Finding the way: Structure, time, and culture in school improvement

To Mr. Donahoe’s mind, restructuring means the formal rearrangement of the use of time in schools to allow them to create and sustain the kind of interactive culture and supporting infrastructure they need to improve student learning.

As I worked in the field of school improvement during the past four years, I became increasingly struck by the failure of those who write about and those who are directly involved in school restructuring to confront a critical question: How does a school generate and sustain the characteristics of effectiveness?

During my immersion in school reform I have read about, been told of, and seen firsthand the inadequacy of the factory model, the egg crate, the cellular structure of schools. I am familiar with the characteristics of effective schools as identified by research — strong leadership, clear and ambitious goals, strong academic programs, teacher professionalism, and shared influence. I have seen lists of desired states, such as school-based management, shared decision making, schools within-schools, integrated curriculum, interactive/cooperative learning, authentic assessment, performance-based testing, and parent involvement. But I have not read about, heard, or seen how a school takes on these features and, in so doing, differs from the traditional school in the way it functions — in the way it’s organized, in the way it structures time, in the roles and interrelationships of its staff. What has been missing, I think, is an adequate consideration of the crucial relationship in schools between structure, time, and culture.

To be fair, the literature and practice of school restructuring nips at the heels of these factors. When a school implements the programs of Theodore Sizer, James Comer, or Henry Levin, something has to change in the way the school functions. But those changes, in Joseph Schumpeter’s terms, tend to be adaptive responses — major changes that stay within the range of current custom rather than creative innovations that go beyond existing practices and procedures.¹ Maybe an evolving series of adaptive responses will get schools where they need to go eventually, but the more likely result is what Yevgeny Yevtushenko calls “fatal half-measures.” As long as the responses only bend, rather than break, the traditional model, any changes brought about in a school are living on borrowed time. It is easier to go back than to go forward because the system that envelops the school was created to support the traditional model and is thoroughly inhospitable to any other form.

It has taken me some time to put these three elements — structure, time, and culture — together. When I began thinking about school improvement four years ago, my attention was attracted by the way schools were formally organized. Gradually, however, I found that time and culture had stronger roles to play in school effectiveness than I was accustomed to seeing in other settings. The best way to bring the roles of structure, time, and culture into focus is by describing my own progression of experience and thought.

School organization

In the fall of 1989 the Pacific Telesis Foundation, of which I was then president, began working with three California elementary schools in a comprehensive restructuring project. By January 1990 I had formed what I thought at the time was an original insight into school organization. I began saying that schools had no organization, describing them asjust convenient locations for a bunch of individual teachers, like independent contractors, to come to teach discrete groups of children.· I noticed that teachers did not talk about themselves as belonging to an organization; they were more likely to think of themselves as being at the outer reaches of a large bureaucracy. Nevertheless, I expected them to take offense at my description of schools. But no one did — in fact, every educator I spoke to agreed rather enthusiastically. Then I found that my insight was not at all original. It permeated the literature. Here, among many writers on the topic, we find John Goodlad saying that there are no “infrastructures designed to encourage or support either communication among teachers in improving their teaching or collaboration in attacking schoolwide problems. And so teachers, like their students, to a large extent carry on side by side similar but essentially separated activities.”²

It is only necessary to envision the organizational chart of the traditional school to understand the issue. The chart would show a box for the principal at the top and, below that, one long, horizontal line of boxes for teachers. There may be other positions and roles, especially in high schools, such as assistant principal, counselor, department head. But they don’t add depth to the chart; if anything, they extend the horizontal line. The way an organization is configured affects the behavior of those who are in it, minimizing some kinds of behavior, maximizing other kinds. The traditional school organization minimizes collective, collegial behavior on the part of teachers. It maximizes two conflicting behaviors. It leads to bureaucratic, rule-prone direction from the top, since the school is not set up to determine its own direction and rules, but then it creates autonomous teachers who, behind their classroom doors, can readily ignore much of the top-down direction.

