Suspending the elephant over the table: concepts of systems change can improve learning white making the job double

School Administrator, Nov, 2004 by Nelda Cambron-McCabe, Luvern L. Cunningham

Peter Negroni, former superintendent in Springfield, Mass., believes Ron Heifetz's insights about the importance of taking the long view helped save his career in school administration. Negroni was on a quick fix, my-way-or-the-highway approach to school reform in 1994 but sensed he was in trouble.

Brutal and ongoing contretemps around his efforts to close the achievement gap had left him with few allies in the schools or community and feeling increasingly isolated from union leaders and significant elements on the governing school committee.

"I was taking fire from all sides and wondering when the cavalry would arrive," says Negroni, now vice president of the College Board in New York City.

Critics derided him as a brash outsider, a know-it-all from New York who didn't understand how things were done in aging New England industrial towns. Then a candidate for the school committee won election with 17,000 votes. "She'd run a campaign demanding my head," recalls Negroni wryly. "It turned out to be a pretty popular platform."

Angry about the election result, Negroni sensed that a backlash threatened the progress he had made in Springfield. People no longer cared that he'd led successful battles for school levies, imposed order on the structural chaos in the schools or saved money and improved programs for recent immigrants. All of that was greeted with disinterest.

What critics focused on was the loss of privilege for Springfield's well-to-do. It was all vaguely reactionary and racist, worried Negroni, a man who wears his heart on his sleeve, suffers fools lightly and remembers how painful it was to listen to Irish cops in New York spit racial epithets at him and his teen-age buddies from Puerto Rico.

Then epiphany struck. "Who does this new board member represent?" asked Heifetz at a meeting Negroni attended of the Danforth Foundation's Forum for the American School Superintendents. "Those 17,000 voters? They stand for something. What's precious to them? What are you threatening?"

Sacred Texts

All of us like quick fixes, even though in education, as elsewhere, they rarely work well, according to Heifetz, a lecturer in public policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, and Peter Senge, senior lecturer in management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Taking time to do it right may be a persuasive theory around the ivied quadrangles of Cambridge, but do superintendents enjoy the luxury of a time-consuming systems approach? With the notorious amount of heat mounting under their chairs, can they afford to acknowledge they don't have all the answers--and sometimes aren't sure about the questions?

It's daunting, but a systems approach may be the only way to tackle what has been called the "toughest job in America." That's the consensus of skilled current and former practitioners of the high-wire act of serving as a school superintendent.

Concepts of systems change can improve learning while making the job doable, according to nearly 200 superintendents who helped us develop The Superintendent's Fieldbook through the decade-long Danforth Foundation's Forum for the American School Superintendent. Rosa Smith, formerly the superintendent in Columbus, Ohio, and Les Omotani, who has taken the systems approach from West Des Moines, Iowa, to his new assignment in leading the Hewlett-Woodmere district on Long Island, speak of Senge's Fifth Discipline and Heifetz's Leadership Without Easy Answers as akin to sacred texts.

Tim Lucas, former superintendent in Ho-Ho-Kus, N.J., says the same about using systems thinking. Lucas, now a professor of school practice at Lehigh University, even helped write Schools That Learn, a book applying Senge's systems ideas to schools with one of the authors of this article.

Think Systems

"It's not personal." That's what Heifetz reminds us to keep in mind as we struggle to survive, according to Smith, president of the Schott Foundation in Cambridge, Mass. Adds Negroni: "What I realized is that it had nothing to do with me. Sure, my new board member opposed what I stood for, but she wasn't reactionary. She represented an important constituency--voters worried about change. What was happening with their kids? Their community? Their jobs?"

Leaders in education or other fields who confuse themselves with the changes their communities are moving through are asking for trouble, and they will probably get it. Taking resistance personally, they are unable to distinguish their role from themselves.

"I was a real Lone Ranger," says Negroni, who was Springfield's superintendent from 1989 to 2000. "I even found myself lecturing the school committee, announcing that unless my proposals were adopted, they'd need to find someone else."

Omotani finds nothing unusual in Negroni's story. To state the obvious, says Omotani, who moved into the Hewlett-Woodmere superintendency in June, there's a lot involved in turning around a big school district. "We need to think systems, not programs," he says, noting that public discussions of schools isolate discrete issues like standards or assessment. "That promotes a quick-fix mentality--what is often called 'single-loop' thinking. What Senge and Heifetz encourage is in-depth, 'double-loop' thinking that attacks core assumptions, not their manifestations."