"What's your solution?" vis-a-vis K-12 school improvement in DC

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Slightly revised with an additional point, inserted at #2, and an addendum.
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Jay Mathew's blog column in the Post, "D.C. School Protestors--What's Your Plan?," has engendered some discussion on a local school list. My response:

This though is a typical response of people with establishment thinking. That you can't criticize something unless you offer an alternative.

1. I usually counter that a good analysis of the problem(s) is good enough in itself. That people who identify the problems aren't always the ones prepared to offer the solution.

2. But the reality is, in this case, that there are plenty of solutions.

Sadly, in my opinion anyway, the "anti-Rhee" contingent is organized in its "anti-ness" but not in offering real, fundamental alternatives. I have commented on this over the years, but I guess the comments weren't seen as important enough to consider by people with more of a horse in the fight. (I don't have children. And I deal with a bunch of urban-related issues, so fixing the schools isn't my only interest.)

To me it would be relatively simple to offer an alternative:

1. Focus on building robust systems, structures, and processes to build excellence within the school system in every dimension, rather than on a belief that individuals will magically be able to succeed against all odds in a system that is dysfunctional. (And note that currently the school system's management is generating much of the dysfunction.)

a. hire a superintendent focused on improving the system as a whole. (Someone like Andres Alonso see the profile from the Baltimore Sun, or Anthony Alvarado, or the subdistrict superintendent in NYC, Kathleen Cashin--see "Bucking School Reform, a Leader Gets Results" from the New York Times.)

b. But the superintendent has to be focused on speed. DC's former superintendent Clifford Janey, seems to be doing a bang up job in Newark, bringing the community to focus on school improvement for a system that likely is doing even more badly than many of DC's schools. See "Newark Schools Chief Seeks Unified Solutions" from the New York Times.

Maybe the one thing that Sup. Janey learned between DC and Newark is the necessity for more speed to keep the elected officials happy. Sadly, it seems as if people mistook his deliberativeness as avoidance behavior, and so the response was to replace him with someone with a bias for speed but little interest and demand for deliberativeness, plans, etc.

2. Transparent, open, and fair decisionmaking rather than arbitrary and capricious practices, especially for personnel (i.e., the principal firings, the teacher firings, the RIFs of union representatives, etc.) and especially looking at parents, residents and other stakeholders as part of the solution rather than only as hindrances.

(Granted many DC advocates are problematic, but only by modeling quality behavior can you change the system. For an example, see this article from the Gazette, about model teaching, "'Old-School Type' Teacher Is All Business at Suitland.")

3. Expand, using positive deviance theories, the programs that are already working well, i.e., Montessori schools, certain bilingual programs like Oyster, cluster school concepts such as the Capitol Hill Cluster Schools.

4. Develop a deep and thorough system of professional development to support teachers and principals. (Using the Mongtomery County MD public schools system, among others, as a model. See for example, "When ‘Unequal’ Is Fair Treatment," from Education Week.)

5. Develop a strong, deep and wide system to support children within the school setting when they need additional assistance. (This is the complement to the MCPS focus on professional development, a focus on the children and providing and executing individual learning plans for students.)

6. Develop a strong, deep and wide system to support families outside of the school setting, but within it also, in order to bring about total focus on improving the family, support of the child, and building what I call the community's capacity, ability and readiness to learn. (There are many examples of this. First Day programs, etc.)

7. Robust summer school programs, consideration of year round schooling, adding length to the school year.

8. Consideration of cooperative (work + school) programs at the high school level to help reduce the drop out rate, deal with the need for some children to make money, show the link between schooling and work, etc.

Two points....

1. This past week, I went to a presentation on improving the suburbs, held at the Urban Land Institute (I am working in a suburban Maryland county for the next year on pedestrian and bicycling planning, so I have to pay more attention to the suburbs). And a presenter commented (in discussing schools issues) that in Montgomery County, drop out rates for "minorities" were roughly comparable to the drop out rates for whites. (I haven't checked out the data for myself.) That says something about how they've been re-working their school system to provide add'l necessary resources to student populations that have traditionally been failed by the dominant paradigms in teaching.

