September/October 2008

Creating a Culture of Reciprocal Accountability

How five new principals won their faculties' support for schoolwide reform

by Gerald C. Leader

Principals new to their schools must win the trust and respect of their faculty and students. Administrators embarking on a whole-school, standards-based change agenda often find this to be the most difficult task they face as they ask teachers and students involved in the reform to relinquish old habits and learn new skills. Until a school community is able to embrace change efforts as its own, there is always the potential that a leader will meet with resistance when altering the status quo.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Boston Public Schools was a chronically dysfunctional school system. Teachers were ill equipped to instruct to high standards a population composed predominantly of high-poverty immigrant and minority students. Assisted by the award-winning reform efforts of superintendent Thomas Payzant, the five administrators whose stories are showcased below were on the vanguard of urban school leadership in that critical time, believing schools could make a difference in student achievement. And they worked hard to prove it.

Prompted by the 1998 Massachusetts Department of Education’s high-stakes MCAS performance test, these leaders pioneered many of the school community-building and instructional innovations that would prove necessary to meet the requirements of No Child Left Behind legislation that was enacted late into their tenures.

Each of the five principals developed and implemented a unique change strategy, but in most cases the recurring thread in the approaches they took to garnering the trust and allegiance of their respective faculties was creating a culture of reciprocal accountability. Sensitive to the needs, values, and priorities of their school populations, they acted accordingly, and teachers became more likely to embrace change efforts as their own.

Kim Marshall, Mather Elementary School

When Kim Marshall was appointed interim principal of the Mather Elementary School, deep inside Boston’s urban landscape, it was clear that he was intellectually prepared for the job. He had an exemplary record as a teacher of minority students, a master’s degree in educational administration from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and comprehensive knowledge of the K–12 curriculum. Missing, however, was the hands-on experience and wisdom that can only come from leading a school. Marshall’s early interventions had an administrator’s textbook logic but worked against establishing a positive rapport with his staff. For instance, his first-year performance evaluations, mandated by the district, were carefully constructed from systematic classroom observations. He found most of his teachers to be “Satisfactory,” but subsequently learned that his predecessor had been far less exacting, doling out “Excellents” like lollipops.

Irritated teachers became increasingly wary of the young leader when he brought in a professional development workshop proselytizing the belief that virtually all children can learn at high levels if they work hard and teachers set the terms for them to do so. When the workshop facilitator requested and recorded teachers’ assessments of Mather students’ performance, it became obvious that black male students comprised the lower portion of the distribution. Contrary to the intention of the exercise, many of Marshall’s teachers felt that they had been deliberately humiliated in front of their peers.

These two episodes impeded early progress, but Marshall’s resourcefulness and persistence changed the tide. In a strategic reversal against what was perceived as his unilateral leadership style, Marshall experimented to find ways he could seek staff participation in the change effort.

Providentially, the 350th anniversary of the Mather, the oldest elementary school in the nation, offered an opportunity for Marshall to orchestrate a well-publicized and financially remunerative celebration. Much to the pleasure of the staff, the Mather building and grounds benefited from a major facelift. The previously undistinguished school received major publicity, engendering pride in the once-beleaguered institution. The faculty found a new appreciation for Marshall as their leader. In turn, they began to reciprocate by participating, if not exactly whole-heartedly then at least agreeably, in a series of innovative instructional improvements led by Marshall. These efforts foreshadowed many of the elements now labeled Professional Learning Communities. The tipping point for staff endorsement of Marshall’s standards-based change agenda came with their realization that his leadership was indeed producing results that they, too, valued: higher student achievement.

Casel Walker, Manning Elementary School

Casel Walker was horrified on a daily basis by what she observed in Boston’s sleepy, self-satisfied, 175-student Manning Elementary School. No one at the school could see the implicit racism that resulted in black students consistently finding themselves in the shadow of their white classmates. Long before the so-called achievement gap was a hot-button issue, the Manning’s honor roll photographs of star students told the story.

Unwilling to wait the five to seven years she believed it would take for the school to embrace color-blind standards-based instruction, Walker chose a risky tactic to pressure teachers to set high learning expectations for all of their students. She intentionally created a “crisis” that disrupted the balance of the school by bringing in a district program for emotionally and behaviorally challenged students, most of whom were black. These 32 new students would provide the Manning with considerable instructional challenges. In partial compensation, the program provided additional faculty: four teachers, four paraprofessionals, and two administrators. Trust developed as Walker and her new and veteran faculty struggled together to raise the academic performance of both regular and special education students.