There is a scene in Tracy Kidder’s Among Schoolchildren in which the principal of Kelly School is meeting with his teachers on the day after the local newspaper has printed the results of the statewide standardized test — flunked by more than 30% of Kelly School’s sixth-graders. Almost all the students who failed came from families below the poverty line. “I don’t want to hear the test scores anymore. I know what kids we got here,” the principal told his teachers. “We can’t bring them all up to grade level no matter what we do. But can we improve instruction here? You bet we can. But we’re doing a good job. We really are.”³ And that was that. The problem at Kelly School is not just a principal who is failing to provide academic leadership, and it’s not incompetent teachers. This is a group of people without the support and resources of an infrastructure that enables them to work together on schoolwide problems.

Although that issue is pointed to again and again in the literature, I have yet to find any effort to run its implications completely to ground. I believe that when we talk about school-site councils, school-based management, or shared decision making, we think we are talking about structural change. However, those forms of school management tend to be appliqued on to the traditional school organization, not woven into its organizational fabric. They don’t necessarily break up the horizontal row of boxes.

When the Pacific Telesis Foundation project began, the schools were organized into teams, each of which was to develop a strategic plan in one of four areas. Every member of both the teaching and the classified staff signed up for the team of his or her choice — curriculum, teaching and learning, leadership and management, or parent and community involvement. The schools were encouraged to invite parents to join a team. Each team elected a leader; the whole school staff elected a project coordinator. The principal, coordinator, team leaders, and, in some instances, others, such as grade-level representatives, formed a leadership council.

During that first year, as I observed the schools struggle with the process of change, I formed a number of conclusions about school restructuring. The first conclusion was that the process needed to be undertaken as a formal reorganization of the school. It could not be perceived by the school staff as an informal or ad hoc arrangement for the purpose of carrying out one more project. Schools are accustomed to ad hoc arrangements for the administration of seemingly discrete operations such as the school improvement program, Chapter 1, and special education. It was not at all apparent to the schools we were working with that they now had a new school organization that should embrace and integrate everything they did. The idea that the schools were undertaking a formal, comprehensive reorganization — that this was not just one project among many — needed continuous reinforcement.

The second conclusion I reached was that there was another reason for the reorganization to be formal and comprehensive: if it were not, the schools would remain vulnerable to changes in leadership and staff. Informal or ad hoc ways of doing things are ephemeral unless, as in many private schools or some small schools in small communities (or districts), tradition has made them inviolable. We all know examples of schools that became immensely effective through the leadership of an innovative, risk-taking principal and then, when the principal moved on, collapsed back to the ordinary.

My third conclusion, which grew out of the second, was that schools are too dependent on their principals. The plain fact is that there simply aren’t enough good principals to go around. Thus a critical objective of school restructuring has to be the development of a school organization that can generate good school performance when the principal is not an effective leader or that can sustain good performance when an effective leader leaves. On the other hand, it also became clear to me that the leadership skills of the principal are critical, at least in the early years, to the success of an effort to create a formal environment of shared influence. Teachers who have just emerged from their individual boxes are not yet ready to assume leadership roles in a shared-influence setting. Schools are trapped by a leadership dilemma: they require skilled, effective principals in order to outgrow their utter dependency on those principals.

We could buy time for the school staffs, but they had no space to install it.

That observation led me to a fourth conclusion. In order for schools to outgrow their dependency on the principal, every member of the administrative, teaching, and classified staff — as well as some parents — must have an active role in the formal organization. Schools are small enough to function as a form of direct, rather than representative, democracy. Schools that restructure by forming a representative executive committee or leadership council, however those bodies are chosen, do not significantly change the isolated role of teachers within the organization. The effectiveness of such schools is as vulnerable to changes in staff as is the effectiveness of the principal-dominated school.

The fifth conclusion was that schools need an external change agent to help them through the traumas of change. We had organized the staff into four strategic planning units, and virtually every staff member was involved in one of those units. A leadership council provided overall coordination, and the foundation bought time (by giving stipends and paying for substitutes, released time, and retreats) so that this new organization could function. Still, we were asking the schools to change in unspecified ways — to change in any way that would improve student learning. We know how enormously painful, hard, fragile, and prolonged change is for individuals, and the collective behavior of people organized into institutions doesn’t seem much different from — or less intransigent than — individual behavior. Just as for individuals, the help of a change agent eases organizational change and, like rebar in concrete, keeps the process from cracking and crumbling.

