Highlights of the Summer 1995 Meeting of the
Forum For The American School Superintendent
A Project of The Danforth Foundation
Doubletree Hotel at Horton Plaza
San Diego, California
July 6-9, 1995
Introduction
What exactly does leadership mean in the social context of
today's schools? How can today's superintendents cope amidst
the politics of education change? Do superintendents define
leadership as survival or as long-term institutional change?
Whatever happened to the idea of a color-blind society and what
is the outlook for school desegregation? Can the schools we
have be reformed? Or do they need to be reinvented?
These questions lay at the core of the Summer 1995 meeting,
an event rapidly becoming an "event" for the 80 members of the
Forum for the American School Superintendent. These questions
were rounded out with a progress report on where an ambitious
urban revitalization effort, the Austin project in Texas, now
finds itself. The lessons learned in Austin appear to be powerfully
reinforced by what Forum members themselves are learning in
their three major initiatives: Success for All Children, Leadership,
and Community Engagement.
These highlights summarize the meeting. For those who were
with us, our thanks. For those who could not be, this document
can extend the discussion.
Robert H. Koff
Program Director
Danforth Foundation
Highlights of the Summer 1995 Meeting
Leadership for Learning Organizations
"Why on earth would any of you superintendents want to do what
you do?" asked Charlotte Roberts of Innovation Associates in
North Carolina, co-author of The Fifth Discipline and the Fifth
Discipline Fieldbook. "You have an impossible job. Your work
represents what Seattle poet David White once called the 'rest
between two musical notes that are somehow always in discord.'
"
The challenge before Forum members, said Roberts, is how to
help district team members learn so that school districts become
genuine learning organizations. The key questions we need to
ask ourselves, she said, are: "When were you as superintendent
the last person in the organization to know what was going on?
Is our goal longevity, or is it fundamental change?"
Leadership, Roberts stressed, is not about "getting your hands
on a formula and then applying it. Leadership is all about defining
a vision, designing an organization to facilitate attaining
that vision, and then thanking and interacting with the people
who make it happen."
Any great change "shakes the very foundation of privilege,"
according to Roberts. What is really involved in leadership
is the effort to "develop the group's collective IQ so that
we draw out the wisdom that already exists in the members of
the group. So learning becomes an interactive process of aspiration,
conversation, and conceptualization, each feeding the others."
Creating a shared vision of what you want to accomplish requires
developing new understandings not only of where you want to
go but also how you get there and who is to be involved, Roberts
stressed. The old vision emphasized the traditional elements
of the school community -- the superintendent, principals, teachers,
students, and school board. The new vision situates itself much
more in context -- community, systemic reform of schools, and
health, housing, and environmental needs.
All of this is a pretty tall order, she acknowledged, quoting
Nelson Mandela famous inaugural address as president of the
new South Africa: "Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure." But
Roberts urged Forum members to make a start in their own communities
by applying four principles:
- develop context by establishing the vision, mission, and
values;
- build skills in productive conversation, skills such as
balancing advocacy and inquiry;
- use actual team meetings and real business issues as the
practice field; and
- apply systems thinking techniques to an organizational situation.
Quoting Mandela again, Roberts concluded: "As we let our own
light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to
do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence
automatically liberates others."
Reinventing Public Education
Liberation from our own fears could easily serve as the personal
motto of outgoing Minneapolis superintendent Howard Fuller.
Introducing a session on contract and charter schools, Fuller
challenged his colleagues with some provocative questions: "As
school leaders, what are our obligations in a situation where
we know that some schools are dead and that nothing is going
to change? You can smell death in some of these schools, and
yet we continue, year after year, to send our kids to them.
Our kids are dying. How do we justify that?"
It cannot be justified, was the reply of the University of
Washington's Paul Hill, a founding member of the Forum's advisory
board. Hill posed as his central question: Why has a decade
of work on school reform produced so little? New programs, curricula,
site-based management, new accountability schemes and more money
appear to have had little effect, he claimed.
"Why is this so?" he asked and answered his own question: "School
governance is at least part of the answer. Although the very
term is enough to make the eyes glaze over, the truth is that
we have defined a public school as an institution that is financed,
managed, and owned by a local agency of government. We have
created a school governance system divorced from public needs
and incapable of renewing itself."
With that charge off his chest, Hill called for a complete
alternative to the existing governance system, not piecemeal
reforms such as "disconnected voucher proposals" but fundamental
reforms that "attack the core of the existing system, the belief
that schools can be governed by politically negotiated rules
that apply to all schools."
