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 academic testing standards so they could prevent schools from receiving the label of failing (Peterson & Hess, 2008). And some states created loopholes in their accountability systems to omit counting students with certain risk factors so that schools could falsely boost their test scores (Dizon, Feller, & Bass, 2006). Ultimately, this punitive approach led to nearly net-zero student achievement growth between 2002 and 2013 (Ravitch, 2013).
President Barack Obama’s administration tried a different approach to improving schools in 2009. Though it did not eliminate NCLB as a federal policy, it allowed states leeway on some provisions and offered them incentives through federal programs like Race to the Top to reward schools into improving (U.S. Department of Education, 2013). Many states offered teachers merit pay for better student test scores and created outcome-based teacher evaluation systems to reward effective teachers financially (a carrot approach). This type of approach might create short-term commitment or interest until the educator no longer considers the incentive a priority.
The preliminary evidence from the shift from stick to carrot reveals that the latter approach has not effected tangible student learning outcomes much more than the former approach, especially as it pertains to closing the achievement gap for students at risk (Lee, 2014). Decision makers and policymakers have not learned that human beings are much more complex and nuanced than these policies, aimed at stimulating motivation to improve performance, suppose.
A lack of balance in leadership approach is the biggest factor in leadership ineffectiveness (Bass, 1981). We propose that transformational leaders must strike a balance between the important elements of focusing on the task and focusing on relationships and between providing support and requiring accountability.
Task and Relationship Balance
Leadership researcher and pioneer Bernard M. Bass (1981) felt that the most critical mistake most leaders make is placing too much emphasis either on the task at hand or on relationships with others. Bass (1981) describes leaders as tending to be either task focused (emphasizing rules and procedures for getting the task done) or follower focused (emphasizing concern for people).
Task-Focused Leadership
A task-focused leader initiates structure, provides vital information, determines what people should do, issues the rules, promises rewards for compliance, and threatens punishment for disobedience. The task-focused leader uses his or her power to obtain compliance. Task-focused leadership produces some benefits.
▶ Clarity of focus
▶ Outcomes orientation
▶ Predictability
▶ Clear expectations
▶ Strong protocol and procedures
Task-focused leadership will also generate some disadvantages.
▶ Fear of failure or lack of job security
▶ Alienation
▶ Lack of professional creativity
▶ Lack of commitment
▶ Passive-aggressive behavior and informal protest
Follower-Focused Leadership
A follower-focused leader solicits advice, opinions, and information from those he or she leads and checks decisions or shares decision
