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Talking Sense:
Engaging The Public In School Reform
Highlights of the Summer 1996 Meeting of
The Forum for the American School Superintendent

A Project of The Danforth Foundation
Denver Marriott City Center
Denver, Colorado
July 9-11, 1996

Introduction

In a world growing ever more complex, in which educators understand the imperative to provide every student with an education of high quality, how can educational leaders engage the public in these issues and obtain their support? That is what these highlights are about.

They focus on the modern American dilemma of a society with high expectations and diminishing revenues. They examine the politics - sometimes dirty, always fascinating - surrounding the allocation of public funds and the definition of new directions. They discuss the need for a new kind of adaptive leadership and new ways of thinking about how to engage the public. And they cover the nuts-and-bolts of staying simultaneously in touch with many different constituencies on many different fronts - while the press is busy painting public officials as venal and corrupt.

Four questions posed by Beloit superintendent Rosa A Smith helped frame the conversation: For what purpose do we initiate public engagement? Could we do it effectively and still have students not learning? If students are learning, do districts need public engagement? And, can we improve conditions for children without engaging teachers?

These highlights capture the flavor of the discussion. To those superintendents who were with us, our thanks. To those who were not, we hope this document extends the discussion.

Robert H. Koff
Program Director
Danforth Foundation

Talking Sense:

Engaging the Public in School Reform

As the United States approaches the 21st century, it faces changes nearly as wrenching as those which greeted it at the outset of the 19th or the 20th. Meanwhile, the public is disillusioned, the press is skeptical, cynicism threatens to overwhelm politics, and the challenges of race and racism hover in the background. Amidst these pressures, educators need to define new kinds of leadership to engage members of the public with their schools.

These themes dominated the Summer 1996 meeting of the Forum for the American School Superintendent. From nationally respected scholars, participants heard about the new political climate and the economics attending it. Superintendents listened as public opinion experts described the public mood. They heard about promising new ways of "engaging" citizens in support of school reform. And they received some practical, hands-on, guidance about how to deal with their many publics.

A New and Different World

One of the major problems public officials at all levels are facing today is that our society is undergoing a transformation of historic proportions, according to Marc Roberts, Professor of Health and Management Policy at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. "You are facing a massive transition," Roberts told the participants. "World War II blew up the economy of the rest of the world permitting us 20 years of uninterrupted economic growth that allowed us to create Medicare and Medicaid with the excess funds at our disposal. But now we are facing downsizing and de-industrialization in which, as Secretary of Labor Robert Reich puts it, the price of unskilled labor is being set in Bangladesh. The problem is that soon the price of skilled labor will be set there too."

Roberts drew the attention of participants to three major issues: the economy, the budget, and the politics surrounding both.

The Economy

"After the Civil War," he said, "and the introduction of trans-continental telegraphs and railroads, we created national companies out of local and regional ones. In the 1990s, technology and fiber optics are making possible a new kind of global economy in which things are designed in one place, created elsewhere, assembled in the developing world, and marketed everywhere. Just last week in Massachusetts, I bought my son a pair of soccer cleats. They are marketed by an Italian firm, made in Bangladesh, and sold here."

Part of our problem, concluded Roberts wryly, is that we "produce smart bombs, while the Japanese produce smart tape recorders!"

Budget Problems

Meanwhile, budgets are a problem at all levels of government, he reported. In 1936 according to Roberts, seven workers supported every retiree. By the year 2000, there will be only two workers for each pensioner. It is a sort of double-whammy. There are fewer workers producing things (and supporting the elderly) and more older Americans requiring ever more expensive services.

Second, said Roberts, "We find what I call the debt-deficit trap. The federal government actually raises enough money to pay for current expenses. The problem is that payment on the national debt drives the debt up faster. Taxes grow at the rate of growth of the economy. After World War II, the economy grew faster than the debt. Now that interest rates are high and rates of growth are low, the costs of financing the debt keeps driving the debt itself higher."

What this means for education, he said, is that schools are in the classic financial situation of the performing arts. "Analyses of the economics of the performing arts start out with questions such as 'Why are tickets for symphony orchestras so expensive when a lot of other things are getting cheaper?' Good question. The answer is that you can't produce symphonies faster or with fewer people. But you can produce shoes, or socks, or automobiles, or cellular telephones faster - often with fewer people. The result is that the only way to raise the salaries for violinists and oboe players is to charge more."