According to Hill the answer lies in contracting, an explicit
attempt to make universally available, to most students and
families in most districts, the benefits of charter schools.
Under a contract system "every school would have a charter,
and school boards would not directly run schools but would contract
with independent organizations -- non-profit and profit groups,
teachers - unions, private firms, or universities, for example
-- to run individual schools."
Although many questions remain to be worked out, the essence
of the proposal lies in its effort to force school boards to
make decisions on a school-by -school basis, said Hill, rather
than by making policies applicable to all schools.
Forum advisory board member Nelda Cambron-McCabe was inclined
to offer a much more cautious view of the value of contracting
in her comments on Hill's proposal. Although finding a great
deal of appeal in the idea, she wondered how issues of equity
and accountability would be handled in the plan when fully fleshed-out.
"Those are very real questions," responded Hill, "but as the
entire discussion at this meeting has indicated, our current
schools do not answer them very well. In terms of equity, we
still face the challenge of desegregation and, as Howard Fuller
argues, how accountable is a system that continues to send students
to schools in which, everyone agrees, students are not learning?"
Most Forum members kept their own counsel on the value of the
contracting idea, but most also appeared to agree that some
new way of thinking about leadership demands and how to respond
to them is essential. The need can readily be discerned in the
racial discord increasingly apparent in American life and where
the nation is with desegregation, 40 years after the historic
Brown decision.
Race: A Changing Idea of America
Concern about racial issues is imbedded in the very fabric
of the United States, according to Professor Gerald Early, who
chairs the Department of African-American studies at Washington
University in St. Louis. It is impossible to understand the
United States without understanding the role of race in its
development, Early maintains, and it is impossible to contemplate
racial division in the United States without concluding that
race and racism are among the most "pernicious ideas" ever put
forward.
"The idea of 'America' is a European invention," said Early.
"White folks like to think this is their America. Some of my
African-American students think it is a white America, too.
But, whether we like it or not, black folks have been in the
United States for a long time. 'America' is not a European creation;
we have all built it, and all of us have to get comfortable
with that idea."
Early remains committed to the ideal of integration, he said,
but warned the Forum that many younger people, including his
son and many of the students he encounters, have little sense
of the history of the civil rights struggles of the 1960s .
One of the ironies of our times, according to desegregation
expert Gary Orfield of Harvard University, is that just at the
very time the nation appears to have turned its back on desegregation
as a strategy for equalizing education, public acceptance of
integration is very high. Moreover, the region that began as
the most segregated, the South, wound up amongst the best integrated,
he claims.
"Desegregation worked in the South, " said Orfield, director
of the Harvard Project on School Desegregation. "Southern schools
are the best integrated in the country -- but all of that is
now in doubt. We have lost a great opportunity. "
According to Orfield, school integration is faltering in the
South, and segregation is on the rise. He presented data indicating
two complementary trends. Southern school integration (as measured
by the percentage of black students in schools with at-least-50%-white
enrollments) peaked at about 45% in 1988. By 1992, the latest
data he had, the proportion had declined to about 39 percent.
At the same time, segregation is on the rise, he said, particularly
for Hispanic students. The percentage of black students attending
public schools with at-least-90%- minority enrollment was nearly
cut in half between 1969 and 1987 (from about 63% to approximately
33%). Since 1987, there has been almost no improvement. For
Hispanic students, however, the proportion in 90%-minority schools
has more than doubled since 1969, from about 15 to 34 percent.
Thus we find, nationally, that only 7.6% of black students
and 6.2% of Hispanics attended schools that were majority white
in 1991-92. Nearly two-thirds of African-American students (63.9%)
and more than half of Hispanics (56.2%) attended schools that
were 90% or more minority, and more than nine out of ten African-American
and Latino students attend schools that are 50% or more minority.
Ironically, said Orfield, we are putting the brakes on desegregation
at the very time that public support of integration is very
high. Polls indicate that 80 percent of Americans favor racial
integration of schools, he reported.
Moreover, although large numbers of Americans are troubled
by busing, a majority supports it as a last resort. To back
up these points, Orfield cited polls indicating that
- 87% of Americans approve of the Brown ruling;
- black and white Americans agree that schools integration
has improved the quality of education for black students;
and
- 46% of Americans (assuming they had children) would be willing
to have them "go to school by bus so the schools would be
integrated"; and
- 53% would support busing "if it were the only way to make
sure children attend schools with classmates of different
racial and ethnic backgrounds"
- the proportion of Americans agreeing that integration has
improved educational quality for white students has grown
from 23% in 1971 to 42% today.
