This is Heather, and I’m delighted to act as guest blogger for Dr Stock, while he is off in the wilds of Alaska hunting. Stay safe, Mark, and keep away from crevasses!
We’ve chatted recently about climate and culture, and I’d be interested in your views on this article that dropped into my mailbox this afternoon.
http://www.tennessean.com/article/20091108/NEWS04/911080384/1970
Quoting from the article:
“Mary Buckner was getting ready to wrap up another year at Napier Elementary when she and the school’s 60 other staff members were called into the library and told to start looking for new jobs. Napier was one of five Nashville schools being “fresh-started” meaning everyone from teachers to janitors would have to reapply for their positions.”
The schools director stated “If schools don’t have a good climate, one way to change that is to change faculty and change leadership,” he said. “I think it needs to be deliberate, not a whim.”
What do you think about ‘fresh-starting’ as a means towards improving climate and creating a more positive school culture?
Tags: climate · culture · fresh-starting4 Comments
In this article, Justin Cohen, part of a nonprofit thinktank references the difficulty of “transformational leadership”, which itself doesn’t seem to mesh with a fresh start. Transfomational leadership would seem to be a more creative way to address change and I have to imagine a less expensive option. Could that simply have meant building, or finding, a stronger transformational leader to mold the existing staff?
To Jesse Register’s credit, perhaps it’s time education had some of this hard-charging decision making. However, what I didn’t infer from the article is Register’s competence in a Type Z. I haven’t walked in his shoes, and if it’s like a lot of education, I’m sure there are plenty of personalities to meld. Building consensus (ala “transformational leadership”) is immensely hard, but last I checked there’s not a teacher, coach, or business person in the country who gets to make the choice (on the taxpayer’s dollar and the children’s backs) to start fresh, just eliminate the class we’re given, clear the bench and start new, or drop the book of clients because they’re not what we’d like to work with.
I believe if we claim to be in the business of educating little people to be productive, effective big people, we are charged with treating others fairly and with care. Maybe this means fresh-starting through a shuffling of resources and skill building of weaker links. I’m glad Register is now considering the transfer process as part of this equation. It definitely means a priority of shared leadership throughout a staff. I’m curious how many of those staffs had consensus on goals and a common perspective on leadership.
Thank you for your comments, Walt. It appears that fresh start was also tried in the UK in the late 1990s and early 2000s. I’m including the link to a case study of a fresh start school in the UK (Aroua, 2009). Quoting from the article:
“The initiative added to the problems faced by the ‘failing school’ and promoted rather traditional ways of raising ’standards’ due to the close surveillance that Fresh Start schools were subjected to. In the case studied, the needs of the pupils that the initiative was meant to address were being sacrificed in the school’s construction of a ’successful’ identity. While the initiative has now lost momentum, some lessons can still be learnt. This paper illustrates the complexity of creating a new school, as well as the need to attend to the specificities of the local context and experiences in raising ’standards for all’ pupils.”
Aroua, M. (2009). A fresh start for a ‘failing school’? A qualitative study. British Educational Research Journal, 35(4). DOI: 10.1080/01411920802642439
Wow, fresh-starting sounds a little overboard the way they did it. I think Walt makes a good point about having a stronger leader who in-return can help their staff become more productive teachers/staff. There is something missing that is causing some poor teaching, as mentioned in another blog on this site better preparing our teachers to begin with would be helpful. However, we all have our strengths and weaknesses and one may need some extra support to help bring their weaknesses up to par with the educational expectations. One’s strengths should not be discounted. The majority of the time it comes back to what assistance the principal is providing. There are some teachers who don’t fit the criteria of a productive teacher and never will or who can be very toxic to our youth, those individuals need to be dismissed. Overall, fresh-starting I don’t feel is the best answer.
Transformational leadership would be a better option to ‘fresh-starting’ a school. However I wonder if transformational leaders are the rule or the exception. How many of these are there to go around?
I have worked in some schools that have very negative cultures. Teachers and administrators seemed to be the locus of this negativity. Students were the big losers in this system, their needs were neglected. Reform initiatives were undertaken, yet all were defeated. Much of the opposition to changing the culture came from veteran teachers and administrators, people who were protected through tenure or simply longevity. The avenues for change in schools like this are few and far between. Radical change, if it means that students are going to learn better, has to be considered, even if it means a process like ‘fresh-starting’.