Public services are in the same bind, Roberts argued. Government is in a real vice, he said and "its fiscal problems will not get better, but worse."

Politics

The politics of this situation are fascinating. Americans, according to Roberts, pay the lowest taxes of any industrialized country in the world. And most Americans appear determined to keep it that way. In 1983, he said, the State of Georgia sent twelve representatives to Congress, including just one Republican, a man named Newt Gingrich. By 1996, Georgia sent 13 representatives to Congress and among them were nine Republicans.

What has happened in politics, he argued, is that we have gone from a nation favoring distributive policies to one opposing wealth redistribution. "Ronald Reagan will go down in history as the most important politician since Roosevelt," he asserted. "Roosevelt created a pro-distributive coalition of the bottom two-thirds. He argued that Big Business and Wall Street were the enemy and asked working Americans and the poor to make common cause. By contrast, Reagan created an anti-distributive coalition of the top two-thirds - the affluent and the middle class. He argued that government is the enemy and demonized the poor by arguing that it is all their own fault."

The public, said Roberts, is noticeably more negative about politics today than it was a generation ago. "People are disillusioned. Campaign ads are more negative. Press coverage is demonstrably more cynical. Local government is awful - with friends like the Massachusetts Bureau of Motor Vehicles, the enemies of government don't need much more ammunition."

Dirty Politics

Roberts' description of the disillusionment of the public and the ugly nature of today's campaigning and campaign coverage was driven home forcefully by an expert on campaign communications, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Dean of the Annenberg School of Communication, University of Pennsylvania.

According to Jamieson, journalists today are rarely like the best of the old breed, educators and "wise men" who stood above the fray, interpreting its significance for the general public. "Now they are more interested in competition than in substance," she said. "As a result, they are likely to frame you as a partisan player, one who is venal, self interested, and jockeying for power - with others who are pretty much the same as you.

"You would not like the kind of 'yourself' that is portrayed in the local paper. The message the public is getting about you and your schools is that you would not need more money if you used what you already have properly; but you have let what you have disappear through fraud, waste, and abuse."

The press, argued Jamieson, is looking for a "reductive" or decisive moment that explains the heart of the conflict among competing players. They rarely have the time or interest to get into the details of substance. Even when public officials try to break the pattern - as President Clinton and Speaker Gingrich did during a debate in New Hampshire in early 1995 - journalists insist on analyzing the public debate in terms of winners and losers, she said.

What we find is "spiraling cynicism," reported Jamieson. Given a choice between substantive coverage or strategic (i.e. political) coverage of issues, research at Penn indicates the public is just as likely to read either. "It is not true that newspapers give readers what they want. We found in six communities around the country that when people get the strategy structure for news (as opposed to the substantive structure), they are less likely to vote, demonstrate a lower recall of the substance of the issues, and their cynicism about politics goes up. It is no accident that a year's worth of debate about health care increased public cynicism and anxiety - the coverage highlighted the conflict, not the substance."

Talk radio plays into this in subtle and not well-understood ways, she noted. There are over 1,000 talk radio hosts around the country, according to Jamieson, and they cover the political spectrum. They are not all the same. Most reach quite a small audience. Everyone is impressed by the fact that Rush Limbaugh reaches 20 million listeners, every week. "The three networks plus PBS reach 30 million, every night.

"But what these conservative talk-radio hosts do is interesting. They open with standard news. Then they go to highly ideological material from conservative papers. And what Limbaugh in particular does very well is that he has a common frame of reference so that his listeners, his 'ditto-heads,' have a coherent way to store and understand new information. Limbaugh's audience can be characterized as older, white, wealthier, Southern males. But we shouldn't underestimate it. It is activist, intelligent, well-read, and it was highly partisan long before it ever heard of Rush Limbaugh. Limbaugh is preaching to the choir, but he has a huge capacity to influence the legislative debate simply by encouraging his listeners to write and phone legislators on specific provisions."

These dynamics of the news media can create problems for public officials, acknowledged Jamieson, but they also create opportunities. In a fast moving dialog with the superintendents, she urged them to reframe the issue by "meta-communicating" with the public and helping to change the terms of the debate (see Turning Theory into Practice below).

A New Leadership Model

What all of this requires is a new model of leadership, one that distinguishes leadership from authority and technical problems from adaptive problems, according to Ron Heifetz, Lecturer at The John F. Kennedy School of Government. As he told Forum members at the November 1995 meeting, the greatest leadership challenges involve adaptive problems, not technical issues. New threats, different forces, and changes in the policy environment - precisely the situation school superintendents face now - create difficulties for leaders because most people, reluctant to change, want most problems treated as technical issues that can be solved by familiar techniques.

