot of the kinds of pressing questions that I know you're all dealing with. What I think I can do, based on my experience, having worked in this kind of environment for a long time both as a member of a state board or head of a state review commission—I did a lot of work with the PEW Forum with state departments of education all over the country; I'm doing some work now with Wallace trying to connect up some state departments of education with special districts in both Ohio and Kentucky— at any rate, on the basis of this kind of experience, to step back and put it in context that maybe helps us have a conversation today. And in doing that I draw heavily on the work of other folks, as you'll see in the PowerPoint that I'm going to go through today.
I see the folks from the Education Alliance here; Mary Beth and her colleagues did this book Leadership Capacities for a Changing Environment. Part of my presentation will draw on that work. My colleagues at Harvard at the Public Education Leadership project have done some work on coherency and the development of a theory of action, which I think is critical to the way in which we think about this work, both at the local level and at the state level. And then our own research at the Rennie Center where we focused on the work of our colleagues in Massachusetts and the predicament that a typical high-performing state department of education finds itself in in the current context will be part of the presentation. And then I want to acknowledge that my colleague Jill Norton, the assistant director of the Rennie Center, who's in the back of the room, did a big piece of research and some of this handout you have, this yellow sheet, is going to speak to a lot of the examples that are going to come up in this presentation that I'm going to mention later on. And I'm not going to spend a lot of time describing those examples simply because time isn't going to allow for that, but you have contact information for these examples that you can follow up with as we go forward.
So what I'm going to do is go through a fairly lengthy PowerPoint presentation. I hope to end with sufficient time that we can have some conversation between ourselves in the whole room and maybe even some time at the tables. We'll see how that goes. Feel free: we're a small enough group, so if you have comments or questions, please feel free to interrupt me at any time. Once again, what I'm attempting to do is put a framework for a conversation, by no means complete, but give you some reference points for your conversation later on today. My next task is to figure out how to advance this.
This is just a quick outline of what I'm going to be talking about. I mentioned most of those so I'm not going to talk about that.
Well, you know better than I do what the imperatives are here for why to rethink this relationship between state education agencies, and states more broadly, and the work of local school districts.
Obviously there are all kinds of legal constraints, the pressures of accountability systems. No Child Left Behind is probably the most prominent in our minds now and gives rise to things like the Comprehensive Centers and so forth, but many of us were laboring under some of these same pressures long before No Child Left Behind came along, and the whole notion that if we were going to be in a new era in which states were charged with now taking a leadership role with respect to education and setting the goals for educational outcomes for students, and in some of our states attaching stakes to those goals, that we have both an educational and moral imperative to help provide the capacity to districts to achieve those kinds of results.
As my colleague Dick Elmore says with his concept of reciprocal accountability, "for each increment of expectation that I raise for you in the field in terms of what I expect you to perform, I have to give you, simultaneously give you, an element of capacity to reach that goal."
So it isn't enough, and I think one of the critical failures I think of educational reform in its first chapter, not only in our state of Massachusetts, but generally speaking, was to over-emphasize and over-invest in the setting of the targets and the developing of the systems to measure progress to those targets. All of which was primarly, legitimate, and very important work, but to under-estimate the need to which we had to build capacity in order to get there, and to under conceptualize how we were going to do that.
So that if we build a system that is going to set new, higher targets, unprecedented targets, for the achievement of students in schools—to ask in effect educators to do something that they'd never done before, to get all students to proficiency when before it was sufficient to get some students to proficiency, and a small number of students to proficiency—we have changed the job entirely as a policy community. And to do that without attending to how you build the capacity to get there was naïve at best.
And so we have both an educational and moral imperative to give some thought to that. That's a less glamorous part of the equation; it doesn't grab the headlines in the way standards and accountability, and stakes and assessments, grab the headlines in newspapers, but it's vitally important work if we have any hope of realizing the aspirations of education reform.
So, that's what we're really here talking about today, is fashioning a new set of relationships that allow the state education agencies and other creatures at the state level to help local districts develop the capacity sufficient to achieve the kind of ambitious goals that states have set.
Not only have we set ambitious goals at the state level, but we've put in accountability mechanisms that in effect call out districts and schools for underperformance. And that, in my view, is where the rubber hits the road on our moral obligation to do something with respect to helping districts is: If we're going to point out their incompetency at achieving the goals that we've set for them then we have a moral obligation to be there to help show them how to get that work done.
And this is tricky. Because it's not at all clear that we know how to get all students to proficiency, anyplace. And so we're kind of struggling ourselves as we think about building these relationships.
Well, this is the kind of data that you're all familiar with in your respective environments and I realize it varies from state to state. The point is that there's continuing pressure, and in some of our states growing pressure with numbers of schools, numbers of districts that are clearly in need of help and have been publicly identified as needing help.
You know, because these are the laws under which you operate, what the sort of the official statutory language calls for—school support teams, the involvement of distinguished principals and teachers in collaboration with regional technical assistance centers, higher education, private providers—and you'll see some figures there relative to current levels of compliance on that.
Okay, here's some background on state capacity issues and here I'm going to draw from the Education Alliance's work which I thought was an excellent piece examining the work of several states in the early stages of addressing these challenges. They outline some of the factors that we're all up against in trying to mount a comprehensive effort here.
First of all, little research has been done on state and district supports or interventions in low-performing schools that could inform new work. We start with a base—I mean, partly the work that we have done at the Rennie Center gets disproportionate attention, in my view, because there's so little out there right at the moment, frankly.
There is so little concrete examination of state departments playing this role. Partially because not many state departments have played this role in an active way, partly because it hasn't grabbed the attention of the research community. Most state education agencies have not historically engaged in the kind of school improvement work that's demanded by the new pressures of the accountability systems. So there isn't a history, there isn't a culture, there isn't an organizational structure within most of our SEAs to support the kind of work that's most urgently needed now.
