Overcoming Anti-Reform Excuses

Superintendents work outside the box to promote beneficial change in their local school districts, argues Frederick Hess in the January 2010 American Enterprise Institute (AEI) Education Outlook. In “Cages of Their Own Design: Five Strategies to Help Education Leaders Break Free,” AEI Senior Fellow Hess asserts that superintendents and principals often make three complaints which “are real problems” but not exclusively true.

The first “common excuse,” is that they are restricted by their contract bargaining agreements but “most CBAs include substantial ambiguity on various counts,” including teacher pay and other personnel decisions, argues Hess.

He and Fordham Institute policy analyst Coby Loup conducted research in 2008 which analyzed the contract bargaining agreements of the nation’s largest 50 school districts. “The murkiness and ambiguity have been made especially problematic by risk-averse principals, central office administrators, school boards, and superintendents who are applauded for ‘collegiality’ and strongly encouraged by the community to avoid unseemly conflict,” he and Loup argue in the 2008 Fordham Institute study. “In no small part, this timidity is the handiwork of local teacher associations, which are enormously influential and active in school district affairs, can frequently unseat board members who don’t toe the line, can make life complicated for unpopular superintendents and principals, and can turn to plenty of other levers such as state (and federal) laws and regulations if the district or its leader becomes obstreperous,” they write.

As for the “second familiar complaint” of “the heavy hand of state and federal regulations,” Hess points to California’s 1980s practice of allowing waivers for school districts “if they could demonstrate that laws or rules were hampering school improvement,” he writes in the 2010 Education Outlook. “Columbia University Professor Henry Levin recounted, ‘Fewer than 100 [waivers] were made in the first year [out of more than one thousand districts,” and “More surprising, noted Levin, was that ‘that vast majority of all requests for waivers were unnecessary,’” writes Hess.

“A third excuse for tepid leadership is lack of money,” he writes. According to a 2009 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) report, “Education at a Glance,” which used 2006 numbers, the public education system has an “annual expenditure” per student “for all services” of $9,709 for primary education and $10,821 for secondary education.

Back in 1983, when the influential report A Nation At Risk was released, per pupil expenditures were under $5,600 annually, on average, according to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), which also used OECD data. As the embedded NCES graph demonstrates, per-pupil education expenditures have grown dramatically. However, even amidst increased funding, these monies rarely seem to translate into increases in student proficiency.

If not these three common “complaints,” what is stopping superintendents from pursuing meaningful school reforms? “More than anything, principals and superintendents live in a culture that puts a premium on collegiality and consensus,” Hess argues. “Fully 80 percent of superintendents follow a career path that leads from teacher to principal to superintendent (with two-thirds serving in the district central office en route),” he wrote, referring to a 2000 study by the American Association of School Administrators.

“Seventy-six percent of superintendents gain their first administrative position before they are 35,” states this study. “This first administrative position is typically assistant principal or principal.” The researchers surveyed 2,262 of an estimated 13,728 superintendents nationwide.

Teach for America (TFA) graduates, who come from some of the prestigious higher ed locales—the University of Chicago, Duke University, Notre Dame, Princeton, Wellesley and Tufts University—sometimes follow this path themselves. “Teach for America is nearing its 20th anniversary,” reported Amanda M. Fairbanks, a TFA graduate, for the New York Times this January. “Of its 17,000 alumni, 63 percent remain in the field of education and 31 percent remain in the classroom,” she writes.

In other words, under half of those who remain in education after serving their two-year term with TFA actually stay in the classroom. (Non-classroom education careers are not necessarily superintendent or principal positions).

In his policy paper Hess argues that “[f]ive strategies can help leaders, policymakers, and reformers make this shift” away from “a defensive to a change-agent mindset.”

–         “Recognize the difference between how business is usually done and how it could be done” by looking “beyond the boundaries of what is permissible” (emphasis original).

–         “Promote transparency,”

–         “Get the Law on Your Side” and make “the law a tool a reform,”

–         “Welcome Nontraditional Thinking and Leaders,” and

–         “Provide Cover” for those pursuing reform as protection from an inevitable resistance.

“Superintendents and principals who sidestep conflict while overhauling low-performing schools and systems will prove, at best, tepid agents of change,” concludes Hess. “Geniality is a good thing, but there is a time for consensus and a time for conflict.” He argued that education leaders truly “intent on radically improving schools and systems” should prepare themselves for a “good bit of turbulence.”

Bethany Stotts is a staff writer at Accuracy in Academia.