Question 3: From research and your experience, what are the most prevalent and most pressing problems for chronically low-performing schools?

Problem #1 – Context Matters

“No silver bullet will cure the ills affecting the nations’s education system.”—Arne Duncan, March 11, 2009

So-called experts on school reform are quick to trot out graphs showing a flat line of student performance over the last four decades. “We spend all this money and look what we have to show for it.” What they don’t show is how the student demographics have shifted in that same time frame. I can’t remember hearing a school leader tell me that their school was getting richer and less diverse. Nor can I tell you the last time I heard a school leader tell me that they were asked to do less. Today, teachers and principals have been asked to do more with less and less.

Here’s the miracle that no one talks about. Despite dramatically different demographics and ever-increasing risk factors that have resulted in the readiness levels of learners sharply declining, schools have held their own. Think about it! One in ten students in high school today is a second language learner, yet reading proficiency continues to improve, even if only slightly. My point here is to acknowledge the good that is being done in school after school across this country.

Having said that, we have a lot of work to do. Regardless of the dedication of teachers and principals, we must do better. We owe it to our students and we owe it to ourselves. The fact is that a student without the skills to go on to postsecondary education is effectively sentenced to a lifetime of marginal employment and second-class citizenship. We all pay the bills for the uneducated. They are more likely to be on public assistance, have poor health, and to go to jail. Instead of contributing to society, the uneducated and untrained are a constant drain—an anchor that we cannot afford to drag around in a competitive global economy. The reality is that, in today’s knowledge economy, the best-educated country will have the highest standard of living. I want that to be us.

The bottom line is that all schools need to improve, not just the lowest performing. Bringing the bottom up will not get us where we want to go. We must raise up all students in all schools to, heretofore, unimagined levels of academic achievement.

School performance is all about culture. School culture is the autopilot of a school. Culture is to a school what the operating system is to a computer—every computer has one, but some are much better than others. Culture is composed of the sum of the values, beliefs, attitudes, expectations, behaviors, and traditions of a school, and the achievement of students is a direct reflection of the school’s culture.

It takes years to shape a culture. Turning around a low-performing school is about so much more than firing principals, replacing staff, implementing programs, or changing school structures. Structural changes don’t change the culture they just rearrange the furniture. I have been in schools that have professional learning communities, small learning communities, career academies, transition programs, and advisories. Despite all these structural changes there was no change in student achievement. Don’t get me wrong, all these are effective strategies, but in order for them to work, schools must make them work for the benefit of the students not the adults who work in those schools.

I have learned from several decades of experience that the most important things, those that will really make a difference in a high school, are often the most difficult to pull off. Schools must change, but not for the sake of change. We must promote responsible change. Change that is meaningful and long lasting, not a quick fix. Responsible change takes time, know-how, resources, and hard work.

High schools don’t become high achieving schools by accident. It takes a lot of work over a number of years. Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, emphasizes that, when it comes to school reform, there are no silver bullets. So, let’s quit dancing around the problem coming up with one fad after another. Let’s stop looking for simple solutions to complex problems and resolve to get down to the arduous task of doing the right things--the things we must do to build a culture of success in our lowest-performing schools.

I had the opportunity to work over the span of four decades as a school administrator in two districts with an excellent reputation of community support for schools. In large part, the culture of the schools in those districts was shaped by the beliefs and expectations of the community. In those districts, schools reflect the context in which they exist. They are a product of their environment. The schools are good because the community expects good schools and the community provides the resources the schools need to succeed. The schools in these districts begin at “good” and strive for “great.” They succeed because of the community not in spite of it.

Unfortunately, many of my colleagues work in a much different context. The lowest-performing high schools across the country are commonly referred to as “dropout factories,” which is code for “failing” schools. They are called “dropout factories” because students in those schools have no better than a 50-50 chance of graduating. These schools are struggling in the midst of devastating poverty, high student mobility, high percentages of second language learners, rampant crime, gang infested neighborhoods, and alarmingly low levels of adult literacy.

School leaders in these schools have a much different and more difficult job than their counterparts in more advantaged and resourced schools. They have the same responsibilities as their colleagues, but must often be concerned with feeding and clothing their students. These schools spend a lot of time finding basic health services for their students. These schools are often the only safe  place their students have to go to.

If these schools do exactly the same things that more advantaged schools do, they fail. Staff in low-performing schools must work longer and harder in rundown facilities with fewer resources just to be “good.” Many low-performing schools not only lack physical resources like updated equipment and the latest technology, but, because of the difficulty they have in recruiting teachers to work in these schools, they also lack the human capital they need to improve teaching and raise achievement.

Leaders of low-performing schools have more than their surroundings to overcome. They often find themselves isolated on an island treated like orphans in their own districts by staff who want to distance themselves from the fallout of failure. Ironically, those who are in the best position to help them improve often reject low-performing schools. At the mere mention of a low-performing school’s name, district staff roll their eyes and scoff. When the leaders in these schools attempt to innovate they are often thwarted at every turn.

Despite existing in an educationally hostile environment, many of these schools are beating the odds and making a difference in the lives of their students. They are graduating high percentages of students and sending them on to post-secondary education. We have much to learn from them.

The National Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP) has spent the last decade researching these “breakthrough schools” to find out what it was that they were doing that helped them overcome their circumstances. I had the privilege of leading one of those “breakthrough schools,” and, in part 2 of this response, I will share with you what I learned over the last decade. I promise that I will offer no “silver bullets.”