Scott Goldstein: DC schools need to shift mindset from compliance to inspiration

Few experiments in the recent history of education reform in the United States have garnered as much attention as the reform efforts ushered in by Michelle Rhee in this city just over a decade ago.

A narrative was built that DC’s reforms, focused principally on teacher evaluation and accountability measures, had saved the District’s schools. According to the narrative, DC was the fastest-improving urban school district in the country and a model for education reform, a model that has already been exported across the country. But despite modest gains and notable investments in infrastructure, pre-K, and more, the opportunity gap and resulting achievement gap in DC schools has increased in the decade since Rhee’s crusade.

It’s a discussion worth having, but as we start a new year and the dust settles from the past year of controversy in DC schools, the opportunity to create a new model can emerge. Whether you’re a true believer in reform or an ardent critic, it’s time to move on from the debate over the past and focus on a vision for where our schools are now. This is a chance to move away from a compliance mindset to an inspiration mindset, and we have to seize it.

Here’s how rigid adherence to policies can work against success: A teacher I know serves students who are primarily recent immigrants to the United States at the 11th-grade level. The DC Public Schools curriculum breaks U.S. history into courses at two grade levels — eighth-graders learn about the first half of U.S. history (from the American Revolution to the Civil War), and then 11th-graders are taught about the period after the Civil War. If students migrate to the U.S. and begin here in high school, they start that year discussing the post-Civil-War Reconstruction Era with little to no background on slavery in the United States. With that in mind, this teacher, in the interest of serving her students, decided that it was imperative to step back and briefly address a topic to which they had had little exposure: American slavery and the Civil War. It was the right pedagogical decision and the common-sense choice. Yet she was reprimanded by school administrators for not following the provided scope and sequence document, which requires her at that time of year to be teaching Reconstruction and not slavery. The focus wasn’t on the quality of her teaching or the needs of her students; it was all about compliance.

This compliance mindset — demonstrated not only through enforcement of curriculum and lessons but also in staff expectations, teacher evaluations, and so much more — doesn’t just impede common-sense solutions. It also harms our ability to truly work together to solve problems rather than pointing fingers.

So how can we learn from mistakes and ensure that we aren’t misrepresenting student achievement or manipulating data, but also ensure we are holding everyone accountable for honest, transparent approaches to school improvement? And how can we also instill a sense of autonomy to work within reasonable policies to problem-solve for the high-needs students we serve?

First off, instead of weekly district-mandated professional development, how about time in our schedules for teachers to observe and learn from each other? Because the best ideas are already here within our walls! That’s an inspiration mindset. Instead of checking on teachers to ensure they’re in the right place, how about investment in and celebration of those teachers who have gone outside the box and achieved results by doing so? Instead of viewing social studies, science, health and PE, music, art and experiential learning as detracting from time for reading and math, how about acknowledging the world of research that engagement and knowledge-building are necessary precursors to literacy?

None of this is a simple transition from where we are, but it begins with trusting those closest to our students with increased professional authority. While our policies should set achievable and moral bottom lines, we have to provide more autonomy to educators who have proven track records of success. When the charter school movement first began, the intention was to allow teachers to produce innovative solutions within their schools and to give them the flexibility to experiment and diffuse positive ideas within and, ultimately, among schools. The movement has strayed far from that goal, but it’s something we can still work to achieve, a reform that will strengthen our public schools and increase the retention of our most-inspired teachers and leaders.

Second, we have to do the slow work of building and rebuilding trust within our schools by ensuring that teachers, school leaders, and district leaders truly understand the pressures each other faces, as well as respect their ideas for pushing student achievement forward. Research shows that relational trust is key to successful school turnaround.

Finally, we have to replace top-down structures with truly collaborative, distributed leadership. Teachers must be given the time and space to lead — not to serve as token leaders hired to implement policies devised by others — but to truly lead from their own ideas and inspiration. We need to hear from teachers of color, who too often face even higher obstacles in working with school leadership (and more retaliation when they speak out). Teachers, counselors, social workers, parents, and community members have to be at the table for reform design — not by signing off on already finalized plans, but doing the designing themselves. Teacher leadership has a demonstrated connection to increased student achievement.

This is the work that my organization, EmpowerED, is engaged in: empowering solution-oriented collaboration that allows our teachers to lead on improving school culture, policy, and curriculum alike.

No one wants to see their school’s name in the headline of the next negative news story, but that’s a dangerous disposition, too. We need teachers, principals, social workers, counselors — everyone who works for schools — to be doing everything in their power to innovate and solve problems for the students they work with, and sometimes the letter of the policy doesn’t help them do that.

“If students pass the test, but don’t care about the content, we have created compliance, not engagement,” says Brad Weinstein, director of curriculum and instruction for Purdue Polytechnic High School. And what a shame it would be if we’ve created a system where we’re spending so much time focusing on compliance — whether it be on content, curriculum, or school and district policy — that we have students who aren’t passing the test or engaged.

Our school system is too rooted in a culture of opposition created, in part, by the much-touted but critically flawed IMPACT evaluation tool. Here is the reality: The challenges we face — from poverty and the need for greater family support, from the opportunity gap to lagging literacy skills — are far too big to be solved by an oppositional system. Together, we can make schools places of empowerment and inspiration again, enabling us to creatively solve our underlying issues. Then, inch by inch, we will be in a position to make improvements that look as good in reality as they do in the brochures.

Scott Goldstein is executive director of the DC teacher leadership organization, EmpowerEd.