Among the factors that made change traumatic in our schools were a lack of leadership skills, unfamiliarity with recent research and practice, inexperience in consensus building, staff discord, the inability to prioritize and focus, the tendency to think in terms of staff problems rather than in terms of student needs, and a reluctance to step off into the unknown (or, rather, an inclination to take, once again, fatal half-measures). Without a change agent, only schools with an extraordinary staff or exceptional leadership will achieve meaningful change, and even for them it will be a long, long road, highly vulnerable to changes in staff.

Having arrived at these convictions and then making use of them to guide the effort, I believed for some time that the project, which in its third year had grown to six elementary and two middle schools, had the needed elements for change in place and that it was only a matter of time and patience before the process began to have an impact on student learning. As I prepared to leave the project at the end of 1991, each of the schools had its own obdurate set of issues, impediments, and problems, but I also became aware that, to varying degrees, all of them were suffering from organizational stress.

The structure of time

This was the source of the stress: we could buy time for the school staffs, but they had no space to install it. Organizational activities were crammed into every available comer of the day. It wasn’t just a matter of finding time for meetings; there had to be time for all the additional interaction, assignments, and emotional energy that stitch an organization — a culture — together. For those teachers who thought a lot about what they did, we were crowding the time they would otherwise have spent thinking about their children and their classrooms by giving them the additional responsibility of thinking about the whole school.

This issue first surfaced in the project’s second year, when Louise Bay Waters, a change agent for one of the schools, wrote a short paper on the promises and pitfalls of shared decision making. She wrote, “Time is the final, and most worrisome, potential problem with shared decision making. Teachers may become so involved with school management that they actually end up less effective in the classroom, or even burnt out.” At the time, I thought that the problem was real but confined to a few especially active teachers and that it was caused primarily by the extra turmoil of the project’s early stages. As the new ways of doing things became routine, even the most active teachers would find ways to balance their activities; in the meantime, we simply needed to be alert to the problem and to deal with it on an individual basis. But, following some meetings with teachers and principals in the fall of 1991, I began to think that the problem was more serious, if not endemic, and was linked to the issue of infrastructure.

It makes sense, after all. The traditional school organizes the school day so that teaching itself, including the preparation and the paperwork, both administrative and academic, is a full-time job. Still, like most people in any other job, teachers don’t necessarily work at 100% capacity, whatever that is. There is some room for most teachers to become more engaged with their schools. However, like a factory — but unlike most other organizations — a school doesn’t have much flexibility for structuring into the schedule the kind of time that teachers need to make schools a collegial effort.

The tension between teaching and school leadership activities cannot be resolved by suboptimizing both. If restructuring is to make any difference, teachers need to be able to perform at their best in each role, and the roles need to be complementary, integrated, and synergistic.

According to the cross-national study Harold Stevenson and his colleagues conducted in the United States and Asia, in schools in China, Taiwan, and Japan, where students seem to perform better academically than their U.S. counterparts, an eight-hour school day is structured so that teachers are in charge of classes only 60% of the time they are at school, and teaching itself is a group endeavor . Stevenson reports that “Asian teachers are able to engage children’s interest not because they have insights that are unknown in the U.S. but because they take well-known principles and have the time and energy to apply them with remarkable skill.”⁴

I’m certain that the most radical and politically difficult element of school restructuring is what needs to be done with the use of time in schools so that teachers can expand their role. The barriers to establishing an eight-hour school day, for example, are probably insurmountable. Cost is certainly a major impediment, but parents and the community are also serious obstacles to change (which doesn’t bode well for school choice as a change agent). A school in Southern California set aside Wednesdays for teachers to work together outside the classroom. The other four school days were slightly extended, and on Wednesdays the students worked on interactive, cooperative learning projects under the guidance of a permanently assigned substitute teacher. A group of parents concerned about the use of substitutes ended that promising experiment after one year. Members of Theodore Sizer’s Coalition of Essential Schools run into trouble with parents who resist change for a variety of reasons. lnterschool athletics, beloved by parents and the community, are an overwhelming barrier to any significant change in the structure of time in high schools. Afternoons , after all, are needed for practices and games.