All of you are up against the problem of resources day-to-day. There aren't the resources there to do the job, there isn't a constituency out there in the field, notwithstanding many of them need help, turn to you for help, want more help than they have in the past—at least that's been my observation traveling around the country, you much more commonly hear people now talking about wanting to work with the state education agency and get support from them than they did in the past.
But still and all, if you put a dollar on the table with a typical district superintendent and say where do you want that dollar to go? To the district or the state education agency; the district needs the money and they're going to want the money.
So there's nobody banging on most state house doors saying, "Give more money to the state education agency to do this work," even though they might be banging on that same door saying "How can you expect us to achieve at these levels when we get no support from the state?" It puts you in an awful bind in that regard. And, the demands:
You could argue that, since the onset of standards based reform in the '90's in most of our states, that leadership role that has been demanded by the standards movement, where states really step unabashedly into a leadership position of setting goals for state's education system, developing assessment mechanisms, and holding various parties accountable for performance now escalates, doubles or trebles, their responsibility with respect to the operation of education in your respective states, and in most cases the budget hasn't anywhere near kept pace with that. In fact, in many states it's slipped behind as a proportion of the overall budget, as we'll see when we get to the Massachusetts case study here.
Current work, if you take a snapshot as our colleagues at the Education Alliance did, focuses in on these areas: tackling capacity, shifting priorities within a state education agency, trying to align resources and policies, centralizing control, and basing adaptive change in state education agencies because the role is changing so dramatically, taking advantage of new opportunities, and especially this last one, coming to the conviction, as I'll talk about later on with respect to the PELP work, zeroing in on the subject of instruction being the core business in our field, teachers and students in the presence of content, and trying to think about our work at the state level as trying to improve that transaction at the heart of the education endeavor.
The kinds of activities and actions that agencies are engaged in: these are the few of them you can see them you can identify with them. I'm sure you're engaged in them in most cases yourselves.
You have many agencies providing targeted assistance with respect to data, or grants, for various kinds of functions that are happening out in districts. Some setting up networks of low-performing schools with more successful schools and in other cases, some states offering incentives for school districts or individual schools to adopt whole school reform programs.
The range of district responses that you typically get to these state policies range from highly fragmented, sort of incapable of responding—you know, lacking in internal accountability themselves, so when it comes to an external agency trying to impose accountability on them it really has very little impact because there are just no mechanisms there to connect at all.
Sort of in between is an inconsistent response: yeah, we get it at the local level, we're gonna try and do this, but we're doing ten thousand other things simultaneously, so we're not really focused on this and the work may or may not get done to— you know, the desirable response is a fully coordinated kind of response.
The issues that I'm sure you find in your day-to-day work that the Education Alliance uncovered in its was leadership at the local level that is truly focused on results and educational outcomes; that thinks strategically about focusing in on the core business, which is improvement of instruction; that aligns critical policies in that regard; that lines up the budget and aligns that with the purpose of the district; and articulates clear expectations about not only outcomes at the classroom level but also practices, and what constitutes high quality practice.
Other issues are the culture and history for the way in which we do professional development and cultivate teacher learning at the local level. So many of our districts and systems really [are] lacking in anything approaching a human resource development system.
I often tell this story. I'd been teaching a heavy education policy management program at the school of education at Harvard and I teach a course, an introductory course, on education policy. I have in it many "refugees" from large city school systems who taught three or four years and come out of those school systems thinking about keeping in the education field but changing their direction in terms of policy and so forth. Because they've come, sadly, to the conclusion that they can't teach.
And I have a panel on a given day in this class and when I asked ten of them to get up there and within 5 minutes each to talk about the kind of mentoring and induction they've received, the kind of professional development they've received, and the kind of supervision and evaluation they've received. Many of these are Teach for America refugees, who've come out of big city school systems with whom I had the occasion to meet periodically with the superintendents, and if you talk with the superintendents you're had the feeling that everything was peace and happiness in the district and they had the most sophisticated human resource development system you could imagine.
But when you get down to the grassroots level, the answers that they give to those questions, the responses they give to those prompts, are alarmingly, stereotypically negative. That is to say, with almost no exception people report being shoved into the room at the beginning of their career, door shut, do your own thing. In the past 5 years I've heard more about mentoring programs, but I've heard almost invariably, in three or four cases in the mentoring, somehow it didn't work out. It wasn't a well crafted, well developed, well supported mentoring program. Yeah, there was mentoring but it didn't really work.
In the area of professional development, largely irrelevant to what these young teachers were doing in their classrooms in terms of trying to help them improve their practice and become more competent practitioners in the early going. And finally in the area of supervision and evaluation: typically drive-by supervision and evaluation. If they get it at all, they get it for a few minutes, they don't get quality follow through. It happens maybe once a year. They're basically on their own.
So, as a result of this experience thrust into the front lines, typically in urban education they find it not a very satisfying experience, not surprisingly. And they internalize their experience to say, "I found out I'm not really cut out for teaching." Which is tragic. Given the rates of attrition that we have in these districts, running up to 50% in three years, it points to a real problem in our sector. And they come out of the field and say "You know, I'm just not cut out to do this."
Well, what we try to say to them is, "You didn't find out you're not cut out do it, you found out that, like most of the rest of us in humanity, put into the front lines with no support you can't be successful. But what you need to know if you want to find out if you can teach or not is, how you'd work out in a situation where you had a modicum of support."
