1. Charter schools will improve other public schools.
2. Providing vouchers to send students to other public or private schools will improve public schools.
3. More testing means more accountability.
4. Intensive supervision and evaluation will lead to the dismissal of ineffective teachers.
5. Value-based testing provides a valid way to reward effective teachers and dismiss ineffective teachers.
6. Merit pay will improve teaching and therefore improve schools.
7. Closing low-performing schools will improve remaining schools.
Schools cannot continue to support such assumptions and go down the same path of sticks and carrots (punishments and rewards). These old and tired strategies just don’t work! We need to empower a generation of leaders who truly understand the science of human motivation to bring out the best in the professionals who serve our students. Unfortunately, as the history of education in the United States shows, changing education is easier said than done.
In this chapter, we examine change in education and change in school culture, how balanced leadership is needed for change, and the three investments and one condition leaders must make to develop intrinsic motivation for change in those they lead.
Change in Education
Schools are not much different than they were in the late 19th century. Many staples that characterized education in the 19th century have gone unchallenged in the 20th and 21st centuries. These conditions include the following (Tyack & Cuban, 1995).
▶ The teacher is the content expert and directs students’ learning.
▶ Students assimilate to the teacher’s educational and behavioral expectations and receive positive feedback for behavioral assimilation and successful regurgitation of facts.
▶ Instructional autonomy is considered a teacher’s professional right, and that right typically goes unchallenged, regardless of evidence of teacher effectiveness.
Not only do many school conditions remain the same for students, but the personal and professional experiences that teachers encounter add yet another layer of challenge.
In his groundbreaking book Schoolteacher: A Sociological Study, Dan C. Lortie (1975) uncovers some obvious barriers to change and helps us understand why change in education is so difficult. In fact, he declares that schools present more challenges than any other institution. Schools go largely unchanged, according to Lortie (1975), because of two major factors.
1. The traditional system has socialized educators into its standard practices and expectations since they themselves were in kindergarten, and their teacher preparation programs reinforced those same values. Lortie (1975) refers to this as the apprenticeship of observation. People who have never had exposure to an alternative find it difficult to envision change.
2. The vast majority of educators performed at a relatively high level as students, so they have not had enough adverse experiences to motivate them to advocate for systems change. In fact, Lortie (1975) argues, they would more likely protect the system than deconstruct it.
Colin Lacey, a contemporary of Lortie, validated Lortie’s conclusions in 1977 with the first printing of his book The Socialization of Teachers. In a 2012 edition of the same book, Lacey concludes that the exposure to school and educational norms at a young age socializes teachers to acquire the same dispositions and paradigms today that Lortie observed in 1975.
The challenges to achieving substantive school change are real and intimidating. Not only must educators face a changing job market that requires students to acquire more skills, but leaders have to combat a system that has not changed much since the late 19th century. Also, leaders have to confront the hardened expectations of educators and parents who were socialized in the system that leaders seek to change. Schools have to find a better way to prepare new and current leaders for these challenges, or they will continue to recycle the same ineffective methods of the past. We propose that leaders should start by changing school culture.
Change in School Culture
We have established that schools are not wired for change. This is not a recent development; it is built right into the DNA of the educational system. To make an impact on this profession, leaders need to understand culture and know how to change it. Terrence E. Deal and Kent D. Peterson (1999) are widely credited for shaping the study of school culture. These authors describe school culture as a school’s collective norms, values, beliefs, rituals, symbols, celebrations, and stories that make up its persona. They also provide a prototype of the optimal school culture, which they call a healthy school culture.
A healthy school culture produces a professional environment in which educators unwaveringly believe that all students have the ability to achieve academic and social success, and they overtly and covertly communicate that expectation to others. Educators in these environments are willing to create policies, practices, and procedures that align with their beliefs and are rooted in their confidence in universal student achievement. To paraphrase, educators in a healthy school culture believe that all students can excel, and they willingly challenge and change their own practices to meet that end. This is the environment necessary to create the required change that can prepare students for the 21st century’s skill-based job market. We argue that an educational leader’s inability to create a healthy school culture is the primary reason school performance goes unchanged or declines and the achievement gap remains wide.
John Hattie (2012) has measured the impact of many important factors that predict and influence student learning. Those factors include environmental, economic, professional, and cultural factors. In his book Visible Learning for Teachers: Maximizing Impact on Learning, Hattie (2012) identifies the top-three factors, which all relate to culture and belief in or prediction of student achievement.
1. Teacher estimates of achievement
2. Collective teacher efficacy
3. Student estimates of achievement or self-reported grades
Hattie’s (2012) findings show that students will learn more and have more success in an environment in which all educators believe that the students can learn at high levels. Those educators work together to convince students that they can achieve the lofty academic goals that their 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 greatly differ from those on the ineffective and destructive path to change, which the field of education has experienced in the past.
A healthy culture operates from two important assumptions. The first expects that everyone within the organization believes that students can and will learn at high levels. The second assumption is that the educators who work within a healthy culture are willing to change or adjust their behavior based on objective evidence about student growth and development. Coupling lofty expectations for student success with a willingness to change practice based on those expectations creates a very effective and balanced school culture.
Balanced Leadership
Past approaches to systemic change have lacked balance. For example, the federal educational policy No Child Left Behind (NCLB, 2002) demanded that schools achieve a standard of annual academic performance on state assessments in both mathematics and reading (adequate yearly progress, or AYP) or face state and federal government sanctions. This sent a simple message: improve or face punishment (a stick approach). This approach certainly got people’s attention, but it did not stimulate the level of moral and personal commitment necessary for deep change. This totally coercive method led to states lowering their