1. Minimal politics
2. Minimal confusion
3. High morale
4. High productivity
5. Low employee turnover
The organization’s health ultimately leads to improvements in innovation (smart), producing better results and greater longevity. Lencioni (2012) concludes that innovation and intellect do not lead to greater levels of productivity if they are implemented within a context that is unhealthy. Health has to come before intellect. Innovation has a fighting chance if it is being implemented within a healthy human environment. He warns that developing the health (culture) of an organization is difficult because human beings are difficult and complex beings:
Most people prefer to look for answers where the light is better, where they are more comfortable. And the light is certainly better in the measurable, objective, and data-driven world of organizational intelligence (the smart side of the equation) than it is in the messier, more unpredictable world of organizational health. (Lencioni, 2012, p. 7)
Technical changes have become very popular in public schools, especially since the passage of NCLB and ESSA. Why would educators continue to seek these surface-level changes when the United States has such a long history of initiatives that eventually overwhelm our school system’s culture of low efficacy? Central leadership and site leadership have scrambled to find programs or initiatives that will be the magic bullet to fix all ailments. Terms like research-based and best practice have been no match for the deeply ingrained disbelief in student ability that cripples many struggling schools. In fact, I have had the opportunity to study several schools where pessimistic faculty members are eager to prove that new strategies or programs aimed at raising student performance do not work in order to justify and solidify their hypothesis that not all students are capable of achieving excellence.
A report from the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) reveals that the highly regarded Reading First literacy initiative, a cornerstone of President George W. Bush’s education policy, had little to no effect on student reading proficiency (Toppo, 2008). In fact, the study goes on to claim that students who received services under this initiative, which had an annual cost of over $1 billion, performed no better than students who had no exposure to this reading intervention. The evidence is clear: these types of so-called research-based strategies are no match for elements of culture that help maintain gaps in student achievement.
The Impact of Beliefs
Some might assume that mere belief in a concept or reality has little effect on a person or group’s ability to achieve that reality. The research teaches us something very different. John Hattie has been credited with publishing the most definitive evidence of the factors that affect student learning outcomes in recorded history. Hattie (2012) researches and synthesizes eight hundred meta-analyses measuring the effect of 195 factors that impact student learning. This meta-analysis took fifteen years to complete, and Hattie released his findings in a series of books known as Visible Learning.
Hattie (2012) measures the impact of many important factors in predicting and influencing student learning. Some of those factors are environmental, economic, professional, and cultural. He identifies the impact of each factor by assigning an effect size to each factor. In the book Visible Learning for Teachers: Maximizing Impact on Learning, the top-three factors are all related to culture and belief of student achievement.
1. Teacher estimates of achievement—1.62
2. Collective teacher efficacy—1.57
3. Student estimate of achievement or self-reported grades—1.44
Students will learn more and be more successful in an environment where all educators believe they can learn at high levels and those educators work together to convince the students that they can achieve lofty academic goals teachers set for them. A leader who understands how to cultivate this type of culture will place a school clearly on the path to improvement and sustainable growth. The skills necessary to create a healthy culture are very different than the ineffective and destructive path to change that we have taken in the past.
Cultural change is a much more difficult form of change to accomplish. It cannot be gained through force or coercion (like NCLB or ESSA). As human beings, we do not have the ability to control the thoughts and beliefs of others, so cultural change requires something more profound. It requires leaders to become adept at gaining cooperation and skilled in the arts of diplomacy, salesmanship, patience, endurance, and encouragement. It takes knowledge of where a school has been, and agreement about where the school should go. It requires an ability to deal with beliefs, policies, and institutions that have been established to buffer educators from change and accountability. It is a tightrope act of major proportion. But cultural change must be achieved—and it must be achieved well—if we are to prepare our current and future generations of students for an ever-changing world that is becoming more demanding each day. Substantial cultural change must precede technical change. When a school has a healthy culture, the professionals within it will seek the tools that they need to accomplish their goal of universal student achievement; they will give a school new life by overcoming the staff division that halts transformation.
CHAPTER 2
The Framework of Modern School Culture
School culture is a complex web of history, psychology, sociology, economics, and political science. To effectively diagnose and eliminate toxic school culture, we must take an honest look at the internal and external factors that create the conditions that make cultural transformation difficult.
Schools in the Era of Accountability
The accountability movement, and No Child Left Behind and the Every Student Succeeds Act in particular, did not create the cultural issues confronting today’s school system. But this new era has brought some deeply rooted belief systems and practices to the forefront for examination, including issues such as how we analyze, staff, and fund schools. Examining the current environment and conditions in our schools can help us understand the myriad paradigms that exist within the walls of our public schools and therefore help us strategize to transform the environment into a healthy one.
Who Is to Blame?
No Child Left Behind and the Every Student Succeeds Act mandate the school as the responsible party when it comes to effectiveness. This is very different from the traditional belief that students and their families were primarily responsible for the effectiveness of education; educators were the experts, and schools provided students with the opportunity to learn. Students were expected to comply with their educators’ demands to acquire knowledge. Schools believed that if parents supported the teacher’s expert guidance and encouraged their children to follow that guidance, students would succeed in school. It was not surprising, then, that all students were not academically successful, because levels of support for education were different in every household. Additionally, success or failure in school was determined solely by educators in the form of completely subjective grading scales and procedures controlled exclusively by education professionals. Parents and students had very little recourse if they felt that the system was unfair or was not an accurate appraisal of proficiency or potential.
Conversely, under NCLB and ESSA, the school became exclusively accountable for student success or failure. Results of student performance on state examinations are posted in news publications for public consumption. States have developed evaluation