Nevertheless, no matter how unthinkable radical change in the school day may be, the school simply cannot continue to function traditionally, with a compressed academic day during which each teacher sticks to his or her own room and duties, as the sociologist Dan Lortie described it.⁵ I believe that this factory model has never been in the best interests of teaching and learning, for the reason that Susan Moore Johnson expressed: “A lone teacher can impart phonics, fractions, the pluperfect tense, or the periodic table, but only through teachers’ collective efforts will schools produce educated graduates who can read and compute; apply scientific principles; comprehend the lessons of history; value others’ cultures and speak their languages; and conduct themselves responsibly as citizens. Such accomplishments are the product of a corporate venture .”⁶ We simply didn’t know what schools were missing, but since the 1960s the social changes and expectations that have overpowered our schools and teachers have created huge cracks in the inherently faulty structure of our schools.

Those changes seem to fall into four categories: growth, diversity, inclusion, and social dislocations. First is the mismatch between growth and resources. Classrooms, schools, and sometimes districts are too large. They have grown beyond human scale for effective teaching, learning, and the management of these activities. Second is the phenomenal expansion of ethnic, linguistic , and cultural diversity in the classroom and the school. Third is the expectation of full inclusiveness. We have come to believe that all children can learn and should stay in school to do so. Fourth is the set of social changes or dislocations that have occurred over the past three decades: single-parent families, latchkey children, poverty and poor health, drugs, gangs, and violence.

Traditional schools and large bureaucratic districts cannot cope with these changes because they do not have a structure that supports an environment capable of change. The education system is a series of closed containers — classrooms, schools, central office fiefdoms (which is what we mean by the egg crate or cellular model) — all of which are surrounded by competing special interests. Change requires a dynamic, open, self-examining, interactive system.

Culture

The qualities just listed describe a culture, not a structure. But the creation and life of a desired culture depend on a compatible supporting structure. Fred Newmann wrote that the restructuring movement is going about the process of change in the wrong way, by “trying to design organizational structures before clarifying purposes and reaching consensus on the educational ends that organizational structures should serve.”⁷ Unfortunately, the traditional school does not have the organizational capacity to formulate goals, desired outcomes, and strategies. Schools need to change their organization in order to change their culture. I would modify Newmann’s observation by substituting the word “governance” for “structures” or by saying that the restructuring movement is trying to design organizational structures without sufficient regard for the culture the schools need in order to clarify purposes, to reach consensus, to ratchet student learning to a higher level.

We take for granted that the function of organization is to create levels of authority for the purpose of moving decisions and direction downward . Based on that assumption , we have made an enormous investment in maintaining a bureaucracy whose directions teachers can simply ignore behind the closed doors of their classrooms.

The kind of culture and supporting structure schools now need reduces both top-down bureaucratic direction and classroom autonomy. In the Telesis Foundation schools, the team leaders and project coordinators do not in any sense supervise units or teams of teachers. Rather, they are elected volunteers from among the staff whose role — in addition to teaching, counseling, or administering — is to facilitate the upward (and lateral) movement of influence through the organization. Schools require a very special nexus of culture, time, and structure, in which a certain kind of culture assumes the function that authority plays in traditional organizations, classic bureaucracies. A diagram of the formal organization of a school restructured in this manner might show overlapping circles representing spheres of influence, rather than boxes representing areas of responsibility and levels of authority. When a school practices shared influence, it does not mean that decisions — and therefore power — are simply delegated to, or even vested in, an individual or a committee. Rather, through some consensus-building process established by the school, everyone in the school community has at least an opportunity to influence outcomes. Decision-making power that resides in one person or group may change other people’s behavior but not their preferences. Influence has the more difficult task of changing preferences and therefore behavior. Or, perhaps more realistically, an accepted, collective process of shared influence relaxes the grip that personal preference has on individuals. In a shared-influence setting, teachers have less individual autonomy because the pressure to do things differently comes from a source that they need to respond to — their peers. The loss of individual autonomy is offset, however, by the collective ability to do things on behalf of student learning that the teacher was not able to do in isolation.