The real tragedy of these two ships passing in the night has
not yet been felt, according to Orfield. The proportion of minorities
in the population is rising in all age groups and is expected
to continue to rise through the year 2025 -- for children, adults,
and older citizens. At the same time, the number of poor children
is increasing dramatically: the number of poor 3- and 4-year-olds
increased 28% in the decade of the 1980s; the number of immigrant
children rose 62%; the number in "linguistically isolated" families,
38%; and the number of children in single-parent homes, 46 percent.
What has happened to our commitment to racial justice foreshadows
a national tragedy, concluded Orfield, a nation not so much
at risk as it is a "nation divided" by race, class, income,
ethnicity, and region.
The Austin Project
Joining the Forum for the third time in three years for an
update on what is happening in Austin, Texas, Martin Gerry,
Executive Director of the Austin Project, observed that Austin
is a boom city, yet "the poor are getting poorer."
Working with the City of Austin, the Austin Project created
SPUR (Strategic Partnership for Urban Revitalization), a multi-year
action plan, neighborhood-based governance structure, and community-wide
empowerment effort. Designed to advance four dimensions of city
life -- equity, community, stability, and prosperity -- SPUR
became the heart of the city's application for a federal empowerment
zone.
SPUR, said Gerry, was an effort to create a comprehensive community
vision encompassing the community, employment, neighborhood,
and family. Employment, he stressed, "transcends all these issues.
It does not belong on a list of services because it is not a
service. In fact, it distinguishes between those who need services
and those who do not."
Economic development and job creation, therefore, become major
elements of the strategy. The effort to attract private capital
to Austin was as important to the SPUR concept, if not more
important, than school change, providing services for families
and children, and health and nutrition.
For the moment, SPUR has had to be abandoned. The city did
not win designation as an empowerment zone and a more modest,
staged, demonstration, Para Las Familias, is now planned. Stage
1 of the demonstration addresses the pre-school and elementary
school years with a health care component and job training provided
through Head Start.
Stage 2, aimed at the adolescent years, will begin at some
point in the future and attempt to add youth opportunity programs
to high school offerings. Gerry believes the entire demonstration
can be financed by a self-sustaining fund (similar in structure
to the highway gasoline tax) that combines in- and out-of-school
training with major incentives for hiring.
The funds structure, incorporated already in tax abatement
guidelines for Austin and Travis County, provides a 40% tax
abatement for large firms, with one-fifth of taxes directed
to a workforce training fund. Firms hiring trainees receive
another 15% rebate. In effect, corporations participating in
the demonstration can receive a total rebate of 55% -- 40% in
the original abatement and an additional 15% if they hire trainees.
Employers understand the value of the training effort, according
to Gerry. Motorola, he noted, had already announced it could
not expand further in Austin because of the lack of sufficient,
additional trained entry-level workers. At the same time, employers
know that it is less expensive (to the private sector) to put
the community's unemployed to work than it is to bring in workers
from elsewhere.
Gerry, who will shortly move on to the University of Kansas
to establish a center on families and communities, cites several
lessons from the Austin experience:
- To succeed, communities need four things going at once:
top-down support for change; bottom-up support through neighborhood
groups; service groups (providers and non-profits) with a
vested interest in change; and outside leverage -- preferably
the business community, not an academic institution.
- Need to identify and nurture community leaders. A lot of
leaders exist in most communities, according to Gerry. They
cannot run the risk of being betrayed by the "project of the
month."
- Take community goals and priorities seriously. "In Austin,
this meant getting rid of rabid animals and closing crack
houses."
- Involve residents in evaluation.
- You need an institution of higher education to help. "In
Austin, it turned out to be St. Edwards University. The University
of Texas might as well have been on Mars."
Success for All Children
Strong echoes of these lessons -- particularly the need to
obtain grass-roots support and take community concerns seriously
-- appeared in the progress reports of the first Forum initiative,
the Success for All Children (an effort to integrate and improve
comprehensive services for children from birth through age nine)
"We learned that you can do a lot with a little in this project
when you have the Danforth name behind you," observed Lynne
Beckwith of University City. "We also learned that this is very
hard work. Not everyone is committed to early childhood education.
