Alan Blankstein, Founder and President of the HOPE Foundation

I have been involved in the education community all of my life. Beginning first as a high risk youth, I was blessed with mentors who guided me and helped me to achieve my own dreams—not just of graduating high school, but moving into college and graduate school before starting my own education foundation.

I’ve spent the better part of 15 years researching schools across the country and working to get at the heart of what works when it comes to improving our schools. Through all my years advocating enduring education reform, I have worked with schools across the country on why courageous leadership is crucial and the steps needed for true school reform.

That’s why I was so pleased to hear President Obama focus his remarks this week in part on the Transformational Model of reform. Success for every child will not be found in closing down schools or firing 51 percent of a school’s staff, but in strengthening the culture of our schools, in a meaningful way.

As a starting point (and as the first of my six principles that guide high-performing schools), successful schools should define their mission, vision, values and goals to create a clear and unifying purpose for student learning. A good mission, for example, would articulate the following:

• What students should learn;
• How will we ensure engaging and relevant pedagogy;
• How we will know whether they have learned it; and
• What will happen if that learning does not occur.

If we are to make success the only option for all students, we would also answer two questions honestly. First, what will it take for everyone involved (administrators, teachers and parents) to resolve that failure is not an acceptable option for any student? And second, who is responsible for every child’s success—is it the student, the parent, the teacher or the administrators?

The second question hopefully is rhetorical and the answer, hopefully, is everyone. Research has shown that in high-performing schools, everyone is responsible for a student’s success. In low-performing schools, however, that feeling of collective responsibility is not there.

To transform lower performing schools, we have to significantly reshape the school culture so that failure is not an option for any student. This is particularly challenging in chronically low-performing schools, but it can be done, and done well.

For the HOPE Foundation, this has been true both domestically and internationally. The idea of pressure alone—via threats of termination, school closings, etc. —is not sufficient. Since people are generally doing as well as they are able, the supports and capacity-building must be at least as robust as the pressure. Here are some guidelines for the kind of support that have been fundamental to our success:

• Build self-efficacy beginning with staff abilities. This may not initially focus exclusively on instruction. In some cases, we set simple goals, such as asking staff to contact a certain number of parents per day. Physical changes to one of our schools in the Bronx led to planting a garden where there had only been broken glass, so that people could see and feel the changes afoot. The important lesson is to have quick, easy and continuous wins and then to celebrate successes.

• Build the leadership team. Shared leadership is essential to sustain school improvement. The combination of district and site leadership rallying around a shared mission and purpose leads to shared accountability, empowering multiple stakeholders to engage in the process and work together toward agreed upon priority. Our approach calls for developing the entire leadership team—together. This has been particularly helpful during times of transition. In areas where we have lost formal leaders, the surrounding emerging leaders and teaching staff have filled in the gaps.

• Developing a construct for lateral learning. According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, the leader of a school or district has three possible means of affecting change—through staff morale; working conditions; and staff capacity. Of the three, the latter is least affected by the leader’s actions because there are so few leaders and so many people who need skill and knowledge development. Our construct has called for job-embedded professional learning—where staff learn to identify and engage colleagues in knowledge sharing, especially with high-yield strategies already underway in a given school or district.

• Using a common framework and guiding principles. Each school circumstance is different, which is why programs and policies have limitations. Principles are portable, however. While they yield different approaches and conversations in each context, they can lead to similarly effective outcomes. As indicated in a recent Education Week report by Anthony Bryck, having a systems approach where all elements of the system are necessary to support the outcome is essential for success. The system we have used for the past decade, likewise, mirrors the elements in this report.

• Shifting the culture with trust as the foundation. One common element in almost all low-performing schools is a lack of trust among the adults in their schools. Changing this culture is essential to high-performing leadership teams, collaboration and relations with the community, students and colleagues. While not easy, trust builds overtime through well-structured and facilitated conversations using new practices and protocols on building agreements on what counts: Success for every student.