These thoughts clicked into place in my mind as I listened to the principals of the schools in the Pacific Telesis Foundation project air their frustrations with shared decision making. Initially, most of the principals thought that this process meant outright delegation. Finally, Bruce Baron, principal of Los Naranjos School in Irvine, said that he’d dropped the term in favor of “shared influence,” because he realized that he too, after all, was still a member of the staff and in his role had valuable things to bring to the consensus-building process. The delicate skill the principal needs is the ability to bring those things to the process without cloaking them in robes of authority. The principal’s suggestions, like everyone else’s, must be able to stand on their own merits. The operative word is culture — not governance, not positional authority.

In recent years many organizations have been convinced that they needed to change their culture. But culture — the values, beliefs, behaviors, rules, products, signs, and symbols that bind us together — is not something we can change like a flat tire. Culture is organic to its community. If culture changes, everything changes. For schools to become organically different, it isn’t nearly enough to repeat like a mantra, “Every child can learn.” What psychoanalyst Allen Wheelis says about individual change seems equally true of organizational change: “Since we are what we do, if we want to change what we are we must begin by changing what we do.” And he adds, “We are wise to believe it difficult to change, to recognize that character has a forward propulsion which tends to carry it unaltered into the future, but we need not believe it impossible to change.” Although a change agent may be a critical enabling factor, the responsibility for change obviously lies with those whose behavior determines whether change has taken place. The plastic surgeons of organizational behavior — those with copyrighted paradigms to push — cannot do the work for us. “We are,” Wheelis says, “no more the product of our therapists than of our genes: we create ourselves. The sequence is suffering, insight, will, action, change.”⁸

Finding their own way

As we think about how schools should change, we hamstring ourselves by our labored and distracting efforts to find an analogue or metaphor for how they ought to work. We have not been properly discouraged by the disastrous results of turning the factory metaphor into reality.

Thomas Timar suggests that a baseball team, which “exemplifies a dynamic organizational culture that reconfigures itself to be competitive in new situations,” is a better metaphor for schools than a factory.⁹ Among other difficulties with his metaphor, I just can’t find any trace of an analogue for students on a baseball team — nor, in the routines of teachers, do I find anything comparable to spending half the workday sitting together rather idly in a dugout. Still, Timar has come up with a good description of what a school culture ought to be. He knows the difference between metaphor and analogue and is only suggesting that, as organizations and cultures, schools ought to be the polar opposite of a factory. But we need to say that in another way.

There simply isn’t any other organized, human activity, either in metaphor or in reality, that is anything like the collective effort of a community to impart learning and character to children, to enable them to become active, productive citizens. We need to set aside the metaphors like “smart machines,” concepts like the marketplace, and questions like “Who is the customer?” — because all of them, drawn from other kinds of organized activity, narrow our ability to come to terms with, to capitalize on, to envision the uniqueness of schools.

The principal’s suggestions, like everyone else’s, must be able to stand on their own merits.

Schools are not only different from other organizations, but they are profoundly individual in their specific circumstances. One of the Telesis Foundation schools is located in a dysfunctional urban area and has a student population that is 95% black; another has seven significant groups of children whose first language is not English; another has a student population that is 95% Latino, with many students whose parents are migratory laborers; another is stratified about equally into three social groups: children from upper-middle-class families, children whose families live in low-cost housing, and children of enlisted military personnel; another is an ethnically diverse suburban school that is taking on urban characteristics; another is a brand-new school with a magnet program and a handpicked faculty; another is an urban middle school with 400 students, 95% of them black, for whom safety going to and from school is the number-one concern; another is a middle school serving more than a thousand youngsters about equally divided among whites, blacks, Latinos, and Asians, 20% of whom are not native English speakers and speak 12 different languages. Two of the schools operate year round, one with four tracks and one with a single track. The faculties, too, differ in many ways from school to school. As David Kirp wrote recently in a critique of school choice, “Each school will have to find its own way, because everywhere the talents and the possibilities are different.”¹⁰

Making change possible

Saying that each school must find its own way, however, does not mean that it will not need a little help from its friends. Whether that help is from the state, the district, or the change agent, the form that it should take is the creation of an environment that is both enabling and motivating — providing sanction, protection, capacity, knowledge, resources, and the opportunity to change — combined with a set of expectations and the sensitivity to know when, where, in what direction, and how hard to push.

