Missing in Action: The District Office - importance of school districts and administrators in realization of school reform - Brief Article

School Administrator, Nov, 2001 by Paul D. Houston

In the midst of a great era of school reform, something is missing. What is not missing is an emphasis on the bottom and rhetoric from the top.

At the bottom, we have seen an emphasis on the school. That is where the action is, where the rubber meets the road. Everyone knows that learning takes place in the classroom and if something is going to improve, it must happen there. School reform that starts from the bottom is based on the understanding that those who must change must be involved in the change and those changes must be integrated into the daily work of teachers. It recognizes that education is organic and holistic. Thus we have seen lots of bottom-up reform.

As politicians have become interested, we have witnessed governors, legislators and state departments of education jumping into the fray. That ushered in the era of top-down reform where coercion and force would create change. This more mechanistic approach relies on external and mechanistic measures to forge improvement.

Top Down Again

Lately there has been a growing awareness that change from the top and change from the bottom are disconnected. Something is missing and that something is the district. From the earliest days of public education in America, districts were created to reflect the desires and will of the community. They were created to sort out the public's interest in the education of its children. Districts were created for economy and efficiency but also for embracing the communities' values.

For most of our history, districts acted as vehicles of command and control. They were the entity that ensured compliance and outcomes. This was the earliest form of top down and it didn't work any better at the local level than it is now working at the state level.

Yet there is an important role for districts to play. And for school superintendents to become relevant in the reform movement, this role must be understood and embraced. Actually there are four reasons for the district to exist: clarity, capacity, coherence and constancy.

Cultivating Vision

Clarity is the "vision thing" that a former president talked about. It is the sense of knowing what ought to be done and what can be gained by connecting to the community, stating that knowledge in ways that everyone understands and then galvanizing action toward it.

The school site is too small a unit for this kind of activity and the state is much too distant to begin to play the role. Vision that is too close up lacks context, and vision from too great a distance is too distorted and faint.

Each district leader must aid the community in understanding its own vision for its children by pulling that vision together and then translating into words actions that the community can rally around. That creates clarity for everyone.

Capacity provides the resources and muscle to get the work done. Site-based reform often flounders because there are just not enough resources at one school to do the job. The loss of economies of scale forces the school to do without needed infrastructure to make it work more effectively. Districts should turn themselves inside out and move from trying to command schools to change to a role of helping them change by serving as the source of needed capacity.

Coherence helps those in schools make sense out of what they are doing and helping create bridges between schools.

One problem with bottom-up reform is that it failed to consider that in our modern, complex society people just don't stay put anymore. They move. And states are much too removed from the lives of people to create the needed connections. Districts offer the perfect resource to help create broader standards for action. This recognizes that no school is an island and that real reform must be connected on a broader scale.

Constancy relates to the reality that change takes time. It is bigger than a faculty committee or a principal. (It is also bigger than a single superintendent or school board.) Change requires a will to stay the course. Certainly constancy can come from the state or federal government, although it would appear that these efforts tend to be tied to political expediency rather than a long-term vision. Districts can provide the sense of constancy that allows everyone to understand that what happens this year will be connected to what happened last year and what will happen next year. This allows folks to focus on the task at hand and to understand they can't merely wait things out.

Tough Transition

Districts and district leaders have a crucial role in creating better schools. It isn't the role of telling people what they have to do and then enforcing compliant behavior, It isn't merely acting as a cipher for the state to carry out mandates that make no sense. The role is one of creating connected communication and collaborative action that knits the community together, gathers its will into action and supports these actions by garnering the necessary resources and support.

It is a tough transition from the old role, but in making it, superintendents will become indispensable to the process of change that is swirling around us.