So, that's a little bit of a digression, but this whole aspect of developing our primary assets within public school systems, which are our people, in whom 80% of our budgets are invested, is woefully underdeveloped. As are the development of communities of practice. We hear a lot of talk these days about what does it take to get high quality people to come in to teaching. A lot of talk about salary and differentiating roles and salaries and so forth and I think that's good and I think that's interesting, but in the end, when you typically sit down with a group of teachers, what they're looking for is the opportunity to become part of a working, collaborating, professional, growing community. They want to learn themselves and be part of a community of practice. And that, for the most part, is underdeveloped in most of our districts.
And the use of data and evidence, and we've got districts all along the spectrum, in terms of their capacity to do this. I will say, in my own experience this is probably the most dramatic change I see in over 15 years of reform say, in Massachusetts is walking into schools, where even ten years ago you almost never heard anybody talk about data of any kind in terms of doing their work. And you now do hear it. People are grappling and struggling with it sometimes, but they're thinking about it, and they're thinking about using evidence to inform their practice and that's definitely a good thing.
So, choices and challenges that the Education Alliance concluded with for SEAs and districts that they have to make in order to intensify this work is allocating limited resources. If you're going to be challenged from a budgetary standpoint, where do you target your resources? What kind of intensity and duration should, for example, SEAs have in their involvement with local districts? How much is top down? How much is bottom up? Where does top down meet bottom up?
All of these questions relative to centralization and shaping the appropriate roles and structures, because this is new work, and therefore demands new rules and new structures, and I know you're all experimenting with this.
Their concluding advice is, in order to do this work effectively you need to build feedback systems to create coherence. In other words, as we're trying out these new roles, as we're measuring and calibrating different degrees of centralization and top down and bottom up, there's got to be a regular feedback loop so we can adjust and adapt, you know, the sort of adaptive leadership model of getting these systems right, but the focus has to undeniably and relentlessly be on instruction and learning. That you've got to look at equity issues in terms of the application of this work across the board. And all means all. And evaluating the reform strategies, which I really think is part of the feedback systems.
Okay, I want to digress a moment to talk about something. We've been working with Harvard with a set of major urban districts across the country, and thinking with them about this challenge of developing strategic coherency in doing the work, and in particular focusing in on the core business of instruction and education.
And so we frame it as coherent strategy, and describe that as a set of key action steps designed to achieve critical goals. And key action steps that are logically integrated. I sort of introduced this and I'm going to run through it quickly as a way of thinking about, not only what we should be encouraging districts to do in their work, but what we ought to be encouraging individual schools to do, and by extension a lens or framework or template we ought to be putting over our own work.
So you can apply—I'm going to talk about it in the context of the district here, but I encourage you to think of it in the context of your own work, but think of it also in the context of the work of an individual school.
Here's the framework. I'm sorry it's probably a little hard to see at a distance, but at the very heart of it is the instructional core which I think is the next slide.
[pause to view slide]
And I think that instructional core is: teacher, student and content, which is the focus of the districtwide strategy and action steps. [Whoops! Messes with remote.] If you saw that framework, it had key action steps arrayed the core and then some environmental factors. [more remote business]
And I'm going to talk just briefly about some of these key elements that go along with this: capacity, system structure, culture, and stakeholders. [more remote business; long pause] These are the five organizational elements to think of in terms of aligning a coherent strategy, and we'll come back to definitions of each of those in a moment.
Strategy requires a theory of action; a theory of action is typically preceded by a mission; a theory of action we could roughly define as a collective belief about causal relationships between action and desired outcomes. So an example of that would be, if you improve instruction, you're going to improve educational outcomes.
The theory is preceded by a mission, so a district may have as its mission, "Our mission is that all students shall reach proficiency in English and Math."
Strategy is a set of actions in service of a theory of action. That is, providing capacity and supports to the instructional core with the objective of raising student performance. Again, this is just a framework in which to think about the work that we're doing and making it coherent.
Strategy guides choices and helps make decisions on action and budget. It's kind of a lens through we look at those things that we think of doing, and it helps us make decisions. Once you settle on a strategy, it's very important that it be well communicated, that it makes a clear connection between mission and objectives, that by virtue of having a clear theory of action it then provides a focus on what and who is important, it illuminates working relationships, it defines the parameters of measurement, it takes into account the environment, and it allows for adaptation as you move along.
Key action steps at the high level, yet specific actions the district must take in order to execute its strategy and accomplish its objectives. In each of these slides—and I won't go through all of them as we move through here but I will on this one—there are some critical questions to ask: What specific actions should we take to implement our strategy? Is the list of key action steps mutually exclusive? Are some key action steps in the list embedded in others?
So, other systems that affect your capacity to carry out your key action steps that need to be taken into consideration and adapted to, include: Stakeholders, who of course all the people and groups that have a stake in the success of the district and the ability to influence its policy and practices;
Culture, the predominant set of beliefs and norms that define and drive behavior in the district, which includes examining what beliefs underlie your own theory of action, what beliefs currently exist, how do you change the environment in which you operate in that set of beliefs from what is to what you want it to be;
What kind of organizational arrangements and relationships enable individuals to perform key action steps? What are current roles and responsibilities? What do you need them to be, in order to execute this strategy? Again, how do you migrate from where you are to where you need to be in order to be effective at implementing this strategy?
Same applies to the systems, the processes and procedures used to manage the district. What systems are needed to support each key action step? And this applies to things like resource allocation, data, training and professional development, organizational learning, etc.
Capacity is simply the resources required to implement key action steps and execute strategy: Skills, knowledge, people, money, all those things.
And then all of this takes place, if you remember back to the diagram, in an environment that's suffused with various regulations and statutes that constrain the district or create opportunities: contracts, notably teacher union contracts, that provide a different set of constraints; funding, which has its own limitations; and then a whole set of local political considerations that have to be taken into account.