Traditional school people wonder why we would be interested
in anything but K-12 issues; early childhood specialists are
suspicious that educators are trying to steal their clients."
Ron Williams of Webster County (West Virginia) added a different
dimension. In Webster County, he reported, the project has encountered
terrible turf problems in the community. "It is simply a battle
every day to get agencies to coordinate with each other," he
reported. "Each of them thinks it has to save everybody else."
Hartford's Eddie Davis pointed to a similar set of concerns:
"It is very important to listen to the parents and find out
what they are interested in. Avoid the temptation to filter
all of this through our traditional education jargon. Like Lynne
Beckwith, we found that a small amount of money from Danforth
can be powerful -- it is not the size of the money that is important,
but the size of the vision.
"Finally, " said Davis, "we have so many different things going
on in Hartford that I have found a way to string all of the
titles together: Children First is an effort to provide Success
for All Children to give them a Fresh Start for a Brighter Future!"
Gaining community trust was the major issue cited by Memphis
superintendent Gerry House: "Memphis has been studied before;
it has been promised things before." House pointed to the Community
Engagement Process (a system of neighbors interviewing neighbors)
as a positive way to identify genuine local concerns.
Superintendents from Washoe County (Nevada) and St. Martin's
Parish (Louisiana), Mary Nebgen and Roland Chevalier, were equally
upbeat in their assessments of accomplishments under the Success
for All Children banner. Chevalier described significant progress
in the form of 1,500 responses as part of the Community Engagement
Process (in a low-income, rural community of 50,000 people),
receipt of $89,000 from the state for reimbursement of school-delivered
services under Medicaid, and a new sense of shared purpose among
early childhood and day-care providers and educators, as well
as the business community.
For her part, Nebgen reported both bad news and good news,
with the latter far outweighing the former. First the "bad"
news: "We have already outgrown our 1,800 square foot trailer
in Sun Valley." The trailer was established last year by the
Success for All Children project to provide health care screening
and social services in a trailer park.
The good news? As a result of the success of the trailer and
community support for the services, the county is going to open
a community center in Sun Valley. Moreover, Washoe County has
received a $101,000 foundation grant (Walter Johnson) for a
family literacy project, Head Start is beginning to make the
transition from the community services agency to the school
district, and the district has received a parent involvement
grant under Goals 2000. Concluded Nebgen: "A small amount of
money from Danforth has paid huge benefits as a catalyst."
KIVA
Winding up the meeting with the by now traditional KIVA, advisory
board member Verne Cunningham asked the attendees to focus on
four key words that resonated throughout the meeting: democracy,
profession, professionalism, and "fixity.".
Keeping those concepts in mind, Cunningham asked the attendees
to respond to key questions: What is the best thing to come
out of this Forum since you joined it, or this meeting? Where
were you when the 1973 Swann desegregation decision came down
and what is your thinking today about desegregation? What do
you think needs to be done to improve stability for superintendents?
Value of the Forum. The participants expressed near-universal
satisfaction with the Forum, noting the importance of the time
it provided for reflection, the value of personal contacts with
other superintendents, the on-going nature of the Forum as a
seminar, and opportunities for networking -- the opportunity,
as one superintendent, to "make my brain hurt."
Desegregation. In this sensitive area, responses were markedly
more guarded. Some responses were personal, but most were couched
in policy terms. The personal responses spoke volumes: some
minority superintendents acknowledged being students in segregated
schools at the time of the Swann decision; others could remember
clearly where they were at the time the decisions were announced.
In policy terms two clear messages came through loud and clear:
In terms of the big picture, all of the superintendents expressed
support for the ideal of an integrated society, even if several
spoke of their disappointment with the reality. At the same
time, the superintendents spoke of a lot of community and teacher
discomfort with what had to be accomplished to achieve desegregation,
a sense that the issue is still genuine dynamite.
Stability. On the issue of stability, superintendents had difficulty
defining the issue until David Mahan, outgoing superintendent
of St. Louis, clarified the problem: We are not, maintained,
Mahan paying enough attention to the effects of continuous disruptions
on schools caused by continuous turnover of superintendents.
Schools maintain our social structure -- and if we are to be
true to our belief that all children can learn, we must find
new ways to provide greater stability to make that belief a
reality.
Next Meeting
With that, participants rushed for their planes eager to continue
the conversation at the next Forum meeting, scheduled in St.
Louis from November 9 to 12.
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