“If we were still principals, here’s what we’d be talking about….”
Wayne Ogden and Larry Myatt
Times are hard, and really stressful for school principals. We think about it a lot.
We each spent two decades in building leadership, during a time not long ago which we agree was more rewarding and do-able for school principals. That experience was core for both of us, we still talk and think like principals, and we both coach leaders and work with teachers in lots of places and on all kinds of adventures.
It’s clear that the job has changed. Way too much reporting, less room for creativity and more demand for “fidelity” and “accountability”, less psychic space for important influencing and a near total emphasis on implementation of others’ plans. No wonder principal applicant pools are down by as much as 40% and so many interims are at the helm.
Now, with COVID weighing on us, we hear lots of leaders at all levels pining for the way it was. They’re stressed and overburdened with demands for safety and hygiene. Parents have pretty much panned the remote instruction they see their kids getting. Meeting time is sparse, budgets are down for non-COVID stuff. Social determinants are wreaking havoc on so many families. Totally understandable to want to get back to the (now seen as) more relaxed traditional rhythms and activities of school.
Yep – it would be easy to say, “Yeah, I’m with you. Just bring on 2015.”
But that’s not our job. At least not if we want the best for our community.
Instead, we have to do our best to “hold” two ideas: people’s understandable craving for the familiar, the predictable --its human nature—we have to recognize and honor that. But a thoughtful leader right now is also trying to figure out how to remind people that we’re educating for “up around the bend”, where we can’t see the road that well. Kids after all are headed for that world, that new terrain, not for 2015. We didn’t see COVID coming, for example. We’ve had technology in our schools for 40 years but how did that work out? Its clear that “remote” is not going away, that we’re going to see the need for several different kinds of distance engagement. We’re seeing, too, the diminishing role of the SAT and other tests amid dramatically shifting college admissions standards, along with the dramatic waning of standards and testing as a viable, helpful improvement strategy. Add to those a flurry of new trends and new demands in so many aspects of the “workplace”, regardless of the color of your collar.
We have to talk about these things -out loud and to several different groups.. We need parent’s agreement and support to educate their young people, mindful of yesterday, but towards a future around the bend. We need our teachers to see how their world is likely to be altered despite their own craving for the familiar. Boards, too --they’re well-intentioned but removed from the changing landscape of schooling. We can’t wait for departments of education and other bureaucracies to guide us, that’s for certain. They don’t see that as their job. When the pandemic ends, it’s not going to be 2015, and you’re probably thinking and talking about that if your head is above the sand.
Of course, part of getting the conversation ramped up is listening -really listening--to our communities. And not just to the usual folks, pushing for more AP, better test scores to support real estate values, or just the right teacher for each of their children. But to the quiet caregivers and families who are not usually on our calendars. To some of the young people who we don’t know well since they are not National Honor Society or star athletes. To the community activists who can seem to be a pain, but in whose words there are pearls of truth and things we wish we could address. To the quiet educators who linger after school or spend their lunch tutoring kids who need more. A lot of people are in pain right now. Our old-fashioned model of school has failed us in so many way. Its these people who can help us to identify the leaks in our boat and then its up to patch them.
This is a time for leadership that extends beyond its positional authority. So, if we were still principals, here are three things we’d be talking about:
1- Your child’s school – pretty much every school—is now the locus of mental health- and it’s not built for it. Young people bring their emotional lives to school. Many traditional places in our communities where the ingredients of good mental health may have been noticed, maintained, or nurtured largely no longer do that work. Families, too, and the ways they operate are much different now from even two generations ago and COVID has further rocked the family equation. Psychologist Robert Evans’ early 2000’s warning about the dramatic need for a reframing of the home-school partnership has gone largely unheeded. Affluence is no guarantee of immunity from the stresses of modern adolescent development as can be seen from data on anxiety and depression, along with increased levels and variants of PTSD that young people carry to school in challenging economic settings.
Here’s a further twist: there’s growing agreement among the many schools we work with that about one out of about every six students not only would prefer not to be in school, but are doing better academically than when they’re in physical school. What does that tell us? Maybe they’re anxious, or they find it hard to learn in a noisy group of 25 or 30, or are bullied, or whatever. But what we are we learning from them that we can use when schools are fully open again?
An oft-cited Winter 2020 Yale Child Study Center study- pre-COVID- tells us that 75% of students describe high school as stressful, boring, or both, and not a place they want to be. Holy cow! How can we possibly bear the social/emotional burden we’ve had to assume with the paltry resources and structures we’ve inherited from a model built generations ago?