So that piece, again, is just a lens for providing coherency to work at whatever level you're doing it.
Several years ago we began work, and there was a paper prior to this, and then we did a case study, essentially of Massachusetts, in which we took a look at that work at the time—and this was largely a snapshot that we would derive in late 2004, early 2005—of the, in our view, the way we began it, the predicament of a state department of education who lacks sufficient resources to do the job that was at least implied and under No Child Left Behind specified for it to do in the future.
Our role in the Rennie Center was to put this on the state policy stage in a way that would enable policymakers to come to grips with the imperatives that I mentioned earlier, which is: If we're going to have this kind of an accountability system in our state—never mind No Child Left Behind, we had it before anyway—we've got to be about the business of building capacity in a serious way, or we really have no right to set standards and hold people accountable for the achievement of those standards.
So we wanted to describe in this the—it's essentially a gap analysis between what we'd like to be there in terms of the capacity to help districts, understanding again that we are feeling our way in terms of exactly what that role should be and what currently exists.
So, this was a case study, we first of all begin by establishing the case that obviously there are persistent achievement gaps right now. And we aren't where we hope to be in terms of closing those gaps—however you choose to categorize those gaps or define those gaps, whether it's gaps between various subgroups, whether it's gaps between the population overall and the standard of proficiency, whether it's gaps between U.S. students and students like our students in other countries around the world—we've got gaps all over the place that we need capacity to close and so that keeps us attentive to this.
These numbers are no longer accurate; they're I think valuable only to give you a rough approximation. In Massachusetts, we have a high level of schools and districts that have been classified as needing help in one way shape or form, I'm not going to get into the particulars of it, but we're classifying more and more schools as needing help and we have a limited capacity to provide that help. And the point of this report was to turn the spotlight on that.
So we did the work; we rationalized doing this work because of the continuing achievement gaps, because of the logic of standards-based accountability that I just articulated relative to needing to focus on building capacity if we were going to set high standards for all. With a coming to grips in the policy community with—in our state, and we're proud in Massachusetts of having done an educational reform act that actually provided substantial new financial resources to many districts, but did it in a way that those resources went out in an unrestricted way.
It wasn't categorical funding; it was funding that went to districts and they could make the decisions on how to spend it, with an eye to sort of a tight-loose philosophy of decentralized government. And the notion was, it was the state's role to set the standards and hold people accountable and measure progress, and it was up to local communities in deference to local discretion and professional judgment, to figure out how to spend the money.
Ten years having done that, [there are] still persistent achievement gaps, a number of policy makers in our environment, and in states all across the country that I encounter are stepping back and saying "Well, maybe if we're going to put more money down, we need to be more directive in terms if how we do it, because the decisions that are currently being made are not leading to substantial closings of the achievement gap."
And finally, that the support that we have to give, even in those states which are, relatively speaking in the minority, where states have provided substantial new financial support to accompany new, higher goals for all children, they need to do more than simply provide financial support: They need to provide the technical assistance that we're talking about.
So the way we proceeded was primarily to interview people in the field. And it was a small study, the numbers are small here, but interesting nonetheless. And we asked, "What components are needed in the state system to support low-performing schools and districts?"
In particular, we queried superintendents and here were our definitions, simple definitions of the terms that we were using in the study.
So, we talked to superintendents, disproportionately urban superintendents, superintendents that had substantial gaps in their districts. And we asked them what services they would need to add, expand, or improve to get all students to proficiency. That is, they at the local level, not saying what the state should do but what they would do.
And you see at the top of the list they would add professional development and curriculum work. Data comes in second, time on learning third, leadership fourth, early childhood fifth. So those are the kinds of things that they'd want resources to be able to do at the local level.
Interestingly to us, we asked this kind of adequacy question of superintendents: You're now being expected to get all students to proficiency. What would it take in terms of an added increment to your budget to give you the resources to develop the capacity to get there?
Surprisingly to us—this is sort of the "blank check" question that courts are being asked about, and legislators are by in large afraid to ask—you know, the median response by our urban superintendents was an additional 11%, which is quite modest in comparison to what we anticipated, actually.
At that point I think these answers would be more stressful now, but at that point 43% were saying they had a critical budget situation, 36% described it as a problem, but progress is possible. Those figures have probably gotten worse in light of recent developments and will continue to move in that direction in light of what we can expect.
Key strategies that they identified, when asked the question of, "What could the state do for you?"
There were these four major areas: we need more help on curriculum and professional development, they said; we need more help on data and assessment; we need more leadership development and strategic planning; and we need more time.
If we're going to get all students to proficiency—and I have a bias here, I chaired the Massachusetts commission on time and learning for a couple of years—if we're going to get all students to proficiency, we need to change the paradigm of holding school time constant and uniform for all students and expecting them all to achieve at roughly comparable levels, or at least to achieve a high minimum, and change that and say that it's the standard that's going to be the core, and we're going to let time vary to meet the needs of learners. And it's about time we got more serious about that and I'm happy to say, in Massachusetts we're actually doing something about it.
Obstacles to capacity building, challenges within the current state system— this is what our respondents came up with: current state review and intervention capacity just very limited in comparison to the number of districts that needed help; the size of the department of education: too small for what it's being asked to do; funding: too limited for what it's being asked to do, and the salary scale for state education staff, something that we don't talk about much but I'm sure there's a lot of sympathy in this room. [laughter] We could spend the rest of the morning talking about that, right?
But anyway, we need to put this on the table. I'm doing a fair number of these around the country in other kinds of centers, and one of the things that invariably comes up, is the salary comparison, and it's a critical issue. Unless we deal with it we're going to have problems.
