Building a Bridge to Success: From Program Improvement to Excellence

Citation

Yoak, E. (2011), "Building a Bridge to Success: From Program Improvement to Excellence", Journal of Educational Administration, Vol. 49 No. 3, pp. 340-343. https://doi.org/10.1108/09578231111129118

The disaggregation of student performance data across race and ability groups under the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001 forces a double‐edged sword into the hands of school principals. Meeting adequate yearly progress (AYP) denotes a commitment to educational equity, but threatens to strip principals and schools of resources, destabilizes job security, and heralds public outcry if the achievement gap is not closed effectively. States have flexibility in the design of their accountability systems, but are required to identify schools for improvement that fail to meet AYP in two consecutive years (No Child Left Behind Act of 2001: Academic Assessment and Local Educational Agency and School Improvement, 20 U.S.C. § 1116, 2010). For California schools receiving Title I funding, identification as a “failing school” initiates a path either towards restructuring or to exit program improvement status, adding dimensions of accountability and constraint to the work of school principals (WestEd, 2008).

Drolet and Turner (2010) write from their educational experience in the state of California and employ its context, but they also aim their book to speak to school principals nationally. Building a Bridge to Success: From Program Improvement to Excellence is a “hands‐on guide” designed to help principals move from the “What” of Program Improvement status, mandated through federal and state legislation and local district policies, to the “How” of school excellence by sharing “strategies that work, are research based, and can be easily implemented” (p. 6). In the current context of national school reform, there is a real need for practical guides for practicing educators that address the changing nature of schooling and school leadership. Building a Bridge to Success aims to place applicable tools in the hands of school principals, but is not without its weaknesses and limitations.

Building a Bridge to Success is written to meet “the needs of principals across America who do not have a blueprint of how to succeed” (p. 6). Based on the results of a 2007 teacher survey, Drolet and Turner identify nine principal behaviors with the most statistically significant correlation to schools that exit Program Improvement (p. 4). Readers are guided to begin by completing the “Principal self‐survey,” providing a reference to their own professional work and orienting them to the most critical topics of their practice (p. 7). Each of the first eight chapters contains an orienting vignette that paints a picture of the working principal, references strategies that can be used to structure implementation, and describes additional factors to consider as the principal plans for and works toward success. “Teachers' words of wisdom about their principals” conclude these chapters, sharing positive testaments as to the impact of principal behaviors on school improvement.

Building a Bridge to Success seeks to guide principals through the products and processes of school improvement. Chapters 1 through 3 outline the norms that enable success:

• (1) common goals;

• (2) a shared focus on teaching and learning; and

• (3) a collaborative professional culture.

Drolet and Turner accurately identify several shared characteristics of improving schools, but their descriptions suffer from a lack of depth or context. For example, professional learning communities (PLCs) appear in Chapters 2 and 3:

Their goal is to share best practices and to learn from each other. At a PLC meeting, an agenda will highlight a teaching strategy to discuss for implementation or content that may need more explanation. Teachers take turns sharing their concerns or issues and receive feedback from members of the PLC on what they might change to strengthen their teaching or the knowledge to impart (p. 24).

While the basic artifact of a school PLC appears with some clarity, it is not fully developed and certain features are highlighted with little justification. Notably, the authors do not address the role of teacher inquiry, even though “In much of the literature [on professional learning communities], the ‘inquiry process’ or ‘inquiry cycle’ is regarded as the central driver of school reculturing and reform” (Cochran‐Smith and Lytle, 2009, p. 49). Furthermore, while many schools use PLCs to drive data‐based instructional approaches, this application is not mentioned (Dufour, 2004, p. 10). Rather, Drolet and Turner assert that “the listeners[']” (the co‐teachers at a PLC meeting) willingness to “ask the hard questions” is the critical element without which “a PLC may quickly devolve into a planning session for worksheets, field trips, and assessments” (p. 37). Instead of a collaborative process of inquiry, PLCs appear as an administrative tool constituted through normative behaviors. While Building a Bridge to Success is not concerned with PLCs essentially, this cursory coverage of an important mechanism for school improvement is one of a number of cases where practicing principals might benefit from a more balanced depiction of the key characteristics of improving schools.