Alluding again to the mature "silver backs" of gorilla colonies, Heifetz noted that leaders are expected to provide direction, so that the group knows where it is headed; protection, so that it can protect itself from attacks; orientation, because people do not like to be confused about what their role is; conflict resolution, so that equilibrium can be maintained; and norms, because people have to understand what is involved with being a member of a particular community.

Part of the unique challenge facing superintendents during times requiring adaptive leadership, thought Heifetz, is that they are almost guaranteed to disappoint someone. "Your majority support on your board expects you to champion its point of view. It is tough to go back to your source of authority and tell these people that after sizing up the situation you have concluded they are wrong."

Among the techniques employed by successful leaders in adaptive situations, Heifetz touched on several:

1. Formal and informal authority. Formal authority confers a limited ability to get things done. By far the more powerful source of authority is found in the informal relationships built up over time.
2. Ripe and unripe issues. Leaders cannot take on everything at once. Attacking unripe issues (as President Clinton did with gays in the military) is likely to lead to defeat and drive everything else off the table. Attack issues when they are ripe - and encourage other people to ripen other issues for you. Discipline and delinquency are ripe in the schools now; student test scores and the problems of children in poverty are not, he said.
3. Identify the adaptive challenge. It is important for superintendents to frame the issues, sequence them, and pace the effort. That helps sets a direction - it may not be all that everyone needs, but it gets people moving.
4. Regulate the stress. People trying to lead without authority cannot control the pressure cooker. Superintendents have to try to decide how hard to push, how provocative they can be.
5. Keep attention on real issues. Change always asks people to give up something, to suffer a loss. Most people will try to avoid the real issues by putting something more palatable on the table. Leaders keep people focused on the issues.
6. Give the work back. Adaptive work requires everyone to take a hand in doing the work, not just the leader. Leaders have to help others see that the superintendent cannot make decisions for communities.

All of this can be a pretty demanding assignment, acknowledged Heifetz, noting that the continuous heat superintendents are under can easily lead to burnout. He urged participants to distinguish between themselves and their role, to empathize with followers who are being asked to sustain losses in the form of change, and to avoid shouldering too much by continually "giving back" the work of change.

Leadership and the Specter of Racism

Heifetz's analysis of the leadership challenge sounded as though it had been developed specifically with the problem of racism in mind. In both a presentation on race and education by Garrett Duncan, Post Doctoral Fellow in the Department of African American Studies at Washington University, and during the KIVA, the challenges accompanying the complex interaction of social change and race resonated compellingly.

Although the concept of race is absolutely without scientific merit, said Duncan, "It is one of the most powerful social organizing categories in the United State. Relations in the United Sates are color coded.

"Children are at risk not because of where they live. As Langston Hughes said, 'Misery is when you hear on the radio that where you live is a slum and you always thought of it as home.' Children are at risk because they are caught in the cross hairs of a hostile society in which they have to persevere."

Duncan argued that the very concept of "whiteness" itself is a problem. It affects not just African Americans but Asian and Native Americans as well. "In California, we find a lot of contempt for Asian Americans. The initials of the University of California at Irvine are UCI. People say that stands for 'University for Chinese Immigrants.' UCLA? That stands for 'University for Caucasians Lost Among Asians.' "

The very culture itself is changing, emphasized Duncan, sounding very much like Roberts and Heifetz. He argued that this change creates particular problems for white Americans because they "are culturally trained to be in the majority always... What is at risk is white America's sense of itself."

"We cannot educate our children unless we acknowledge who they are," he concluded, defining teaching as "love made explicit."

Many of Duncan's themes, and their interplay with the leadership challenges defined by Heifetz, echoed clearly in the Forum's traditional KIVA, conducted by Verne Cunningham. Preceded by a briefing by the Council of Great City Schools - Michael Casserly describing the Clinton Administration's new proposal to help underwrite school construction and repair in aging, dilapidated city schools, the KIVA spent a lot of time attending to issues of race and democratic values.

