A Principal Looks Back: Standards Matter

Author: Marshall, K.
Publisher: Harvard Education Press
Publication Date: 2003
Editor: David T. Gordon
Book Title: A Nation Reformed? American Education 20 Years after "A Nation at Risk"
Full text available online at: http://gseweb.harvard.edu/hepg/marshall.html

Abstract (written by WestEd)

Based on his experience as a principal, the author has come to believe that many schools will not achieve, or perhaps even attempt, real change without the impetus provided by external standards and accountability. He acknowledges the challenges of state and federal testing, but believes that externally imposed standards and accountability help to lower ten notorious barriers to high student achievement.

He uses the school in which he served as principal for 15 years, Mather Elementary School in Boston, as an example of the differences that can exist between enacting change to improve achievement before and after external accountability is introduced. For the most part, teachers ignored the principal's efforts to improve student learning through unifying goals, standards, and assessment until forced by external accountability to improve school performance. The barriers to high student achievement that Marshall names and discusses at length are:

1. Teacher isolation — pockets of excellence but failure to learn from each other to improve schoolwide performance.
   
   
2. Lack of teamwork — staff meetings focused on non-instructional issues (e.g., field trips, troubled students).
   
   
3. Curriculum anarchy — teachers ignored district curriculum goals and taught whatever they chose.
   
   
4. Weak alignment — tests were poorly aligned with classroom curriculum and not respected by teachers; teachers had little confidence they could improve test scores by teaching to the goals.
   
   
5. Low expectations — of students and themselves, with teachers regarding themselves as "hard-working martyrs in a hopeless cause."
   
   
6. Negativism — teachers with strong personalities "declared war" on the principal's goals for changing the school culture and student expectations.
   
   
7. A harried leader — spending too little time on teaching and learning and too much time on building renovations, discipline problems, etc.; then enacting distributed leadership, sticking to a plan for briefly visiting five teachers' classrooms each day, and bringing in coaches instead of sending teachers to isolated workshops helped improve professional development but did not have an impact on test scores.
   
   
8. Not focusing on outcomes — at the end of a teaching unit, teams rarely met to evaluate what worked and plan how to improve what did not work.
   
   
9. Mystery grading criteria — teachers had personal criteria that students may not know; common rubrics and scoring sessions helped improve instruction and test scores but the initiative waned and finding enough time on a consistent basis became an issue.
   
   
10. No schoolwide plan — staff could not agree on a schoolwide program and spent too much effort trying to "grow their own;" Reading Recovery targeting first graders and Literacy Collaborative Program in primary grades were helpful in unifying some staff and raising test scores, but they were not part of a coherent schoolwide plan for change and realizing more significant gains in student achievement.

Real improvement in teaching and learning began when strong external standards and accountability were introduced. The need to align curriculum and assessment to the state test put an end to curriculum anarchy, and the staff focused on student data as a gauge of instructional effectiveness. Using the school's writing rubrics came back to life. A key element was the "powerful learning cycle" of analyzing data from quarterly assessments to identify the percentage of students at proficiency and invent strategies to improve achievement for struggling students and areas of weakness.