Chapters 4 through 8 address the procedural elements which effectively scaffold improvement:

• (4) communication;

• (5) monitoring;

• (6) support;

• (7) relationships; and

• (8) being ready for and embracing change.

Drolet and Turner make an important observation regarding leadership behaviors by recognizing that successful principals are not differentiated from their counterparts simply by the behaviors they enact, but rather by the degree of efficacy with which they carry out specific leadership tasks (p. 5). Unfortunately, the power of this approach is weakened by the level of generalization in the depiction of implementation. Chapter 4, “Strengthening Communication,” opens with a vignette of the fictional or de‐identified Mary Kate, and the statement that “Mary Kate is like every principal in every school across America” (p. 46). The authors then assert that “there is no such thing as overcommunication, so that is not something to worry about” and advise principals to “take heed and you will succeed when it comes to communication” (p. 46). Recent work in leadership theory makes the counterargument that “situation or context does not simply ‘affect’ what school leaders do as some sort of independent or inter‐dependent variable(s); it is constitutive of leadership practice” (Spillane et al., 2004, pp. 20‐1). The role of context is also supported by the proponents of either situational or contingency theories of leadership (Northhouse, 2010), and a literature review of leadership studies from 1990 to 2005 emphasizes that:

[…] in the past 15 years or so, there have been increasing calls in the literature for the necessity to give more attention to the role of the organizational context as a major factor affecting leadership behavior and outcomes (Porter and Mclaughlin, 2006, p. 559).

Practicing principals may be better served by examples that deal with their roles in specific, differentiated contexts, avoiding broad generalizations regarding leadership practice. The chapters on monitoring, support, relationships, and change provide similar levels of coverage; while each highlights important ideas, there is often insufficient justification to warrant any particular approach to implementation.

The final two chapters alternatively contrast two fictional case studies that purport to show exactly how following the blueprint outlined in Building a Bridge to Success enables one principal to succeed while another fails. Narratives that speak powerfully and simply to practical issues hold particular value for practicing educators. Unfortunately, here as in previous chapters, the text's colloquiality creates a tone that risks patronizing the intended audience. Chapter 9 describes John, one of many apparently inept administrators “who are nice people and mean well” but “end up blocking student progress toward proficiency” (p. 109). While John is relaxing over his summer, readers are witness to a fictional cabinet meeting where various administrators scoff or feign surprise at John's administrative weaknesses, before the new superintendent comes to the rescue with a suggestion she “was introduced to at a conference” (p. 108). This vignette ends just as the next chapter begins: with all problems being solved by “carefully and consistently implement[ing] the strategies found in Building a Bridge to Success” (p. 114).

Any commitment to excellence and improvement should be inspiring, but it is difficult to feel rewarded when the conclusions to all problems are reduced to the deterministic, de‐contextualized implementation of leadership strategies. Furthermore, while the problem of student achievement is centrally located within the lived reality of student learning, Building a Bridge to Success offers very little with respect to student experiences, the classroom environment, or family and community contexts. The disaggregation of test data has become a mechanism by which the achievement gap leads directly to program improvement status (O'Connell, n.d.). The stratification of performance across groups of race, class or ability, combined with outcomes‐based assessment, requires educators to focus explicitly on specific groups of students and target skills (NCREL, 2004). Rather than addressing the cultural sensitivity and instructional differentiation needed to support diverse learners in varied educational and social contexts, Building a Bridge to Success is almost exclusively concerned with principal behaviors and teacher norms.

For the time‐pressured principal, looking for a quick reference guide to new strategies for faculty meetings and other administrative tasks, Building a Bridge to Success may offer something to consider. The main topics addressed are salient and descriptive of successful schools, whether they need to exit program improvement or they just want to improve. The appendix of additional surveys, templates, and activities may also provide helpful strategies, as they are ready for implementation. For experienced school leaders who are looking for substantive, research based, theoretically sound work that speaks powerfully to the needs of students, educators, and communities working to meet the increasing demands of high‐stakes testing and accountability, the search may continue elsewhere.