Several things became apparent as the KIVA progressed. Both majority and minority superintendents acknowledge that the racial situation in the United States has in many ways improved markedly in the last 40 years; the legal structure supporting discrimination and segregation has been upended. Nonetheless, racism remains a problem; values and attitudes cannot be legislated. Superintendents in rural and suburban districts, mostly white, are likely to downplay the significance of race in the United States today; their consensus (not universal) appeared to coalesce around the belief that the nation's racial problems are behind it. African-American superintendents, most in urban districts, disagreed, practically universally. In painful and moving terms they described their encounters, both as children and professionals, with racial hostility, some of it bordering on violence.

As Heifetz had noted, adaptive leadership requires sensitive management to help constituencies through periods of dramatic change. The powerful and candid discussion during the KIVA served as eloquent support for that view.

Needed: New Ways of Engaging the Public

"I want to talk to you today about new ways of dealing with the public," said John Immerwahr of the Public Agenda Foundation and Villanova University. "I want to distinguish between public relations and public engagement and tell you something about our research at Public Agenda indicating considerable dissatisfaction among several publics with the public schools."

With that, Immerwahr launched into a tour of the public horizon in all of its complexity - including the general public, community leaders, and teachers. "What we find is a very depressing picture," he summed up. The general public, he reported, is worried about moral decay, anxious about the family's economic situation, and inclined to distrust leaders. It sees schools as part of the problem, not the solution, said Immerwahr.

Community leaders focus primarily on performance, he said; they are unwilling to use social problems as an excuse for poor performance and want schools run like a business. They are openly hostile to school leaders, he concluded.

And teachers are alienated, uncertain allies of reform, at best, according to Immerwahr. They feel they are doing an heroic job under difficult circumstances, they are skeptical of experts, soft on the value of academics, and burned out from the "reform du jour" syndrome.

What is needed according to Public Agenda's research, said Immerwahr, are new strategies that engage the schools - various publics - citizens, leaders, and internal constituencies such as teachers - that invite these publics into the discussion. This new strategy'public engagement' recognizes that the time has long past when decisions could be handed to the public on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. It recognizes that the general public has a vital interest in these debates and is entitled to be a part of the discussion. In contrast to old forms of public relations, Immerwahr described a new public engagement strategy (see table) that emphasizes shared dialog with the public over an extended period of time (involving seven separate stages of public awareness) in search of common ground.

"Don't make the mistake of not giving people enough time to deal with these issues," warned Immerwahr. Like a grieving process, public engagement involves many stages: public awareness, a sense of public urgency, casting about for answers, resisting the hard work involved, making choices, intellectually accepting the necessity of change, and full acceptance of the necessity, i.e., intellectual and emotional agreement.

 

A New Model of Public Engagement

Most members of the public are still only at the third stage on most school reform issues (that is, grasping for answers), argued Immerwahr. Educators must avoid the temptation to interpret public resistance to their reform agenda as apathy - which can be attacked by "pumping up the volume and increasing the frustration. The public is not apathetic. It cares deeply about these issues, but needs enough time to come to terms with them."

Turning Theory into Practice: The Nuts and Bolts of Public Engagement

Turning the theory of public engagement into practice is easier said than done, as the nine superintendents involved with the Forum's Public Engagement initiative are beginning to find out.

The challenges they face in winning public support for new directions represent a cross-section of the challenges facing American education. Two of the districts (Tulsa, Oklahoma and Crossett, Arkansas) have bond issues coming up shortly and a history of trouble enacting them, sometimes in the face of teacher opposition. Two others (Dobbs Ferry, New York and Newport-Mesa Unified, California) face severe intra-district community-relations tensions. Two (Nye County, Nevada and Kendleton, Texas) face massive structural change, including, in one case, the possibility of merging with a neighbor. One district (San Jose, California) has been negotiating a Consent Decree to end court-ordered desegregation; another (Rochester, N.Y.) is coping with "reform fatigue"; and the ninth superintendent in Oak Ridge Tennessee has just taken over a new district and is trying to size it up.

Whether for these challenges or others, communications expert Adam Kernan-Schloss of A+ Communications offered some nuts-and-bolts advice. "You need a communications plan," he stressed. "But remember, as Eisenhower said: 'Plans are worthless. Planning is everything.' "

"All over the country," said Kernan-Schloss, "well-intentioned reform efforts are failing because educators fail to communicate clearly." He offered a five-part agenda for change:

