The Missing Link: Accountability With Staff Support

The deputy superintendent, about to be appointed superintendent of Maryland’s Montgomery County Public Schools and known for his tough-mindedness, wasn’t pleased with the way I answered his question. I hadn’t provided a clear explanation about how to handle a high-stakes parent conflict that had arisen at the elementary school where I was completing my principal internship.

“What I’m trying to teach you,” he said, “is that when I was a principal in Philadelphia 30 years ago, a principal’s word was law. But it isn’t like that anymore. Now a principal, like a superintendent, stands on ever-shifting political sands.”

The Situation

It has taken more than 20 years to fully appreciate the lesson he taught me that day. Now that I’ve served as an elementary, middle and high school principal and as the director of professional growth, as well as a consultant working with principal supervisors and principals, I can see he was right. I’ve seen superintendents and principals struggle to stand on such a shaky surface.

This is what they tend to think when first appointed: “I need to get results and I need them fast. First and most important, I want to make a difference in the lives of children and now is my window of opportunity. Second, I know my honeymoon won’t last long, especially in this high-stakes environment of educational accountability. I’ll begin by analyzing the student achievement data, graduation rates, SAT and ACT scores, AP and IB enrollment and whatever else is available. I’ll go further — disaggregate it and drill down to the individual student level. I’ll be a data-driven decision maker because I believe the old saying is true: ‘What gets measured gets done.’”

Of course, they are right. They need to study the data, question them, work with others to understand their implications and plan action steps, and then make adjustments.

I once heard another superintendent, who was under enormous pressure to get results, talk to a group of first-year principals. He had a reputation for an “I know best” leadership style, and in a moment of candor, he made a startling acknowledgment: “You think I know the secret to closing achievement gaps? I don’t. But I’m completely committed to our district being the first to close them. So I’m trying something. If what I’m trying doesn’t work, I’m going to try something else. That’s what I want you to do. It’s not only my job that depends on making progress, it’s your job, too.”

Both superintendents were right. The pressure to get results while working in an unstable political environment leads superintendents and principals to conclude that they need to focus on the data and take immediate action. However, you can take this approach too far. A central-office administrator from Texas once described his school district to me as “the land of too many initiatives.” Clearly his superintendent was feeling the need to get results through one method or another. The result he was getting, though, was that his administrators were going crazy trying to keep up with him and his initiative du jour.

The Missing Piece

What are these superintendents missing by exclusively concentrating on being action-oriented, data-driven decision makers? They’re forgetting the missing piece that will make all the difference to their staff and students’ progress and their own success. The old business maxim they’re following shouldn’t be limited to “what gets measured gets done.” It should be extended to “what gets measured and supported gets done.” The reason is actually as simple as ABC.

Another business maxim, courtesy of Good to Great author Jim Collins, is that it is essential for a leader to “get the right people on the bus.” It’s undeniable that the quality of the people makes a great school or school system.

When you are appointed as superintendent or principal, you inherit almost all of your staff. If you’re lucky, you will have the opportunity to bring in a couple of talented people you knew from your previous assignments.

After your first year, a few people may retire or leave, giving you the opportunity to hire a few more. Still, the majority are the same staff who were working there under your predecessor. They were getting a certain level of results before you came, and given their level of skills and motivation, that’s what you have to work with. No amount of firing is going to change that reality. Taking that approach only accomplishes one thing — it delivers a message of intimidation and fear throughout the affected employee groups and to those who worry they are next.

The Opportunity

The other leadership move that new superintendents and principals often make is based on Collins’ corollary that after you get the right people on the bus, you need to get them in the right seats. In other words, they reorganize. Sometimes matching a talented individual with a new area of responsibility makes a big difference.

More often, I’ve seen an entire system become immobilized as everyone wonders if they’ll have a job next year and who their new boss might be. It sets people and progress back months every time a major reorganization is first rumored, then slowly rolled out. When it’s finally in place, everyone knows it won’t be long until the next one, which inevitably will happen if the results don’t come fast enough or the leader changes.

That’s why the only chance you have to improve your district or your school is to support your employees by building their capacity to do better work. Yes, be a data-driven manager, but also be an ABC leader — A Building Capacity leader. If you do both, you have the recipe for significant and long-lasting change.

Consider two school districts, one large and one small, to observe how they provided real support and built capacity to get results.

MONTGOMERY COUNTY, MD.

In 2000, Montgomery County, one of the 20th largest school systems in the nation with more than 160,000 students, began implementing a professional growth system for teachers, followed by one for principals and other administrators in 2004 and support professionals in 2005. Each system outlines the standards to evaluate performance — ensuring “what gets measured” is in place.

The district went much further, putting the support component in place. Every new teacher receives coaching by a consulting teacher, an expert in effective teaching who visits the teacher’s classroom each week to observe, model, guide and coach. New principals receive their coaching from a consulting principal, a highly successful principal on special assignment to help peers succeed in their challenging new jobs. Support professionals who are underperforming also receive coaching support from experienced and skilled peers.