2. On Weds. I went to a school in the county where I am working that is known for its walk to school programs (a school district outside of London, UK used them as a model for developing a systemwide program although ironically the county doesn't have a county-wide walk to school program), which were initiated by two parents, with strong support from the principal. I spent almost three hours there!

The principal is amazing. I was blown away by her discussion of instructional leadership generally, her talk of "the schoolhouse" and the school community, and of course, her focus--even though she didn't call it that--on what I think of as site based transportation demand management, focused on getting children into classrooms safely and quickly, so that as much time is brought to bear on instruction.

It was a privilege to be able to talk with her, and the parents who started the walk to school initiative. I took many pages of notes...

I don't feel like I hear much about "instructional leadership" and focus on the overall environment here in DC in the context of urban school reform, or just basic improvement.

My notes are at the office, but one of the things that she said was something like, "when you come into a new school [as the principal] you don't change things, you're one person. You work with the teachers and the parents to improve on what's already working, and to improve what isn't working well." (She was much more succinct.)

And she commented how, as she's now been at the school for five years, on how they are just getting to the point where the teachers are getting to the point where they are able to work with each other in focused ways to improve the curriculum and teaching plans in very specific ways, that improvement is a process, and not a quick one either.

The focus on the quick fix, and on the individuals (teachers) rather than the system as a whole and the organizational culture is telling. We are screwed here.

Ironically, it seems like the only good writing in the Washington Post on organizational management, systems, and culture is in the Sports section about the dismal situation of the Washington Redskins. In "Toxicity Seeps Downward Through Redskins "Sally Jenkins writes:

Stability works; instability doesn't. ... Why doesn't Snyder seem to know all this? Why do the Redskins continually make the same management mistakes? One possible answer is they suffer from something called "toxic management." Denial and refusal to accept criticism are classic hallmarks of it, and so is shifting blame to others.

Toxic management is not just a term; it's a pathology, and experts have written books about it. The leader in the field is Roy Lubit, a member of the faculty of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, and the author of "Coping with Toxic Managers and Subordinates." According to Lubit, toxic managers are "rigid, aggressive, self-centered."

They're also divisive. Some of the indicators: bullying of subordinates, impulsivity, inability to concentrate and moodiness. Also: a record of grievance filings by employees, customer complaints and high staff turnover. Toxic managers actually prefer tension to stability, because it's a demonstration of their personal power. ...

According to Lubit: "Toxic managers divert people's energy from the real work of the organization, destroy morale, impair retention, and interfere with cooperation and information sharing. Their behavior, like a rock thrown into a pond, can cause ripples distorting the organization's culture."
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In a nutshell, DC politics and municipal management is a classic example of toxicity, not to mention going for the quick fix and thinking because you might be knowledgeable about an elephant's foot, that you can fix the whole elephant.

I wish I could say that this is to be expected that after only 30 years of home rule, that the city is still developing its institutions.

But there is no excuse to be developing sound management structures in the city as if there was a vacuum, that the city developed independently of every other locality in the rest of the U.S....

Furthermore, given all the money that the city has, relatively speaking, compared to other jurisdictions, this is a crime and a travesty.

I was in Silver Spring yesterday, so I picked up a copy of the Silver Spring Voice, a community newspaper. The October issue, not yet online, features an appreciation-obituary of Dan Parr. He worked on "downcounty" issues in Montgomery County, so for the most part his activities--being a co-founder of the Takoma Park Food Co-op, leading the effort to rebuild Montgomery Blair High School, working on campaigns to get progressives elected to Montgomery County Council, and then working in municipal and then state government--were not on my radar, my being focused on the District of Columbia.

The article's discussion of how Parr organized a campaign to get the school rebuilt, recognizing that "downcounty" was losing out to "upcounty" in terms of resources and programs provided by Montgomery County to its various geographies, and how a declining and deteriorating school made improvement of downcounty, especially Silver Spring and its commercial district, almost impossible, was both moving as well as an apt example of how to bring about fundamental change in DC--know what you want, and campaign in every way to make it happen.