1. Make communications a priority. "Public engagement amounts to politics, public relations, marketing, communications, and organizing all wrapped into one... Factor communications into your work from the very start."
2. Get the substance right. Everyone is an expert on schools. Don't give "nifty speeches" if your schools aren't actually doing it, "walking the talk."
3. Make it real. Seeing is believing. "Too much of the conversation is taking place 10,000 feet above sea level... Make your work concrete and visible and personalize the improvements." Let people see what new standards look like.
4. Stress benefits. Let people know why they should change, what is in it for them. Every group has a different reason. Address those concerns. Talk directly to teachers and make them your allies.
5. Use terms your audience can understand. "Plain English is essential. 'Systemic reform' is meaningless to most people. How about 'improving schools' instead?" Use everyday language and images, he urged. Most people in Philadelphia, said Kernan-Schloss, are not worried about a 10-point agenda for change - they want books in the classrooms, safe bathrooms, and less bureaucracy. The superintendent is now talking about those issues as well as the 10-point agenda.

Above all, cautioned Kernan-Schloss, remember "you need the public's permission to make fundamental changes in its schools."

The experts meeting with the Forum supplemented Kernan-Schloss's prescriptions with a host of other ideas. Marc Roberts urged attendees to communicate clearly the dimensions of the "profound crisis the United States faces in its social contract. Say to people: 'What do you think you're doing? What exactly is going to happen to us if we don't educate our kids?' "

"Force reporters to reframe issues by 'meta-communicating,' " advised Penn's Jamieson. "Put the issue in a new context and make them pay attention to it." Letters to the editor, opinion pieces in the newspaper, and offering to be a guest on local radio and television shows are useful ways of redefine the terms of the debate, she noted, pointing out that most news outlets would welcome contributions from a local official with the clout of most superintendents. She also advised superintendents to "inoculate themselves against some criticisms by acknowledging the validity of the other side's argument and then adding other facts and data." Roberts agreed. "Be honest about the failures of the past," was his advice. "That's the only way we can go to the public and say, 'Trust us.' "

Finally, Jamieson urged superintendents to take advantage of the opportunity they have on talk radio to engage activist citizens. "The number of people defending public education on talk radio is too low to code," she observed, "but we did not find a single media market in which some talk-show host was not willing to support public schools. Experiment. Get on a radio show in your community and find out a year from now if it seems to have made any difference."

Ongoing Work and Next Steps

Forum members heard progress reports on how the three on-going Forum initiatives are proceeding (Success for All Children, Leadership, and Public Engagement).

With respect to the Success for All Children program, Nelda Cambron-McCabe described the case studies she is conducting in partnership with Jim Harvey to tease out "lessons learned" from the effort. Based on visits to Bozeman, Memphis, St. Martin Parish, and University City, said Cambron-McCabe, it is clear that these are very impressive efforts that have laid a strong foundation for success. "The Success for All Children program is different in every district," she reported, "reflecting different local needs. This allows each community to play to its strengths." Among the initial lessons learned, she said, are the following: "Cooperation is no bed of roses; the success for all children project cannot be a stand-alone project; and patience is required so that the project can learn to walk before we expect it to run."

Forum members also received a report on the progress of the Leadership initiative, led by Cheryl Wilhoyte (Madison) joined by the other initiative participants. These superintendents have had three meetings in the past year, capped by an outstanding workshop in Cambridge with Ron Heiftetz, they reported. They are trying to create genuine learning communities, working on a strategy of developing "critical friends," and have completed, with the help of a technical assistance grant to Nelda Cambron-McCabe at Miami University, a project to join the information superhighway and connect via e-mail.

Finally, Clifford Janey (Rochester) led a discussion of the status of the Public Engagement initiative. The ten superintendents involved in this effort had an exciting initial meeting in St. Louis earlier in the summer, an intensive workshop very similar to the Forum's own July program. Among its hightlights was the opportunity to watch Will Friedman from the Public Agenda Foundation conduct a focus group with St. Louis area residents on their perceptions of the local public schools. Participating superintendents were impressed with the interest of the focus group members in education and their fairness in judging schools, despite acknowledging disappointment in school performance.

All told, these three efforts involve about 27 Forum superintendents and districts. At this meeting, Forum members reviewed a draft letter inviting participation in a fourth initiative on principals. Likely to involve another ten to twelve superintendents, the principals - initiative will get underway in the Spring of 1997.

With that, participants headed for home. The next Forum meeting is scheduled to be held in San Francisco from November 7 to 11. The focus? The Principal and Educational Leadership.

Further Information:

Robert Koff
The Danforth Foundation
Suite 1080
231 South Bemiston Street
St. Louis, Missouri 63105-1996
(314) 862-6200

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