The function of the change agent is to prepare and organize the school for change; to identify the areas in which staff members are weak, such as leadership skills and group decision making, and to provide the training that they need; to help the principal adapt to a new management style; to assist in the vision, mission, goals, objectives, measurements, and timetables; to identify the impediments that are peculiar to the school and help the staff recognize and overcome them; to keep the focus of activity on improved student achievement; to recognize when schools are attempting too little or too much and then to help them establish the right pace of change; to enable schools to circumvent district and state bureaucracies and provide them air cover against interference from the district; and to create networks within which teachers and principals can interact with their peers from other schools and districts. Ideally, the change agent would have experience as a teacher and an administrator; skills in group facilitation; political savvy; a good knowledge of current research and practice in the areas of teaching, curriculum, and assessment; and a personal vision of and commitment to school improvement. A change agent can work effectively with as many as five elementary schools within a district but with only two or, at most, three high schools. In the initial stages it would be preferable if change agents were not district employees, but — unless the district obtains a corporate, foundation, or state grant — it is hardly likely that it could afford a corps of outside change agents. To build up its internal capacity for assisting change, a district should retain one outside person who would train, oversee, and back up a cadre of change agents who have been recruited from within the district. To make room for the change agents, the district would begin its own restructuring by eliminating such positions as curriculum coordinator and other school support roles that will be assumed by the schools. District change agents should hold the same rank as school principals and should be allowed by the district to approach their job objectively and independently. If the agents are district employees, they as well as the schools need to be shielded from overbearing district rules and procedures.

As schools move through the process of change, the role and involvement of the change agent diminishes, though not at the same rate or in the same way for every school. Nor does it ever entirely go away. Because schools must be dynamic organizations, identifying and adapting to changing circumstances and improved teaching methods and curriculum, they need someone who stands outside and looks at their culture and effectiveness with a cold eye and a warm heart, who would not be tempted to let difficult circumstances limit what the school believes it can achieve, who will not allow the school ever again to be a static organization, who cannot be co-opted by either the district or the school.

The change agent is an indispensable figure, but it is the principal who has the most crucial and sensitive role. Within the Telesis Foundation project, even the best principals — those who had an innate talent for managing a shared-influence environment — were not sufficiently prepared for the change in their role. But once they had weathered some initial stress, their lack of preparation did not hinder the process from moving forward. If a principal cannot manage well in a shared-influence setting, however, any change or improvement in the school will be marginal at best. Most districts will not have very many principals who are up to the job. Shared influence requires principals who are intuitive, risk-taking, visionary, self-confident, empathetic, and trusting. These are the implied qualities of the best kind of leader, summed up about 2,600 years ago by Lao Tzu, who wrote, “When his work is done, the people say, ‘Amazing: we did it, all by ourselves!’ “¹¹

The number of schools that a district can initially undertake to change will be limited by the number of available change agents and by the number of qualified principals, so districts must find a way rather rapidly to develop and enlarge the pool of both. That talent pool will come largely from teachers who experience the process and come forward to take leadership roles in their schools. While leadership academies for principals may be helpful for setting the stage, management skills and styles are learned primarily by experience, access to on-the-job consultation, and interaction with peers who are working through the same process of change.

Finding the time

A culture can’t change and an organization can’t function unless they can make use of time in a way that sustains their life, like oxygen to the blood. Somehow, we need to find a way to provide teachers with the time they need to make productive use of their collective energy.

The problem often is greater for large middle and high schools because they are more complex.

A basic requirement for all schools is that the full staff meet for at least three days before the start of school to set the agenda and the calendar for the year, to organize teams, and to elect leaders. Nearly as vital is a full staff meeting for a couple of days at the end of the school year to assess results, to set preliminary objectives for the next year, and to designate staff members who will do those things that need to be done over the summer, such as compiling research or receiving training. Year-round schools need to make time in their calendars at some point for these full staff conferences.

