High Standards for Leadership

Abstract

THE conditions surrounding teaching in this country are beginning to resemble the worst aspects of a welfare state. The issue, however, is not teachers' pay. It is the surreptitious way that state and local education officials must go about doing what they need to do to survive, while federal policy makers pretend that rules and regulations will solve all problems. Thankfully, there are exceptions to this dreadful state of affairs. No one can honestly tell the federal regulators that schools have met the mandate to provide a qualified for every classroom. School districts were scrambling at the beginning of the school year to find warm bodies, just as they did when the baby boomers reached school age nearly two generations ago. Today, public school enrollments are at an all-time high, fueled in part by the baby boom echo and, in many places, by immigration that has turned classrooms into mini-United Nations and placed even greater strain on schools serving poor and minority children. Census figures had been predicting such diversity to materialize a decade from now. Instead, it is a reality this school year. If the states have been setting minimal definitions of highly qualified, doesn't that mean that they are at least trying to be realistic? With enrollments exploding in some areas of the country, teacher recruiters have even gone to Europe and the Philippines in search of teachers. Some have turned to such organizations as the Visiting International Faculty Program, based in North Carolina, to find teachers. As of September, this program had placed about 1,600 teachers in schools. Meanwhile, our federal policy makers and some of the watchdogs who follow the implementation of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) contend that noncompliance with its mandates is at the heart of the problems with the law. If states and districts only did what the law requires with regard to teacher quality, choice, supplemental services, and other provisions, student achievement would be moving ahead nicely. Instead, the number of schools not making adequate yearly progress rose considerably this fall in most states, just as the testing experts had been predicting. While others seemed to be losing their heads over noncompliance with NCLB, the leaders of two of the nation's largest school systems kept theirs. Their story is one of deciding what was most important to accomplish for the children in their care and then sticking to their guns. Worrying about compliance with a federal law appeared way down on their list of priorities. Both Tom Payzant, who retired this past summer from his post as superintendent of schools in Boston, and Roy Romer, outgoing superintendent of schools in Los Angeles, wrestled early on with some of the reforms that became federal policy. While superintendent in San Diego, Payzant was a leader in the National Alliance for Restructuring Education, which introduced a new reform vocabulary to a coalition of schools nationwide. Curriculum standards, alignment with assessments, units of study, systemic change--these were among the big ideas the alliance brought to school leaders long before these concepts became embedded in federal policy. As governor of Colorado, Romer followed through on the ideas generated by the first education summit, convened by then-Gov. Bill Clinton and the first President Bush. Romer chaired a commission that recommended higher standards and better assessments, the wellspring of the standards movement. Payzant and Romer, two superintendents on opposite sides of the country and with very different styles of leadership, steadfastly crafted the same kinds of changes in their districts. …