This gives you some sense of the rough proportion, again the numbers are different now, and if you talked to some people at the time, they were even different at the time it came out. But it gives you a sense, and the sense is there's an onslaught of schools being classified as needing help, and there's just limited capacity to meet that.
If you look at, again this case, snapshot numbers: in 1980 our department of education had 990 employees. At the time of this report, the DOE had 510 staff. I don't know what those numbers are right at the moment, but you know you're somewhere around half of the staffing that existed in the eighties for a state department of education that's arguably being asked to do double the work: All the compliance kind of work and technical support work that it was doing in the '80s, plus all the new work that attaches to standards-based school reform. And the size of the department has shrunk.
Boston Public Schools by comparison, 60,000 students or so, 548 administrators to oversee a district to support 6.5% of the state's students. Massachusetts has 25% less [staff] than Maryland, South Carolina, Wisconsin, and so forth.
Here you see as DOE budget totals have gone up in terms of their operating budget within the state budget (let alone we could get a more dramatic figure if we did it as a function of all the money that's being spent on education statewide), but you look at percentage of the DOE total and it's steadily shrinking, from less than half a percent in the first instance of pre-reform or just at the onset of school reform, to now less then half of that by the end. So we're moving in, arguably what a logical view would say, is the opposite direction of where we ought to be going.
Median annual salary of DOE employees compared to teachers and administrators; I don't know if you can see it, but superintendent, high school principal, middle school principal, teacher at that end, and the various levels within the state department of education.
So you're basically looking at a situation where people who work at the DOE have longer commutes, a longer day, a longer year, and get less money for it than other folks. So, naturally this is going to somewhat limit the pool of people that are willing to overcome those disadvantages to working with the DOE. [audience: Did you bring something for depression? Laughter.] I'm giving you a case! So you can go bang people on their head! [Laughter]
So, here on a more, perhaps upbeat note, Julianne. Here are the things that they wanted from you folks.
And in the professional development area it was: more state guidance on curriculum and professional development options, beginning with the low-performing schools. Not only, how do we do this work of professional development if we want to change the paradigm of the way we work, but who can help us do it?
Improve state capacity, provide professional development particularly in math and strategies for special education. Particularly in hard-to-serve persistent problem areas, they wanted more direct help. In a general way, they weren't saying, you know, we need the state department of education to come in and help us develop a reading program in every school in the commonwealth, or a reading professional development program, but they were saying, in some areas where we feel strapped, we're having real persistent year by year problems ,we need more direct help and direct intervention.
On data: much more help in formative assessment systems. Notwithstanding all the antipathy toward testing in a lot of our states, we find more and more districts stepping up with their own limited funds and purchasing formative data systems so that they can get real time, immediate data that helps inform practice in the classroom. Because our state annual assessments just don't do that. They're not valuable for that purpose, and they want more help with that.
They'd like to see a state select a provider or a set of providers, state provide funds to allow systems to purchase there own systems or create some sort of a state system that would give them more real-time data that teachers can use to inform their practice, and they don't have that now. And most of them are very interested in growth models, and value-added analysis, and seeing states work more aggressively on that.
Particularly urban districts were eager about leadership training; there's a lot of that going on now, Bobbi's with us in Massachusetts and we've got the NISL [National Institute of School Leaders] program going in Massachusetts, and it's touching a lot of people, but folks are talking about the pipeline.
And they're talking about the dilemmas that we know exist in the leadership area. We are asking leaders in schools now to be instructional leaders. We haven't absolved them of their management responsibilities; we've said, "You need to run a tight ship, you need to keep it under control, we don't want any crises in our community coming out of this school—and at the same time we want you to be an instructional leader."
But typically we don't have pipelines really that produce very well people in either category, let alone finding people with both sets of skills, and even if you can get them there isn't enough time in the day in a typical school for somebody to do all that work.
And, you know, our leaders are up against that and struggling with, how do I shape roles and responsibilities within schools, how do I balance these responsibilities of one kind or another. They need help and states need to take leadership on this—a tough thing for policy and political standpoint. I mean a logical argument would be to say, "well what we need in these schools is somebody who can be the instructional leader and somebody who can be the building manager" but that would sound to a lot of legislators like more administrators, and that's the last argument that they want to hear about how we need to improve education is by adding more administrators. So we're challenged here, in terms of the environment making a case for what's needed, but it's something that the districts are really struggling with.
Thinking about state level incentives to strengthen leadership at the local level and re-conceptualize the leadership function I think is critically important.
Here are things that emerged from the research that we did that need to be worked on at the state level. Service-oriented intervention process, having to do with the way in which we work with the districts and schools, that handful of districts and schools that we identify that we're able to work with.
Building the quality of staffing, this reflects both expertise and the quantity of people. There are a number of folks who long for the days when we had regional centers, there was more of a regional approach to meeting needs of districts across the geography of the state. There was a hunger for research in the field and an interest in working with turn-around partners of one kind or another.
We came to the conclusion at the end of our work that this greater state capacity is urgently needed to assist districts and schools in fulfilling the promise of education reform.
I'll tell you an anecdote. We did a release of this at the state house in Boston. And there was a legislator there and to me this anecdote illustrates the problem that we have, that I'll talk about later on in terms of how do you build a constituency to support this work? And this legislator got up and turned to our good friend, the Commissioner of Education and said—well, she first said to me, "You know, I look at this study and this is a gift horse that you have served up on a platter to the commissioner of education to make an argument for an enhanced state department of education."
And David Driscoll was on the panel with us, and had to publicly respond to this. She said, "well Mr. Commissioner, what do you have to say about this?" And David, who's a very skillful politician and recognizes that he's got to keep the field happy at the same time as keep the executive branch happy, has a very tight line to walk in responding to that.