Walker was also determined not to repeat the mistakes she had made during her highly successful tenure as principal of the Blackstone Elementary School in Boston. Within a year after she left the Blackstone, she had seen her past accomplishments crumble. She came to realize that her style of leadership had cultivated an unhealthy dynamic between her and the staff: they had depended too heavily on her and she had not sufficiently empowered them. At the Manning, she vowed she would not micromanage and would instead give freedom to her staff with the mutual understanding that they were accountable for their students’ learning. The results were remarkably positive, and the Manning became a school sought after by parents and teachers alike.

Muriel Leonard, Shaw Middle School

Muriel Leonard’s reputation as a no-nonsense, tough but fair, and competent school leader preceded her at the chaotic and failing Shaw Middle School. Recognizing that the school was on the verge of meltdown, teachers gave Leonard’s aggressive and demanding reform agenda the benefit of the doubt and offered only minimal resistance to her change agenda.

Leonard’s trust-building was a product of her persistently challenging teachers and students to reach increasingly higher levels of performance. After bringing order to the school, she set about making herself a presence in every teacher’s classroom, modeling her exacting instructional standards and providing “tough-love” coaching. Teachers who succeeded recognized themselves as more knowledgeable and skillful professionals. Thrilled with their own accomplishments, they were ready to take on Leonard’s next round of challenges. The Shaw’s subsequent success was in large measure a product of Leonard’s increasingly more complex and demanding instructional challenges, which elevated student achievement while allowing the faculty to find intrinsic satisfaction and motivation in their individual and collective accomplishments.

Michael Fung, Charlestown High School

Few public school principals have the luxury of sifting through a parade of teacher applicants to tap ones who will trust them. Michael Fung, headmaster at Charlestown High School, did. Having intimidated Charlestown’s veteran teachers into granting him the authority to open-post new positions (hiring teachers from outside the district pool), Fung recruited a cadre of new young teachers. He brought in five new teachers in his first year, ten in his second, fifteen in his third, and eighteen in his fourth. Corporate funding supported his new reform strategy and enabled the majority of these hires.

Fung knew that the linchpin of his strategy to increase MCAS scores was the quality and dedication of teams of ninth- and tenth-grade teachers. As there were very few veteran teachers Fung felt he could trust in this role, he placed his bets on his new teachers: recent graduates of Ivy League schools, most of whom had little or no teaching experience. As a condition of employment, these new teachers implicitly pledged their trust and allegiance to him.

The arrangement wasn’t entirely one-way, however. Fung coached his new teachers, attended to their instructional needs, and showered them with encouragement. They, in turn, improved the academic achievement of his ninth and tenth graders. This was reflected in dramatic gains in the students’ MCAS scores.

Kathleen Flannery, Edward Everett Elementary School

Upon her appointment as principal at Boston’s Edward Everett Elementary School, Kathleen Flannery knew she had a lot to give, but also a lot to learn from her staff. Despite a distinguished record as an urban administrator, Flannery did not think of herself as an expert in curriculum matters. Everett teachers were comfortable in their tight, self-sufficient, and largely unreflective community. The school’s low performance on the district’s norm-based achievement test did not seem important to them. They questioned Flannery’s expertise in elementary literacy and the legitimacy of her agenda to improve achievement of all Everett students. In order to effect change, Flannery would have to prove her worth as both a colleague and a leader.

On a path to developing one of the highest-performing schools in Boston, Flannery modeled the same behaviors she requested from the teachers: attentive listening, respect for data, extra hours, and hard work. Believing literacy instruction at the Everett was inefficient and out of date, Flannery refused to dictate what she considered to be the best alternative—a whole-language program to replace the use of basal readers. Instead, she relied on the Everett teachers’ longstanding interest in exploring best practices at other Boston schools. Even when this process yielded what seemed to Flannery to be an even more primitive literacy pedagogy—a phonics program not widely respected elsewhere—she chose not to intervene. She wanted student performance data to decide. Ultimately, the school developed its own balanced literacy program.

Everett teachers came to respect and admire Flannery’s dedication to what was best for students, her attention to their integrity as professionals, and her commitment to building a real community of practice. Flannery astutely recognized that the currency of exchange in the Everett culture was professional expertise, particularly in literacy. Unsure of her own expertise, Flannery acted first as a colleague when it came to curricular matters—questioning, suggesting, and endorsing—until the staff was ready to appreciate her skills as a leader and trust her leadership.

All of these principals built trust through reciprocal relationships with their faculties to effect change within their schools. They provided their teachers with the training, resources, and support they needed to improve their practice and raise student achievement. In turn, teachers were expected to produce significant results. In the process, each of these five principals learned from their mistakes—and all grew and changed as leaders.

Gerald C. Leader is professor emeritus at Boston University and director of EDCO’s Educator Leadership Institute, a principal and director preparation and licensure program. He is the author, with Amy Stern, of Real Leaders, Real Schools: Stories of Success Against Enormous Odds (Harvard Education Press, 2008), from which this article is adapted.