school improvement is developing the capacity of the staff to function as members of high-performing teams in schools that are true professional learning communities.
■ Local education leaders must explain changes in policy to parents and other stakeholders. Without such clear and consistent communication, parents can easily default to their own experience—the way school was when they were students.
The Audience
So, who is the audience for this book? In a perfect world, every state legislature would become deeply familiar with this book’s contents. Lawmakers would be persuaded to move away from the punitive-based, sanction-driven reforms of the past and use this book to help clarify how states can improve student learning by embracing PLC principles. We will address the specifics of those principles. However, this is more than a manual for policymakers. The practical advice in the following pages will be useful for leaders at the district, school, and classroom levels.
During the first decade and a half of the 21st century, education leaders asked, “What does Washington want?” as they attempted to avoid the sanctions of No Child Left Behind and pursue the incentives of Race to the Top. But with the advent of ESSA, education leaders must ask, “What do the students in my system need?” The implementation of the PLC process and the other ideas in this book is not merely a response to national legislation but rather an ethical imperative. These are the right things to do and not an exercise in compliance with higher authorities.
But ultimately, the impact of ESSA on student learning in the United States depends on the quality of educators students meet with each day.
But ultimately, the impact of ESSA on student learning in the United States depends on the quality of educators students meet with each day. Collective efficacy—the belief that our combined efforts can have a positive impact in achieving our shared goals—is one of the strongest predictors of an improving school. The PLC process, when implemented well, is our best strategy for increasing teacher, administrator, and student efficacy.
Out of Chaos Comes Order
To outside observers, the U.S. education system reflects chaos. It involves 14,000 independent school districts, 150,000 schools, and more than 48 million students—with no national agreement on what students should know at any given grade level, no comprehensive exam that assesses everything students should learn, and no consensus on what schools should do when students struggle to learn (United States Census Bureau, n.d.).
If the U.S. education system is ever to operate as a true system, it must embrace clarity of purpose, a guaranteed and viable curriculum, careful monitoring of each student’s learning, and a prompt intervention process that ensures the staff continues to provide struggling students extra time and support until they become proficient.
In short, the years to come can be the best of times for schooling in the United States if our legislatures and districts fully commit to the PLC process.
Educators and legislators who work together to create a true system of education in their districts and schools can offer action research to help others learn from their work. In short, the years to come can be the best of times for schooling in the United States if our legislatures and districts fully commit to the PLC process. But if lawmakers and educators cling to the failed policies of the past—policies that view teachers as problems to solve rather than resources to develop—ESSA will have little impact on student achievement.
In the Face of Uncertainty
Political uncertainty in every era pushes education leaders into one of two directions. The first, and most common, is the path of paralysis: “We can’t respond until we know what to do,” these leaders lament. This strikes us as curious, as the same leaders often express deep resentment of policy hierarchies that have, during the years 2001–2016, issued one directive after another. Most of these policy prescriptions, particularly those associated with accountability systems based on student test scores and Byzantine teacher evaluation systems (no offense intended to the Byzantine Empire), have been counterproductive. Time that could have been profitably devoted to teaching and learning has been diverted to test prep and mind-numbing documentation of teacher evaluation systems.
But now that schools, districts, and states have been liberated from these restrictions, education leaders following the first path remain paralyzed, waiting for one bureaucratic system to be replaced by another, as if toxic micromanagement from a national capital would magically be better displaced by the same policies from a state capital.
There is a better way, and that is the path this book suggests. Schools, districts, and states can pursue a new way—accountability as a learning system. They can focus on known best practices in teaching and learning, with collaborative work among teachers and administrators at every level. We believe that the fundamental purpose of educational accountability is improving student learning through improved teaching and leadership practices. This is in stark contrast to those who believe that the purpose of educational accountability is to rate, rank, evaluate, and humiliate schools and the teachers and administrators who work there.
While we know that schools should not be immune from criticism, we have seen no evidence that criticism, ratings, and rankings have led to improved student achievement. At the heart of the PLC process is a continuous source of feedback that helps students, teachers, and administrators understand how to improve. Just as PLCs are a learning system for collaborative teams of teachers, our vision of accountability is that the PLC framework can help entire districts, states, and ultimately the world.
Education systems have an unprecedented opportunity to redefine in fundamental terms what the phrase educational accountability really means.
We write with a sense of urgency. As the following chapters demonstrate, education systems have an unprecedented opportunity to redefine in fundamental terms what the phrase educational accountability really means. Readers will discover the opportunity to engage in fundamental transformation, from accountability as a means for public humiliation, supported by dubious and opaque statistical systems, to accountability as a learning system, one that helps students, teachers, education leaders, and policymakers use the information from accountability systems to inform professional practice and policymaking in real time.
After considering the history of education oversight in the United States in chapter 1, we then examine ESSA and how states can respond to this legislation in chapters 2 and 3. In chapter 4, we provide an example of how an individual school might respond to ESSA, elevating collaboration over a tradition of competitive private practice. In chapters 5 and 6, we consider how districts and states, respectively, can respond to ESSA. In these chapters, we offer a three-tiered accountability system in which districts and states consider accountability indicators that are common to all schools, such as safety and academic achievement, and illuminate these results with accountability indicators that are unique to the needs of each individual school. Our theme in these chapters is that accountability is more than a litany of test scores. Educational accountability becomes a learning system only when effects—student achievement—are linked to causes—specific actions of teachers, leaders, parents, and policymakers. Finally, in chapter 7, we consider the path ahead for ESSA.
Let