So what he would say, what he said on the occasion was, "I wouldn't argue for additional funds to come to the department at this time when the field is so strapped because I know folks in the field are having to make layoffs and cutbacks that are significantly cutting into programs, so I'd have to argue in the near term for the first priority of dollars going out to the field."
Now that was the right thing to say and had I been in his shoes on that end of the stick I would have said the same thing. However, it's illustrative of the bind that you're in that even those of us that have leadership roles in these agencies who are woefully positioned to meet the expectations that have been placed on us, are unable by the constraints of our position within state governments and within the governing structure of education, to actively advocate for our agencies.
And this is a problem. I know in Massachusetts from working with the education committees in Beacon Hill over the years that one of the greatest frustrations, and this well precedes this administration and department of education, one of the great frustrations of the chairs of education, when we go up and argue with them with a report like this, we really got to focus on capacity, nobody is going to pat you on the back for it but its really needed if we're going to meet our goals in terms of education reform.
And they'll say, "How can we do this if the agency that we're talking about isn't willing to come up and argue for these resources itself?" The agency is hamstrung because they get their budget from the Governor. So, we're in a bind and we've got to think strategically, and I don't have the answer to this, I think the board of education plays an important role and I think there are other outside agencies and entities that we need to cultivate, but one of the key questions at the end of all this, is: how do you build a constituency to make it possible to do this kind of work? Because you're going to need additional resources; you're going to need additional people in order to be effective at it.
Okay so, we did some looking beyond the work that we did, sort of revisited this work, I mentioned we're doing some work in Ohio and Kentucky right now where we're thinking with districts very explicitly about what it is that they need from their respective state departments of education, and how would that work, you know, the same thing that we're gathered here to talk about today.
And you essentially see some of the same categories that we've already talked about here, a little bit more refined in the way we developed them and we did a little work going around the country and looking at state departments of education in kind of a survey mode to see who's doing what in these categories. And I'm sure those of you in the room are each doing pieces of this work in one way or another. But the hope is that you begin to get the shape of a normative state education assistance function from looking at these components that seem to be in high demand in the field.
So, one of the big areas is planning and implementation, which has to do with helping schools identify root causes, developing and implementing action steps to effectively address challenges. Well, most of you are mandated to do this by law and you're doing it in some way or another: working with needs assessments, improvement plans, and supporting districts in implementation. So there's a fair amount of that-most state education agencies in one way or another are doing that kind of work.
And here are a few examples that again are on the yellow sheet. [audio pause]
Okay, leadership support, building instructional leadership focused on results, developing professional learning communities among all school staff, and addressing the supply of new leaders.
I've talked about the problems even in conceptualizing the new leadership role, but it is safe to say that in the field, we're still in a mode where people are not, for the most part, promoted and advanced within school districts based on their instructional leadership capacity. It is more on management and leadership kinds of roles, so there really is a need and the state's in a good position with a sort of strategic coherent focus to provide some real help on this and there's some good models for doing that around the country, and I think it's a really important thing to do.
So here are a couple I've mentioned that work, I think I've mentioned the NISL program, that work in Massachusetts.
Lots of talk in this area of data. I think this is a really important one, it's an obvious one for states to get into, whether it has to be the state education agency or not, I suppose, you know, there are other possibilities. But we've urged them to pay attention to evidence in formulating strategy for instruction. They need help in, how do I use evidence when I get it, and getting it in the first place: developing systems. If we're going to let a thousand flowers bloom and basically say "Well, we'll give you your annual statewide large-scale assessments, but you've got to figure out some other things to do on the ground district by district", we're—it's like having everybody develop their own curriculum. It's kind of a wasteful process of reinvention, and so many of our districts just don't have the capacity to do this well. And this is work that given the nature of technology would much better be done at a state level, and especially in this area of formative and benchmark assessments tied to the state standards.
And then professional development on analysis and working on these growth models. So I see this as a—although it's costly, it is an obvious immediate area for states to ramp up in if they can find the resources.
In so many of our states, particularly in New England where the local control tradition is so strong, we're just leaving curriculum development, selection, and mapping, all up to the local districts, again kind of a wasteful, inefficient process.
Districts seem to be looking for more help and some state agencies are doing some pretty good work in this area in terms of selection, guidance, mapping functions, and making recommendations both on whole curriculums, or even on lesson plans in some instances.
Here are a few examples. [audio pause]
Support for improving teachers' practice and pedagogy. This is an area where districts themselves are uncertain: how do we internalize this work ourselves, let alone how does an outside agency of the state come in and help them how to do it? They need coaches, they need model lessons, and they need places where they can go to observe effective practice. They need--
I had a student the other day propose that our states ought to be getting together video libraries of effective practice. You know, identification of what constitutes quality teaching, which is sort of the first, primary question here. What do we mean by quality teaching? And if we have a definition that fits and works at the state level, why not get some video of people who are actively doing that, and give our teachers a chance to see people at work educating children like the children that they work with and have a chance to observe effective practice.
So, again, we have a set of examples in that area. [audio pause]
Professional development, which is really an extension of the instructional improvement, guidance on providers, support, I mean I think this whole notion of how do you develop—it's not just a question of how do I find the right inspirational person to come into this school and turn my faculty around—but how do I move from a buffet model of once a year or even once a month we get together and have a general conversation, to an embedded model of teacher-led, evidence-based, student-focused professional development that is part of the work of being teachers.
How do we do that? What does it look like? How would a school organize itself if it wanted to proceed in that way? And what are the steps I can take to get from where I am closer to that model of what we know works in terms of professional development?
