Will to Lead, the Skill to Teach, The. Anthony Muhammad

      PART II

      The WILL to LEAD

Two

      Conflicting Wills

      During the ongoing debate about educational equity, few ‘/have stopped to ask, “Does everyone truly want every child to succeed?” As educational professionals, we would hope that every one of our peers truly desires to see all students succeed, but is that a wise assumption? Is it possible that organizational goals for student success may conflict with some employees' personal goals? Synthesizing and aligning all of the various ideologies of individual educators into one functional organizational philosophy is not an easy task.

Schools as Microcosms

      Some scholars have argued that schools are simply a reflection of society. If a community embraces equity, justice, and freedom, then these qualities will be reflected within the walls of the schools. In that situation, schools can be an environment in which egalitarianism flourishes. If those qualities are absent on the outside, however, or they are unevenly distributed, schools will reflect that reality as well.

      In The Bell Curve (1994), Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray argued that the goal of creating a system that provides an equal education to all students is not only impossible, but detrimental to the betterment of society. They argued that all people are not evenly endowed and pouring resources into less-capable students unfairly and adversely affects the growth of more capable and gifted children.

      In the past, many scholars identified schools as the perfect places to guarantee social and economic division. They argued that schools' primary purpose was to maintain comfortable social norms (particularly for the rich) and train others to prepare for and accept their place at the bottom of the economic ladder (Bowles & Gintis, 1976).

      Yet others see schools as agents of social change. Researcher R. W. Connell (1993) places schools right in the center of social development. He argues that schools should impact society—not be impacted by society. He notes that within a progressive society, the public education system is a major asset. As one of the largest industries in a developed economy, it is paramount to the future development of society. He also notes that teaching is a “moral trade,” and teaching and learning are social practices involving questions about authority and application of knowledge.

      Scholars and practitioners do not always agree on the philosophical points, yet the research on high-performing schools identifies philosophical alignment among practitioners as the first step toward better practice (DuFour et al., 2008; Petrides & Nodine, 2005; Reeves, 2000). So the school change process has to start with the development of a productive and collective will, while recognizing that practitioners will come to school with many different personal ideologies shaped by their own experiences.

The Importance of a healthy School Culture

      In the book Shaping School Culture: The Heart of Leadership, Deal and Peterson (1999) write:

      While policymakers and reformers are pressing for new structures and more rational assessments, it is important to remember that these changes cannot be successful without cultural support. School cultures, in short, are key to school achievement and student learning. (p. xii)

      There has been debate about the meaning of school culture. Some have mistaken culture to be synonymous with ethos, morale, and spirit. School culture is much more concrete than that, however. It is the deep patterns of values, beliefs, practices, and traditions that have been compiled and normalized over the course of the school's history (Stolp, 1994). School culture sets the standard for what is normal and expected in a school. It is multifaceted with patterns of values, beliefs, practices, and traditions. Staffs in school cultures rooted in high expectations for student performance will spend most of their time nurturing that expectation, just as staffs in schools with cultures of low student expectations will validate that norm.

      School culture affects student learning and performance in many different ways. The National Center for Leadership looked at the effects of five dimensions of school culture: (1) academic challenges, (2) comparative achievement, (3) recognition for achievement, (4) school community, and (5) perception of school goals. In a survey of 16,310 fourth-, sixth-, eighth-, and tenth-grade students from 820 public schools in Illinois, researchers found support for the proposition that students are more motivated to learn in schools with strong cultures (Fyans & Maehr, 1990).

      Researchers analyzed the effects of school culture on student achievement when they examined one school project directed at improving elementary students' test scores. The school project they studied focused on creating a new mission statement, goals based on outcomes for students, curriculum alignment corresponding with those goals, staff development, and building-level decision making. The results were significant. The number of students who failed an annual statewide test dropped by as much as 10 percent (Thacker & McInerney, 1992).

      As this research shows, a school's collective norms, expectations, and values are tightly linked to the productivity of its students. Therefore, the development of a healthy culture cannot be left to chance. Educators must nurture and cultivate it methodically. It is important to note that schools with an organizational belief system that matches the norms and beliefs of a vast majority of their students can take this issue for granted. For example, when a school population consists of students who come from family environments that nurture values like high academic achievement, delayed gratification, and compliance with rules, students' socialization process matches the school's expectations. But other students come from families that do not share and cultivate what the school values—perhaps there is a lack of supervision and motivation for high achievement and adherence to rules. It can become politically expedient to ostracize and justify failure among this seemingly insignificant minority of students because they just don't “fit in” (Ogbu, 2003). This phenomenon can easily turn a stated mission of “learning for all” into “learning for most.”

      A metaphor helps to clarify the importance of culture as it relates to will and skill: culture is the soil, and organizational structures and practices are the seeds. There are certain conditions that soil must meet if the planter expects to harvest produce. If the soil is unhealthy, it doesn't matter how good the seed is. In fact, a healthy seed can be planted in dry, acidic, and uncultivated soil, and it will be just as unproductive as an unhealthy seed. Seeds are only as good as the soil in which they are planted; likewise, school structures and practices are only as good as the culture in which they are implemented. Structural change that is not supported by cultural change will always be overwhelmed by the unhealthy culture (Muhammad, 2009). Healthy culture provides the right environment, but does not guarantee effectiveness; it must also be accompanied by high levels of professional skill.

Toxic School Culture

      The antithesis of a healthy school culture is a toxic school culture. Kent Peterson (Cromwell, 2002) describes a toxic culture in these words:

      Toxic school cultures believe that student success is based solely upon a student's level of concern, attentiveness, prior knowledge, and the willingness to comply with the demands of school and they pass that belief on to others in overt and covert ways. toxic cultures