A 2014 U.S. Department of Education report finds the following regarding U.S. schools.
▶ Among high schools serving the highest percentage of African American and Latino students, one in three do not offer a single chemistry course, and one in four do not offer a course more advanced than algebra 1.
▶ In schools that offer gifted and talented programs, African American and Latino students represent 40 percent of students, but only 26 percent of those students enroll in such programs.
▶ African American students, Latino students, and students living below the national poverty line attend schools with higher concentrations of first-year teachers than do middle-class white students.
▶ African American students are suspended and expelled from school at a rate more than three times as high as white students (16 percent versus 5 percent).
These data reinforce the fact that school leadership, at every level, needs to improve. Student academic success and skill development are matters of survival for many, especially in a world that is quickly moving away from the industrial model into a knowledge-based economy. The needs of society are changing faster than many schools’ ability to create positive momentum, especially for our most vulnerable populations. If effective leadership is judged by positive impact on performance, these data suggest that there is a huge need for positive influence and change in our school systems. Improving the skill and effectiveness of leadership is essential in the quest to provide every student with a quality and useful education. As we work with school leaders, we do not observe a lack of sincerity and desire to improve the effectiveness of their environments. What we observe are sincere, hardworking people who lack an understanding of how to properly cultivate an environment of change. We believe that the transformational leadership model, and the essential skills attached to this model, is the best solution to this problem.
Finding Balance for Systems Change
If there is one thing people can likely all agree on, it is that change is hard. Whether individually battling a personal vice, like smoking, or striving to change other long-held habits, people find it difficult to will themselves to abandon an unproductive behavior for a more productive behavior, even if they have overwhelming evidence for change. Schools face an even more daunting, complex challenge than individual change—systems change, a challenge that many school and system leaders have failed to meet.
Daniel H. Pink (2011) writes, “Too many organizations—not just companies, but governments and nonprofits as well—still operate from assumptions about human potential and individual performance that are outdated, unexamined, and rooted more in folklore than in science” (p. 9). The challenge of change is tough enough with the right skills and research-based strategies, but when a system operates from its own conjecture, folklore, and gut instincts, it makes the task nearly impossible. Pink (2011) points out that gut instincts lead to one of two very ineffective assumptions.
1. People are motivated through force—the stick approach.
2. People are motivated through incentives—the carrot approach.
He notes that both assumptions are incorrect because people have much more complexity and nuance than their fears or material desires.
Educational leadership practices and educational policies reflect this lack of insight into the complexity of human nature. Richard DuFour (2015) eloquently dismantles these incorrect assumptions and ineffective policies and practices in his book In Praise of American Educators: And How They Can Become Even Better. DuFour (2015) documents seven assumptions, which have roots in neither fact nor science, that continue to guide change efforts in U.S. public schools. These assumptions have not worked or even come close to changing schools for the better.
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