So that's a big area where I think that they need help and that invariably involves school making time to do that work, that's a different way of using teacher time than we've done in the past and when we talk about extending time for student learning, we should be talking about how we extend and use that time for purposes of teacher learning.
Again, here are some examples. [audio pause]
Focus at the district level, professional development focused on student achievement. How do we get central office administrators, who play such a dominant role in so many of our districts, brought into a coherent theory of action and strategy that we described that focuses in on instruction and how does, how do they apply that filter to their work? You could argue that every significant action that somebody takes in a central office ought to have something to do with improving, directly or indirectly, the quality of instruction in classrooms and the district. But how do you install that lens, how do you change the culture that exists in so many places, which is clearly not focused on that at the moment to that kind of approach?
District improvement plans, you're working on that. There are a number of central office reviews now, where people are using kind of an Edmonton model or philosophy, where the district is not the central authority in the district but the district is a service organization to serve the schools. Annenberg and others are working with school districts to take a look at the way in which they organize and operate their central office and do that kind of audit to cause them to do a serious rethinking of that.
And we've got some examples for you to look at. [audio pause]
Now, in addition to the kind of roles that we describe in those key areas, there are also of course policy interventions, which are less the province of your state departments of education than they are of policy makers at the state level. But we are talking about state support here, which doesn't always have to mean and be synonymous with state education agencies, and of course state education agencies in many states are well positioned to influence the development of policy.
And these are just a few policy areas, but obviously ones that, you know, play an important role in this business of building capacity. Teacher quality: lots of thinking now about differentiating roles of teachers. Changing the teacher work day, changing the way in which we assign teachers, changing the way in which we attract, develop, mentor, and induct teachers, the ways in which we promote them. So there's lots of work that needs to be done in that area.
A lot of our states are finally buying the incontrovertible logic and evidence that supports expanded early childhood education. And as I mentioned earlier, this notion of focusing in on using time in a different fashion to me seems inextricably connected with our ambition to get all students to a high standard. There is no way that we are going to get vast numbers of kids who have had disadvantaged educational experiences or life experiences, to a level of proficiency, if we don't spend more quality time with them. Not just time on academic tasks, but time generally, so we've got to figure out a way to do that. And of course it all in the end connects to financial support.
So, by way of wrapping up, there is a whole set of challenges that we're up against. Creating a sense of urgency about this work is one; obviously, you all are acutely aware of. You're acutely aware of limits you have in terms of responding to the needs that are out there, and these are hard things to get people talking about.
I remember when we did a report, when I ran, for eight years, the Massachusetts education reform review commission, that raised this question much earlier, pre-NCLB, about the capacity of the state department of education to do the work of education reform. And our then inimitable chairman of the state board of education, John Silber, [his] first comment on reading the report was, "Well, the last thing we need is more bureaucrats at the state department of education." You know, that's a classic kind of response to this.
How do you create an urgency around this subject of capacity building? Capacity building in itself just doesn't have handles that policymakers, or press people, or even philanthropists, can readily grab onto. Somehow we've got to create those handles and find a way of making this attractive, appealing, [and] urgent to people who are influencing policy.
That means building a constituency. And you know, we can talk about a lot of ways and means of doing that but we've got to move this conversation beyond this room, and get people who have influence on policy to appreciate the importance of this sort of, nuts and bolts, nitty gritty, grunt work of building the capacity of systems to realize their ambitions. It's just not enough to set goals and say "okay, go ahead and achieve the goals." It's not going to work that way.
You know, we did it as a nation when we did the goals 2000 program. We think we can do this and get away with it; we set these very ambitious goals as a nation, Goals 2000, in the early '90s. And we achieved none of them by the time it was the year 2000. The difference was: we didn't have any states attached to them. We didn't embarrass people as a result of having those goals. They were aspirational goals, and people I think pretty well knew when we set them we weren't going to get there, and there was no real traction on the goals, even though it was score-keeping: Every year we kept track.
Now we set goals, goals having to do with 2014 and goals having to do with yearly progress, and all the rest of it. And they do matter. They do make a difference, and they do affect the morale and outlook of people already laboring under tough conditions in the district. I think it's right that we have high standards and it's right that we expect continuous improvement, but we've got to do this work of helping them to figure out how to get there.
Because they're saying to us: if you policy makers are so brilliant that you think we can get all students to proficiency by 2014 and do it in—however much this defies the research— but do it in increments along a linear diagonal line over these years, show us how to do that work. And if you don't know how to do it, at least have the humility to get down with us and listen to us about what we need to approach meeting the challenge that you set for us.
So, being, doing what we prescribe for teachers to do in schools I think is an important part of doing this work ourselves, somehow reflecting on these new roles and relationships, these new sets of responsibilities we have, and how it's going when we do this work in the field. I think that's critically important.
I'm doing some work with one of the other comprehensive centers now where I'm out interviewing state agencies with whom they're interacting. And you know, it's very revealing, as comprehensive centers seek to inform the work of state education agencies, how that help is received by the state education agencies mirrors the kind of relationship that some of the agencies have with the districts. And I think it is really important to develop those kinds of feedback loops that we like to insist that others use in their work, in terms of doing our own work.
And then ultimately it's about results in the end. And we're a big part of the equation, in terms of what at least the policy community sees as the rationale and logic for how we're going to get to proficiency for all, which is urgently important not only for the children but for the nation. And yet we've got to cause them to focus on what we need in order to help accomplish this job.
So, for discussion purposes [brief discussion about time remaining], what we're asking—and I realize this is not a highly refined model but it gives you the outlines of a model—we asked you how do we modify this model, in other words a system that had these components, to fit your context. Because we realize each of you has a different context in which you operate; you each have a different history of work that you're doing. Some of you are already doing lots of things in some of these areas and maybe not so much in others. What are we missing? What ought to be here? This would be helpful for me to hear from you, and Jill to hear from you, about you know, how we frame this because again, this is a continuing conversation, we're evolving new roles here.
