Michael and his coauthorAndy Hargreaves (2012) acknowledge the value of well-implemented PLCs. But they also observe that, too often, PLC strategies “have been imposed simplistically and heavy-handedly by overzealous administrators” (p. 128), that PLCs are sometimes viewed more favorably by those at the top (administrators) than they are by those on the ground (teachers), and that “the current PLC movement should be reconfigured and reconsidered” (p. 136).
With this book, Cultures Built to Last: Systemic PLCs at Work™, the two of us have teamed up in an effort to stress our continuing support for the PLC process, but we also recast PLCs from just another attractive innovation for individual schools to the central instrument for changing the culture of the education system: district-, state-, and nationwide. An orientation and commitment to whole-system reform are especially important for PLCs because they started as—and it is easy for them to be stuck at—being an individual-school phenomenon. To make PLCs systemic, leaders at all levels must see the strategy as tantamount to changing the culture of the system. They must abandon the perception that PLCs represent a program to be implemented and recognize that the PLC process is a cultural transformation that has lasting value.
The Challenge of Cultural Change
Structural change deals with policies, programs, rules, and procedures. A characteristic of structural change, one that political and educational leaders often find attractive, is that these changes can be mandated. A state government can increase graduation requirements, adopt the Common Core State Standards, or increase the number of required school days in a calendar year. A district can move its high schools to a block schedule, adopt a new language arts program, or require students to wear school uniforms as a matter of fiat.
Unlike structural change that can be mandated, cultural change requires altering long-held assumptions, beliefs, expectations, and habits that represent the norm for people in the organization. These deeply held but typically unexamined assumptions help people make sense of their world. More simply put, culture is just “the way we do things around here.” Systemic implementation of the PLC process requires changing the way things have typically been done at all levels.
Two things are true about cultural change: it is absolutely doable, but it is also undeniably difficult. Factors that contribute to the difficulty include the following:
• It requires significant changes to traditional schooling practices that have endured for over a century. In particular, it changes the way that just about everyone relates to each other in the school and across schools and the system.
• It is certain to create conflict.
• It is multifaceted. Leaders do not have the luxury of focusing on a single aspect of the organization that requires attention.
• It is a heuristic process of trial and error. There is no formula to be followed that guarantees the desired outcomes. Much of cultural change involves working through complexity by finding out what is working and what isn’t, and by making adjustments based on the findings. The good news is that there are clear ideas for guiding the process.
• It never ends. Creating the commitment to continuous improvement inherent in the PLC process means you never “arrive.”
But, although we acknowledge the difficulty of cultural change, we are convinced that unless leaders recognize the need for whole-system reform aimed at changing the very culture of the system, schools will be unable to meet the challenges they confront. Furthermore, even those individual schools that have implemented the PLC process successfully will find it difficult to sustain the process unless the larger system provides a more positive and supportive context.
On the other hand, PLCs as cultural change are exciting for people and can get initial results in fairly short order. They unleash energy and draw in the vast majority of people who begin to make fundamental changes never before thought possible.
When the PLC process drives an entire system, participants come to have a sense of identity that goes beyond just their own piece of the system. They identify in palpable ways with the overall organization, unleashing the energy of mutual allegiance and competition for the common good. This “systemness” exists in the hearts and minds of the people working together for the betterment of the system and is a defining characteristic of the culture.
So to be explicitly overt regarding our purpose in writing this book, we hope to convince readers of three things:
1. If the PLC process is going to impact education beyond the individual school or isolated district, the process must be the driving force of the entire system. It is time for PLCs to go big!
2. The PLC process is just that—a process, not a program. Educators don’t “do PLC” one year and then move on to something else the following year. They will not get the lasting benefits from PLCs until they learn to implement the process deeply and widely as a fundamental change in the culture of schools and school systems. We will elaborate on this distinction between process and program throughout the book.
3. Every person in the system has an obligation to be an instrument for cultural change—rather than waiting for others to make the necessary changes.
By system, we mean multiple schools and communities that are tied together within a single authority. The school district is the minimum size for us, but increasingly we mean all the districts in a given province or state, and in some cases, we mean the entire country. If the overall system is not the focus of ongoing improvement, it will be extremely difficult for schools or districts to sustain continuous development.
Why We Need Systemic PLCs
At a time when the link between education and lifetime opportunity is stronger than ever before, the United States continues to score low on measures of education performance, and the gap between high and low performance is growing. The United States scores twentieth or worse among the thirty-four countries that are members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. In addition, studies show that American students are increasingly bored as they move up the grade levels. A study by Lee Jenkins (2012) found that 95 percent of kindergarteners like school, but by grade 9, this percentage has decreased to 37. The news is not much better for teachers. A 2012 MetLife Survey (Markow & Pieters, 2012) shows that teachers are becoming increasingly dissatisfied with their jobs, with almost one in three teachers contemplating leaving the profession. Equally shocking is the rapidity of the decline. The survey found that 39 percent of teachers in 2012 were satisfied compared to 62 percent only two years earlier. We have to contemplate what kind of places our schools really are if so many people would rather be somewhere else.
PLCs can play a central role in dramatically improving the overall performance of schools, the engagement of students, and the sense of efficacy and job satisfaction of educators. Furthermore, this improvement can occur not just in isolated individual schools, but across entire districts, states, and provinces. To do this, leaders must grasp the underlying principles of PLCs and realize that changing culture in systemic ways is at the heart of any successful large-scale education reform.
Changing culture in systemic ways is at the heart of any successful large-scale education reform.
Why Systemwide Reform Is Best
In the late 1970s and 1980s, researchers Ron Edmonds, Wilbur Brookover, Larry Lezotte, Michael Rutter, and others presented evidence that some schools were significantly more effective than others in helping students learn when external factors such as the socioeconomic status or family background of students were held constant. The focus of their research was the individual school, and they concluded that the school, rather than the district, should serve as the primary unit for reform. In fact, Lezotte (2011) acknowledged that early in their research,