Time also needs to be found during the year. The Pacific Telesis Foundation schools have lengthened some days and shortened others in various ways to make time available for collective effort. At Will C. Wood Middle School in Sacramento, which has divided its 1,000 students and its faculty into eight houses, students come to school 1 1/2 hours later than normal every Wednesday so that the house faculties can meet. But other team configurations, such as house leaders, the leadership council, subject-area teachers, and special groups like the technology team, simply meet when they can — usually after school, some on a regular schedule, others not. Will C. Wood also takes advantage of the eight days that California allows for school to be out of session so that teachers can come together to plan for school improvement.

The modifications of the school schedule at Will C. Wood and the other Telesis Foundation schools are rather modest and don’t break the mold of the traditional school. They are, in other words, adaptive responses. The schools are trying to make a new organization and culture work without sufficient time, which is surely a recipe for organizational stress. Los Naranjos Elementary School, however, has combined its modified schedule with a disciplined planning and scheduling process. Beginning in May, the whole staff agrees on the school improvement activities for the next year. These are then developed into strategies by teams. (Every staff member is on a team, and teams may change from year to year. In 1992-93 the four teams were devoted to instructional strategies, language arts, technology, and assessment.) The whole staff decides what the school’s priorities will be, how much time will be spent on each strategy, and who will be responsible for development and implementation. A steering committee then puts together a full-year calendar that includes all team meetings, grade-level meetings, and full staff meetings, along with the subject of each meeting. The calendar is completed in June before school is out.

Because teachers make the calendar, teachers can also change it. But if a new venture is added, some other strategy or activity must be eliminated or diminished, which requires the agreement of the full staff. “The mistake most schools make,” says Principal Baron, “is that they plan their use of time month by month, and they keep tossing in new things to work on.” At the beginning of the 1991-92 school year, when the district asked all schools to undertake a self-esteem strategy, Los Naranjos was able to say no, wait until next year, because it could show the district a full school improvement calendar and agenda for the year.

In order to create time, Los Naranjos makes use of its eight school improvement days and has also slightly lengthened four weekdays and shortened Wednesdays, dismissing students at 1 p.m. The calendar includes the specific use of all Wednesday afternoons by teams of teachers.

The school worked with parents to gain support for both the eight school improvement days and the short Wednesdays, convincing parents that, if they wanted the improvements they were beginning to see to continue, they must give the teachers time. During this outreach process, parents themselves chose to schedule the school improvement days immediately following holidays.

The formula Los Naranjos has adopted in order to make maximum use of the time available in a traditional schedule — that is, disciplined planning and scheduling combined with concentration on a limited number of strategies — is an approach that should be used no matter how radically a school is able to restructure its schedule. As Baron points out, Los Naranjos budgets time just as it budgets money. It itemizes what the time is for, how much time is needed, when it will be used, and who will use it.

The Los Naranjos yearlong calendar is an effective mechanism for husbanding both time and the number of issues the school chooses to address during the year — creating a sharp staff focus and making certain there is a match between time and activities. The teachers can prepare themselves to balance teaching responsibilities and collegial activities. “Teachers have a real solid feeling they will get something done during the year,” Baron says.

Nevertheless, the modifications of the schedule at both Los Naranjos and Will C. Wood amount to adaptive responses rather than creative, formal innovations. Although schools can find ways to rearrange their schedules to make some time for collective effort, these modifications do not provide enough time for the adequate involvement of every staff member and all internal interests. The problem of time is greater for large middle and high schools because they are more complex than elementary schools and need more structured planning time to attack their issues from different angles.

Collective time needs to be treated, Baron says, as a valuable and scarce commodity that is formally scheduled and rigorously allocated to specific aspects of the school’s agenda. Just as the state requires a certain number of classroom minutes and a certain number of teaching days a year, it (or the districts) should find a way to formalize a certain amount of collective staff time, as the Asian schools do, leaving it up to the schools and their communities to determine how best to reconfigure the school day. Until that happens, all collective time is ad hoc, vulnerable to shifts in leadership, and most likely thought of as an add-on rather than as an integrated activity.