Could you or would you adapt this model in your state? I mean, is a vision like this something that you see as desirable? And secondly, is it something you see as practical? What are some of the things that would get in the way of your achieving this kind of vision within your respective environments? And finally, thinking a little bit about that advocacy question, that urgency question, what are some of the ways the state departments of education can advocate for the resources needed to fulfill the kinds of requirements that I've been talking about this morning?
So, I have a minute to take some questions or comments. We'll do that and then we'll leave these discussion questions to kind of influence the things we'll be talking about at your tables. Let me throw it open and see what you have to say.
Julianne Dow: Paul, as you think about this piece of work that you did, particularly the Massachusetts study, and the ongoing work that you've done to try to be a local advocate for the past two decades of state reform of state education, how do you answer that question about building capacity? Because I felt like you put your finger right on it, which is as long as the chief executive, the governor, is not taking this up and therefore making room for the chief state school officer to articulate this actual need, that there's not going to be a constituency. And so to me the NGA, the governors, are the only place actually where it seems to me that there's a potential for taking the argument and trying to move it forward and there you're of course just in the total midst of politics.
Paul: I think that's right; that's a reasonable theory of action in that environment, that we have got to capture the attention of top leadership with the urgency and importance and the logic that goes along with this. Because this is not readily apparent to most people in top leadership positions. You come into a room full of such people and start talking about capacity building—they don't really know what you're talking about in the first place. So you've got to get a whole language that makes it possible to have a compelling conversation about this. I mean, it fits in the parlance of business and other areas. We wouldn't say to a high performance sales force, "well you were selling a hundred widgets a week, but now we've set new goals, now you're going to have to sell two hundred a week." The sales people would say to us "well what's going to be different in my job because I'm already maxed out in selling a hundred here, are you going to give me an assistant, are you going to give me a price cut that I can use, what are you going to give me to help get me to that level?"
That's kind of where our teachers are, they're saying well, you're asking me to get everybody to proficiency, last week it was okay if I only got 25% of the class up there and now you're telling me 100% of the class. Well, I don't know how to do it. If I knew how I would have been doing it already. How am I going to get there?
Somehow we've got to get there. I don't have all the arguments, but we've got to develop a language for this, and then we've got to take it to the top levels. And that's hard because the nature of politics is—you know, I was just working on the transition team here—the nature of politics is: people are looking for quick wins. They're looking for "low hanging fruit"—things that can be done quickly and show immediate results. And this is long term, ongoing grueling kind work that's hard to shape into that kind of context of need. But I don't think they have any choice but to do that.
Julianne Dow: Do you see the business sector coming forward to help again? We got ed reform because of the business alliance work; I feel that that was critical. Do you see at this juncture, this time period, it is likely?
Paul: I work with business groups who somewhat got distracted by other issues now, the whole regime of standards-based reform has been installed in a lot of our states, so there's less of a sense of urgency about this than there is in the business community about things like healthcare and pensions and things of this nature. But I think it can be recaptured. From my experience talking with business groups they appreciate that this is an issue, that this is a real issue.
They knew at the outset—I remember early work that I did with business community in Massachusetts and elsewhere around the country in the '80s—when you took business people into schools one of the first things that would strike them would be the absence of a human resource system. Which is their way of articulating capacity kinds of concerns. In other words, here you have this flat system. Everybody does the same job the whole time; the only promotion out of it is into management. You could do the same job when you enter at 22 that you're doing when you leave at 65, and never have observed anybody else doing the work that you're doing. You know, it made no sense to people, I think—but that takes work. Somebody's got to develop that.
Audience member (Mary Beth Fafard): I wanted to build on what Julianne said. The experience in Rhode Island is that to build a constituency, we have to show how the investment, meaning the dollar investment, yields the result. And I believe in the education community we haven't been good, or skilled, at showing that this investment in capacity that we're building to support, yields this. And in Rhode Island with a business governor, a governor who comes out of the business community, we've been pressured to show in interventions, especially in urban districts, how everything we're doing adds up in dollars and why would the district need it? And to be more precise about showing what the investment yields. And I didn't know if your seeing that there are effective ways the business community can help us make that argument so people don't do the classic "Oh you're just throwing more down on something that hasn't worked already"
Paul: Yes. I agree with that, except the challenge of course is, it's easier said then done. For example, you take professional development. You work with schools on installing you know, a reflective community of practice and the research is modest now, at best, that links any particular professional development strategy to any set of outcomes, but we sort of intuitively believe and we have some sort of larger scale evidence that communities that operate like that, like the district 2s of the world, are getting better results. And so we feel like we've got an adequate rationale to move in that direction. It's harder to show near term results that are going to satisfy a governor like this that if you do just this it's going to come out in that way. So that's a challenge. But I agree with you in terms of the general premise of your remark that we've got to be willing to do that.
Mary Beth: I was wondering, the partnership with the combination of the research you're quoting in those sets of districts who are making advances like out in Chicago, if they are also from your perspective, have included the dollar signs that have yielded what they're getting.
Paul: A lot of the—they're bigger districts and by virtue of their size and centrality, their glamour in terms of attracting outside foundation dollars and things of this nature, it's easier for those places to attract the support that they need to do some of this capacity building work. It's much harder for these middle sized and smaller cities, of which we have a lot in New England to get that kind of attention. And then when you get down to really small cities, you're up against absolute limits in capacity at the district level that even the strongest intervention processes at the state level are going to be challenged to get up and support over time.