District leaders can’t afford to pull away the scaffolding and leave principals to fend for themselves. If superintendents want an equity agenda to succeed, then they must continue to take a hands-on approach.
Recently, I called Damien Pattenaude, the school superintendent in Renton, Washington, to ask him about his strategic approach to resource allocation. Pattenaude has earned a reputation as a bold, equity-minded leader, and he hasn’t been shy about defining specific goals for the district, such as to strengthen collaboration among teachers and administrators, improve curriculum, increase the use of data, build new professional learning communities, and invest in principals’ instructional leadership. Perhaps most important, he has made it a priority to steer the most funding toward the schools and programs that serve the largest numbers of vulnerable students.
When he started out in Renton, Pattenaude’s plan was to build consensus around a new vision for the district, set things in motion, and then gradually release control, allowing other people to step up and lead. That’s the conventional wisdom among many experts in school system leadership: If you put great principals in place, decide on a high-quality curriculum and materials, and make good investments in staff development and professional learning, then local educators will gain their footing and move ahead, without much ongoing direction from the central office.
There’s a certain logic to this. After all, it’s what good teachers do. At first, you give students some direct instruction and support, then you provide scaffolding as they practice and explore their new skills, and then you pull back and let them apply those skills independently. And if that’s how we teach students, then why not apply that same approach to adults? But the more Pattenaude described his work, the more I began to question whether the conventional wisdom has things upside down. Pattenaude has come to realize that the schools in his district require continuous support, guidance, and coaching. He’s rightfully concerned that if he tries to pull away the scaffolding and encourage local principals and staff to move forward on their own, they might stray from the system’s equity agenda.
The same issue came up recently in a conversation with Kathryn Wiley, a researcher at the University of Colorado who studies racial inequities in student suspensions. She told me about one district where the superintendent has given a lot of autonomy to local school leaders, with some potentially negative consequences. As she explained:
some principals get the sense that following the district’s discipline code and racial equity goals are “optional,” since the central office won’t insist on it. They’ll just shrug and say, “What can we do? Schools have autonomy!” Even in districts that have a shared conduct code, I’ve seen wide variation in school discipline practices, and local autonomy is a big reason why. One instructional superintendent even referred to central office staff as “the great suggesters,” describing them as powerless to do anything more than offer advice.
To implement an equity agenda, then, do school system leaders have to keep a firm grip on decision making? Why can’t they trust principals to do the right thing and press on with efforts to support the most vulnerable students, whether that means revising the disciplinary code, expanding access to gifted and talented programs, or redistributing scarce resources?
Keep in mind that whenever schools make significant changes to their policies and practices, some parents will object. That’s inevitable. And when the changes appear to favor marginalized children, the objections are likely to come from some of the most privileged and powerful community members, especially affluent parents who worry that “promoting equity” means taking resources away from their own kids. No matter how skilled and well-intentioned the principal, it can be difficult to resist the intense pressure that such parents — and often their allies on the school board, in the local government, and in the media — can bring to bear.
And let’s face it, pursuing equity in K-12 education can also be hard work. It requires constant attention, like tending to a campfire that keeps burning through logs. Staff need to question old assumptions and embrace new priorities. Teachers need to learn new skills and be held accountable to new goals. Resources need to be reallocated. Students and families need to be kept informed and engaged. Given such complex and ongoing challenges — not to mention pushback from angry parents and, perhaps, resistant teachers and staff — it’s easy to understand why a principal would give up on the district’s equity agenda and retreat to the comfort of the status quo.
As both Pattenaude and Wiley explained, that’s precisely why district leaders can’t afford to pull away the scaffolding and leave principals to fend for themselves. If superintendents want an equity agenda to succeed, then they must continue to take a hands-on approach.
What levers can system leaders pull?
How should superintendents go about this work? I can see at least five ways in which they have to stay engaged at the school level: offering political cover, providing good data, supporting collective leadership, guiding the reallocation of resources, and making sure principals receive ongoing supervision and support.