These cadres of coaches provide a lot of support. However, it’s expensive to staff so many positions, and this doesn’t even include the cost of the supports provided by supervisors, teacher leaders, peer mentors and trainers leading courses and workshops. These coaches are particularly costly because the support they provide is job-embedded (individualized and provided at the employee’s work site), which is more effective, but less efficient than group or online training. If we maintain the belief that what gets measured and supported gets done, the most important question is: What are the results?

A few years after the coaching systems were in place, the superintendent asked me to do a cost-benefit analysis. Was our investment in support paying off?

We examined the effect on principals and, most importantly, the effect on their schools’ student achievement — especially on making progress closing achievement gaps. We focused on the elementary schools with the highest needs in terms of poverty, mobility and new English language learners. When we looked at the schools of the new principals who received coaching support, the data revealed remarkable success. The students in these schools made greater gains than the students in the school system and the state — the type of progress needed to reduce achievement gaps. Even more telling was that the gains continued after the year of coaching ended.

Encouraged by these results, we examined the effect of coaching support on new teachers and their students’ learning. Most people would say that veteran teachers produce higher student achievement. The limited research in this area generally supports this belief. But what if new teachers who receive individualized coaching could produce approximately the same level of student achievement as their more experienced colleagues?

When we studied the student achievement results from our new teachers’ classrooms, we found the new teachers’ students were doing approximately as well as the students throughout the high-performing district and surpassing the state. Because new teachers are more likely to teach in high-poverty schools, these results were especially important for closing achievement gaps. Using this coaching approach, in addition to the supports provided by the schools, we could be confident that our students in high-needs schools were being well-served.

WOODSTOCK, ILL.

In 2016, the superintendent of the 12-school Woodstock Community School District 200, located 50 miles northwest of Chicago, began collaborating with the Center for Educational Leadership, a nonprofit service arm of the University of Washington College of Education. The superintendent and his leadership team had a vision of a district working in concert to raise achievement for all students and close achievement gaps.

The school district was attracted to CEL because equity is a key principle of the center’s work with schools nationwide. Its approach is to work side by side with teachers, principals and school system leaders to build expertise to deliver great classroom instruction around a unified vision of outstanding teaching.

During the 2016-17 school year, Woodstock and the center staff focused on building the capacity of the superintendent’s cabinet of assistant superintendents and directors to coach principals for school improvement. As one of the consultants working with Woodstock, I observed something unusual. Rather than arranging for his staff to be trained, the superintendent was completely engaged in every professional development session.

The plan called for learning some research-based coaching skills and observing assistant superintendents coaching principals in their schools and providing them with feedback. When I asked for an example of an authentic challenge that one of them faced when coaching a principal, to my surprise, the superintendent shared an example and then volunteered to be coached by me in the group setting.

The idea of making practice public is another key concept in the Center for Educational Leadership’s approach to capacity building. What better way to model that it’s safe to try new ideas and refine your skills than to have the superintendent go first. When we went to schools, everyone was willing to experiment with new coaching skills because a psychologically safe climate for learning had been established.

The following year, the focus moved to identifying and coming to consensus on a set of “power standards” — high-leverage instructional strategies that the entire district would work on together so that the principals, district leaders and schools could help each other. Like most districts in Illinois, Woodstock uses the Danielson Framework, so CEL facili-tated a process to select key standards aligned with it.

Increasing student engagement is one power standard that the Woodstock leaders chose. No surprise, because it is found in just about every framework as an important key to improving teaching and learning.

In Woodstock, every school analyzes its data and implements a school improvement plan (“what gets measured gets done”), but now a structure is in place to provide a unified vision across the district, and all the supports provided by the district and individual schools are aligned. 

When learning walkthroughs began, they were focused on each school’s problem of practice, how the power standard was being implemented and what supports were needed. Next year the plan is to include all teacher leaders in the training, both on coaching skills and walkthroughs based on the power standards.

You can see a clear progression in how Woodstock is rolling out its plans. The leaders are both data-driven decision makers and capacity builders. They subscribe to CEL’s foundational ideas that if students aren’t learning, they need to be afforded with powerful learning opportunities.

For improvements to occur in how teachers teach, improvements also must happen in how principals supervise. For that to happen, district leaders must improve their own set of practices. Everyone has to make some changes in how they operate to get better at their jobs so that students achieve. 

This approach regards teaching and leading as sophisticated endeavors that can only be improved in an open and safe culture of public reflection and collaboration. This is the way Woodstock is approaching the enhancement of everyone’s expertise and the building of everyone’s capacity.

Capacity and Data

Whether you are a superintendent leading a large school system with many employees and assets or a small district with fewer staff and more limited resources or you are a principal in a similar situation, you can be both data-driven and a builder of capacity. The challenges are certainly greater with limited staff or funds, but the key to your staff’s growth and ultimately student success is to lead using both approaches.