Turning up the heat

Like the Pacific Telesis Foundation schools, hundreds of other schools across the country are engaged in school reform activities. Even though each school must find its own way, it needs a system that is supportive and also willing to change itself. When only one or two or a few schools within a district are changing, the district can tolerate, or even encourage, that activity without changing its own practices, procedures, organization, staffing, and role — that is to say, its own culture. But until the district culture becomes aligned with that of the school, any changes an individual school makes are vulnerable. In addition, individual schools may be able to show the way, but they can’t collectively create a critical mass for change. Samuel Johnson wrote that a scattered people resemble “rays diverging from a focus. All the rays remain, but the heat is gone. Their power consist[s] in their concentration; when they are dispersed, they have no effect.”¹² Once, while walking along a Santa Barbara coast road on a starry but moonless night, I walked right into a tree. Change throughout the system will not come about through a thousand points of light but from the steadily increasing, concentrated light and heat of one sun.

Turning up the heat is a district responsibility. When all the schools within a reasonably sized district have undergone cultural change and the district administration has aligned itself with its schools, the system itself will have something to build on. In most districts, however, a diversity of interests scatters any effort to coalesce around the best interests of schools. A restructuring effort that begins with special-interest politics will end the same way.

A district capable of cultural change must have certain characteristics: a supportive, patient school board; a superintendent who is a skilled leader with a vision for change; a cooperative, unthreatened middle management; a reasonable relationship with the union. These characteristics suggest that, in the beginning, the successful districts will most likely be small to medium-sized, with not much more than 25,000 students, and they will be part of fairly cohesive communities whose special interests are not extremely divergent. When districts of this size are manifestly successful, then perhaps the larger districts, which are more grievously plagued with special interests, will be able to motivate those interests to come together. However, I suspect that the very largest districts are simply beyond human scale and need to be broken up before comprehensive change can take place.

The reform of structure, time, and culture does not ensure school improvement; it only makes it possible. Schools will continue to vary in quality — but, in general, from wherever they start, they will have the capacity to raise themselves to another level. In California the schools have some reliable guides for putting their collegial capability to work on school improvement: the reports of the state task forces on school improvement at the elementary, middle, and high school levels (It’s Elementary, Caught in the Middle , and Second to None); the state curriculum frameworks; and the revised, performance-based California achievement tests.

Without the reform of structure, time, and culture, school improvement projects can be propped up for some time with grant money and the efforts of external organizations. But unless all the elements of change become inherent within the school and the district, enabling the school to stand substantially by itself, school improvement efforts will eventually collapse.

Michael Kirst has said that restructuring has no objective meaning; it means whatever the speaker has in mind at the moment. To my mind, restructuring means something literal: the formal rearrangement of the use of time in schools to allow them to create and sustain the kind of interactive culture and supporting infrastructure they need to improve student learning — to bring about the creation of truly new American schools.

References

1. Joseph Schumpeter, “The Creative Response in Economic History,” Journal of Economic History, November 1947, pp. 149-59.
2. John Goodlad, A Place Called School (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1984), p. 188.
3. Tracy Kidder, Among Schoolchildren (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989), 199.
4. Harold Stevenson, “Leaming from Asian Schools,” Scientific American, December 1992, p. 76.
5. Dan Lortie, Schoolteacher (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975).
6. Susan Moore Johnson, Teachers at Work (New York: Basic Books, 1990),
7. 149.
8. Fred M. Newmann, “Linking Restructuring to Authentic Student Achievement,” Phi Delta Kappan, February 1991, p. 459.
9. Allen Wheelis, How People Change (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1973), 13, 101, 102.
10. Thomas Timar, “The Politics of School Restructuring,” Phi Delta Kappan, December 1989, 264-75.
11. David Kirp, “What School Choice Really Means,” Atlantic, November 1992, pp. 119-32.
12. Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, Stephen Mitchell (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), poem 17.
13. Samuel Johnson, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775; reprint, London: Oxford University Press, 1970), 119.

Citation: Donahoe, T. (1993, December). Finding the way: Structure, time, and culture in school improvement The Phi Delta Kappan, 75 (4) 298-305.