Offering political cover may be the district superintendent’s most essential responsibility. As I’ve argued on many other occasions, system leaders must act as buffers between local educators working to make their schools more equitable and community members working to undermine that agenda. This job never ends. Relationships will always need to be cultivated with newly elected officials. Tough budget decisions will have to be made again and again. Contracts with employee associations will have to be renegotiated every few years. And angry parents will always have to be met with. While superintendents’ political capital can wax and wane, they must always be willing to take the heat from critics if that allows local school leaders to carry on with their work.
School transformation also requires that leaders have good data about how students and adults are doing relative to agreed-upon standards. State standardized test scores are useless as leading indicators of improvement, so it’s incumbent upon system leaders to help schools gather and act on other kinds of information. Common assessments, student work, surveys, and observations are all part of a comprehensive approach to understanding student performance and need. Environmental data are also essential, as it’s important to know whether children have access to food, health care, and stable housing. Data about adults should be regularly reviewed as well, whether it’s about their classroom instruction, their use of student suspensions and referrals, or their efforts to integrate social-emotional and academic learning. System leaders need to help schools put in place the mechanisms to regularly collect, review, and act on all of these kinds of information.
It takes collective leadership to sustain an equity agenda, not only because principals come and go, but because the quality of the agenda depends on input and buy-in from diverse educators, parents, and community members. For school leaders, though, it can be hard to decide when to slow down and seek broad input and when it’s time to move quickly and take bold action. So, to help strike a healthy balance between collaboration and decisiveness, superintendents can create structures that make it clear when and where to involve others in shaping the agenda. In Renton, for example, the district allows each school’s staff to waive aspects of its contract, if members choose, so that teachers can establish professional learning communities on specific equity issues, debate them, and advise their principal on how best to proceed.
The superintendent’s decisions about resource allocation fuel the whole equity agenda, ensuring that schools are able to pay for required materials, curriculum, assessment tools, staffing, and professional development. That doesn’t mean principals should be free to go on a spending spree, though. When trying to improve a struggling school, it’s always tempting to buy more “stuff” (and Title I dollars often incentivize principals to do so), but spending alone doesn’t promote more equitable outcomes. It has to be strategic and aligned with specific needs and goals. And here’s where it can be particularly helpful for district leaders to continue to play an active, hands-on role, taking steps to coach, monitor, and even audit local schools to make sure they use resources in ways that actually promote equity.
Finally, principal supervision is one of the most important, if often overlooked, means by which superintendents can promote effective, equity-minded school leadership. A key part of Damien Pattenaude’s strategy in Renton, for example, has been to assign a well-regarded veteran administrator to regularly visit schools that have been targeted for additional resources, both to observe classroom instruction and to coach the principal. Some tension is inherent to this work, in that each principal has a distinct vision for their school, and they may chafe if given too much oversight. Yet, no one gets better alone, and even the best leaders need ongoing feedback. Moreover, by rotating among a number of schools, the principal supervisor can pass along the best ideas and practices from each one, helping move the district’s equity plan forward throughout the system.
Finding the right balance
Shortly after I began as school superintendent in Montgomery County, Maryland, I mentioned to one of my mentors that many of the people in my new district had told me they felt too restricted by the system’s top-down, command-and-control culture. School leaders wanted more autonomy, so they could be creative and try out new ideas. He warned me to be careful. He had seen efforts to promote equity go off the rails after a heavy-handed leader was replaced by one with a more collaborative approach.
I heeded my mentor’s advice to some extent: I made it clear that the pursuit of specific equity-focused goals was non-negotiable, even as I encouraged school leaders to develop their own strategies to achieve them. I’d like to think that’s the right approach. However, if I were to do it again, I might try to stake out a position a little closer to the “tight” side of the “tight-loose” continuum, especially when it comes to directing the work of schools that need to make significant improvements in how they serve their most vulnerable students. It takes time — and a lot of trial and error — for teachers to learn when they should pull away the scaffolding and let their students stand on their own. For district leaders, too, it’s not easy to decide how and when to let go.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Joshua P. Starr
Joshua P. Starr is the managing partner at the International Center for Leadership in Education, a division of HMH, based in Boston, MA. He is the author of Equity-based Leadership: Leveraging Complexity to Transform School Systems.
