and rigor. Rick Hess, the director of educational policy at the American Enterprise Institute, recognized that Napolitano’s fight would be much more political than educational: “The problem with that is if you had hard tests or hard standards you made your schools look bad. So there was a real, kind of perverse incentive baked into NCLB” (as cited in Bidwell, 2014). Dane Linn, the vice president of the Business Roundtable, echoed some of the same concerns that Hess shared:
What’s more important? To tell the truth to parents about where their kids are really performing? Or to continue to make them believe they’re doing really well, only until they get into the workforce or they go to college and they’re finding out they need to be put in a remedial English class? (as cited in Bidwell, 2014)
By 2013, many states that adopted the CCSS in 2010 started to ditch them or modify their commitment. States like Indiana, South Carolina, and Oklahoma passed legislation that either withdrew their participation altogether or weakened their financial support and commitment. The decline of the enthusiasm for the CCSS movement can be traced to four important realities (Jochim & McGuinn, 2016).
1. Far-right politics framed the CCSS and the financial incentives as a federal attempt to take over locally controlled schools.
2. Far-left politics framed the CCSS and the assessments associated with them as an attempt to use performance data to evaluate teacher performance and undermine the power of unions.
3. The standards were developed privately, and there was no open public debate. The public did not have a personal stake in their adoption and implementation.
4. The development and implementation of the two assessments were sloppy, with many logistical and technical glitches which annoyed educational professionals, and they lost their enthusiasm over time. By 2016, thirty-eight states had left one or both of the testing consortia.
The Dawn of a New Day
I first heard of NCLB on an ordinary Friday morning in March of 2002 while serving as a middle school principal in an urban school district with more than 98 percent minority enrollment. I was on my way to the district administrative office for our biweekly administrator’s meeting, called the pay-day meeting. It was 8:05 a.m., and I was five minutes late, as usual. I was expecting an agenda filled with mundane administrative logistics and announcements. I anticipated the superintendent leading the meeting, as he usually did, with concerns about our budget or some security issue from a sporting event. There was no way I could have anticipated the topic of this meeting.
As I entered the room, the superintendent introduced an official from the Michigan Department of Education who came to share some information from the federal government. As she explained the goals and components of a new law, NCLB, there was an eerie silence in the room coupled with a universal feeling of shock and anxiety.
This law’s goals were not incongruent with what we, as administrators, wanted for each one of our students, but we never suspected that we would actually be held legally accountable for producing schools that made these wishes a reality. The state official went on to explain that schools that did not meet these requirements would be labeled as failing and would face a series of sanctions.
Everyone at the meeting was shocked. Our effectiveness or proficiency would be judged primarily by student outcomes on standardized tests and our ability to move our entire school organization to accept this new reality. We had been introduced to the new reality of American education. After examining our reality, it seemed we had to be miracle workers to bring this new reality to fruition.
Why was there so much shock and anxiety among this group of administrators? Primarily, we were anxious because we were painfully aware of the culture and history of our schools. We were aware of what we assumed government officials were not. We were aware of all the issues surrounding teacher quality, staff expectations, student apathy, and inadequate parental support, among other things that we had worked so hard to keep away from the public eye. We had been trained to create an illusion of prosperity that we never expected to actually achieve. We knew that there were many classrooms where the curriculum was not followed. We knew that gaps in student performance were expected in a traditional urban public school system. We were being asked to do something that no one had ever been asked to do: create a functional system in which every student could learn and would learn, despite the many obstacles and the myriad of tasks necessary just to be functional. It was absolutely overwhelming, and we did not know where to start. In fact, we banked on the assumption that if we ignored this new law long enough, it would eventually just go away.
Clearly, it has not gone away, and years later, the same anxiety exists. We are just as confused today as we were on that memorable Friday morning in 2002. ESSA, which is essentially the state version of NCLB, has done little to soothe that initial anxiety. Student performance has improved very little, and the dysfunction in our education system that faced us in 2002 is still prevalent. In fact, former U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings told a group of businesspeople in Detroit that “we can’t adequately solve this problem [the achievement gap] until we diagnose what’s wrong” (as cited in Higgins & Pratt-Dawsey, 2008, p. 1). Many years and several billion dollars later, our best educational minds are still diagnosing the problem. Improving public schools is very complex indeed.
As Margaret Spellings points out, understanding and diagnosing the problem will help us start the much-needed process of reconstructing our schools so that the organization meets the varied needs of all students (as cited in Higgins & Pratt-Dawsey, 2008). This book contends that this very difficult journey begins with the adults, the professionals, taking an honest look at how this gap in student performance began and how it is perpetuated despite the honest efforts of very intelligent and concerned people. Universal achievement remains a pipe dream until we take an honest look at our beliefs, practices, behaviors, and the norms of our organization. These elements make up a very sensitive system known as a school’s culture. This is where many school officials and reformers fear to tread, but it is this place that holds the biggest keys to unlocking the potential of our public schools.
School Culture Research
In my work, I hear people use the terms culture and climate synonymously, and they are very different. In short, culture is how we behave, and climate is how we feel. Culture is “the way we do things around here,” and climate is “the way we feel around here” (Gruenert & Whitaker, 2015, p. 10). It is very possible that a group of professionals could feel very good about themselves and their students but still fail to modify their behaviors and practices and see no substantive change. The flattening world, described earlier in this chapter by Thomas Friedman through the lens of globalization, and the economic and social challenges of our world demand that schools make substantive improvements so that students have a fighting chance in a world that continues to become more competitive. Simply feeling better about ourselves is not enough. It is going to take a deep reflection of our individual and collective behaviors and creating conditions that allow all of us to improve our practices and behaviors.
According to Kent D. Peterson, educational consultant and professor, “School culture is the set of norms, values and beliefs, rituals and ceremonies, symbols and stories that make up the ‘persona’ of the school” (as cited in Cromwell, 2002). For years, we did not consider how the varied and diverse human elements from stakeholders—students, parents, and educators—impacted our schools. But we do now.
Peterson’s explanation of school culture is functional and accurately describes how the unseen human factors of a school affect the day-to-day practices and behaviors within a school (as cited in Cromwell, 2002). Peterson categorizes school culture into two types: (1) positive and (2) toxic. He describes a positive culture as one where:
There’s an informal network
