Will to Lead, the Skill to Teach, The. Anthony Muhammad
procedures that support their belief in the impossibility of universal achievement. (p. 5)
Toxic school cultures have a dominant belief system that places success or failure solely on the shoulders of outside forces. In his definition, Kent Peterson identifies four student characteristics that are prerequisites for school success: concern, attentiveness, prior knowledge, and compliance. Any educator would agree that these are important assets in the learning process and that not all students arrive at school predisposed to these characteristics. In toxic cultures, students are blamed for not possessing these characteristics, which releases adults from the responsibility of properly educating every student. This mentality is in direct conflict with the objective of public schools—learning for all. Toxic cultures essentially establish that some students are educable and some are not. Obstacles to student success are not viewed as challenges that adults must overcome; rather, they are products of home and community and therefore not the concern of the staff. Toxic cultures are said to be descriptive because educators within them become very adept at identifying every obstacle they face. Toxic cultures are deflective as well because they assign blame elsewhere—the staff itself is never responsible. Typically these schools spend their time blaming students, parents, the government, and others for problems instead of spending time trying to solve them (Butler & Dickson, 1987).
It is important to note that a culture is not considered healthy or toxic based on the type of problems the school faces. In fact, all organizations have problems (Collins, 2001) that are as unique as the people within the organization. What makes a culture healthy or toxic is members' collective ability to work together to solve problems. No organization can be successful blaming its clients instead of serving its clients.
Collective Commitment to Success for All Students
Healthy school cultures develop a collective commitment to student success. How do they accomplish this? They are courageous enough to recognize the profundity of their personal differences, but they accept that these differences are not as important as meeting the educational needs of their students. They are willing to confront the subtle but powerful assumptions that guide their worldview, the harmful stereotypes that interfere with a staff's ability to effectively focus on the development of each student—the elephants in the room.
There are three important “elephants” or barriers staffs must confront in order to develop the type of collective focus necessary to properly educate every child. These barriers are sometimes referred to as predeterminations. There are three types of predeterminations: perceptual, intrinsic, and institutional (Muhammad, 2009). If unhealthy predeterminations are present in a school, creating a system of equitable achievement is nearly impossible.
Perceptual Predeterminations
The first elephants to confront are the disadvantageous predeterminations about students—the perceptual predeterminations. These are often the long-held stereotypes of teachers. Stereotyping is a natural function of the human mind. Stereotypes help us to understand a complex world in simple terms. As Langlois et al. (2000) note:
TO help simplify a complex world, people develop mental models called schemas. Problems arise when people begin to oversimplify schemas. oversimplified schemas are known as stereotypes. Stereotypes are fixed impressions and exaggerated and preconceived ideas and descriptions about a certain type of person, group or society. (p. 390)
People create mental models to understand how the world works on a daily basis, and they can become fixed about certain groups of people. Stereotyping does not make a person inhumane or unethical—it is a natural function of the human psyche. It is problematic, however, when mental models adversely affect our actions, specifically when they negatively affect the students educators are entrusted to serve. These stereotypes can include negative beliefs based on variables such as student race, sex, home language, disability, social class, and immigration status. Educators do not lose their right to their own opinions when they choose their profession, but it is ineffective and unethical for them to operate from a mindset that adversely affects the students they serve.
In a comprehensive study of five middle schools involved in restructuring in Philadelphia, Wilson and Corbett (2001), authors of Listening to Urban Kids: School Reform and the Teachers They Want, document that teacher expectations and perceptions about student performance greatly affected their practice. The students identified that teachers who “stayed on them and made them be successful” provided a rich learning environment (p. 64). Wilson and Corbett also found that these teachers that students identified as invested in their success “involved students in constructivist and experiential learning, and experienced better student conduct, grades, and scores on standardized tests” (p. 42).
Wilson and Corbett also describe teachers with negative images and stereotypes of their students. One teacher noted that she was scared of her students because she had never been in an urban environment and described her experience as a “daily battle between teacher and student for classroom control” (p. 34). Teachers with these negative stereotypes about their students tended to have higher job turnover, and, despite the district's investment in brain-based and research-based instructional strategies, these teachers “opted to rely on instructional strategies that were primarily suited to one style of intelligence rather than to several” (p. 34). One student described his experience like this:
My science teacher is scared of us so we mostly work out of the book. We do vocabulary. We read the chapter and get the vocabulary words. After each section in the book, we do a section review. (p. 43)
The student is experiencing a low-quality education because of his teacher's assumptions about race, culture, and social class. The teacher's fear of and negative perceptions about African American students and their culture not only creates an unproductive learning environment, but also directly affects the level of pedagogy and content rigor in the classroom.
Educators' perceptions of their students have a profound effect not only on their will to teach students, but also on the methods they use to do so. The students in these five middle schools had totally different educational experiences based upon their teachers' perceptions. The schools that students rated more favorably had teachers who treated them with respect, listened to them, affirmed their identity, and pushed them to succeed. The clear difference between the ineffective and effective schools in this study was the effectiveness of school leadership in nurturing an optimal learning environment.
Intrinsic Predeterminations
Educators are only a part of the school community. Students' perception of self—intrinsic predeterminations—help to shape collective focus and will. If educators form broad and rigid assumptions based on their personal experiences and societal messages and images, it would seem natural that students would develop similar stereotypes about themselves. An African American boy who is consistently confronted with images of Black men as criminals in the media might come to believe that that is his destiny. A teenager who has grown up in a rural or isolated community where she is not exposed to a world that is growing and full of possibility may not be motivated to strive for excellence in school because she does not see how it applies to her life.
When seeking to develop a positive organizational will—a collective focus on success—educators must be up to the challenge of not only changing some long-held negative stereotypes about students, but also helping students overcome long-held negative stereotypes about themselves. A student's negative perceptions of his or her ability will affect his or her behavior and productivity. One study about the influence of student self-perceptions on achievement (Akey, 2006) concluded:
The earlier schools and teachers begin to build students' confidence in their ability to do well, the better off students will be. Because students' perceptions of their capacity for success are key to their engagement in school and learning, schools should be designed to enhance students' feelings of accomplishment. Teachers whom students see as supportive and who set clear expectations about behavior help create an atmosphere in which students feel in control and confident about their ability to succeed. (p. iii)
In addition, teachers have a difficult time educating students who have these negative perceptions about