Attentive leaders and their schools have begun a retrofit that will take time, money, heavy culture changing and new tools. We need to be talking about that with every audience we can. And, in house, we have to stop saying simply “SEL” or pronouncing it like “sell”, treating it like the flavor or the week or a vitamin that will address the issue. That trivializes the complicated work ahead. Call it wellness, good health, belongingness, social-emotional or youth development, resilience, not just “SEL”. We have to think bigger and get in gear to address the fact that, like it or not, schools are centers of mental health. Check out our Nine Elements of Social/Emotional Support poster. We help leaders and their teams work with it as a rubric to see how well their school is doing with that retrofit. If it hasn’t started at your school yet, its past time.
2-How are we going to cope with the tidal wave of failure rates we’re seeing in so many places? We’ve spoken to some principals who have current “failure rates” of close to 50%. That’s not just course failure, that’s grade-to-grade passage failure, and graduation eligibility failure. A significant part of that failure is directly attributable to poor attendance. Principals relate how difficult it is to get students to attend classes when they are learning partially or fully remote mode. Add to that the number of students who are not engaged in the remote instructional motif, turned off by the unsophisticated, boring lessons they’re encountering as regular fare. Some families in high needs areas do not have adequate access to technology and internet access, or have to share limited technology with several children, while other parents simply don’t have the luxury of staying home or hiring someone to monitor their children’s learning during the day.
Some bureaucracies, think tanks and higher education centers will no doubt spend time and money developing algorithms to estimate “learning loss” and develop top-down strategies to re-order their curriculum standards, pacing guides and tests. Not helpful in the long run, we’d guess. But we do need to take action and we offer two steps in response to the “learning loss epidemic”. The first is to pay attention to one place most folks agree will be particularly damaging -the break-down of reading development among children in elementary school. That should become a huge priority everywhere it is recognized as a COVID-related phenomenon. All teachers should get bootstrap training in key reading strategies, guided by reliable but down-and-dirty assessments to pin-point where help is needed.
The other notion we espouse is for principals watching failure and disengagement rates soar to call out an “all-hands-on-deck” community strategy --mobilizing community centers, groups and clubs, local businesses, parents and retirees, anyone who can spare an hour a day or 2-3 hours a week. School “guidance” offices should suspend much of their reporting and recording activities and become command and tracking centers where students are sensitively matched to those who can help them with tutoring, reading, study skills, virtual internships, etc. Tight on engagement and personalized support, looser on traditional formats of “instruction”. Rather than worry about “grades” we should keep our eye on the real issues --keeping students supported and engaged in this crisis.
We’re aware of a growing number of efforts in several cities bringing together families, youth workers and activists organizing around what Pedro Noguera has called “the normalization of failure”. We’ve got a defunct model of school designed to sort kids, and now with help from COVID its doing that unfortunate job better than ever. Families and communities should be mobilizing against the status quo and we should be helping them.
3-School leaders, put your own oxygen mask on first –ask for good, regular coaching.
If there were ever a time when we needed to step up and support leaders, this is it. We are watching so many leaders go uncoached, and they and their schools are paying a price. High-quality coaching is not therapy, nor does having a coach imply that a principal has flaws or shortcomings. Good coaching provides customized opportunities for principals to think deeply about the many important decisions they must make, and having a skilled coach provides a chance for leaders to process ideas as they develop, and to get feedback from an expert confidant before an idea, initiative or piece of writing goes public. Time for the coaching relationship to prosper comes from time not wasted on mistakes and false starts. COVID has been a tsunami for so many schools, and a principal, a leader, struggling to stay above water -on her/his own- is a recipe for mediocrity at best.
The idea of superintendents coaching principals is one that we’ve seen meet with very limited success, one which more often flounders or evaporates as time passes. Most Superintendents simply do not have adequate time for effective coaching of school leaders, a particularly granular task, and even if time can be found, there exists an inherent conflict in the roles of confidential coach and a boss who evaluates her or his leaders. Given the extraordinarily challenging political, instructional and human relations issues they face, especially now with COVID and its myriad issues, principals need a dedicated, confidential coach from outside the organization who can be trusted to address a leader’s uncertainties, concerns and challenges in such an intense and complicated environment.
While some will resist spending to support their principals, more sophisticated decision-makers know that from Fortune 500 companies to politics, from professional sports to the fine and performing arts, highly successful leaders use coaches to help them excel at what they do. Seasoned school superintendents and smart boards make these strategic investments because they understand that organizations with strong leaders perform better with high-quality, dedicated coaching. Instead of arguing that “our school district just can’t afford” to hire external coaches for our leaders, we’d want them to take a longer view — in New England, for example, a typical three-year contract for a school leader with salary and benefits ranges from $400,000 to more than $700,000. A typical one-year contract for an external coach is roughly $12,000, a modest sum to ensure the success of a new principal, in particular given the potential for disruption and uncertainty with a leader’s departure, the time and cost of a new search process, and the impact on to student achievement and school culture. Our principals are under the gun. And, as we’ve said, it’s more than “getting back to normal”. We need not only to deal with the current challenges but to come out different and healthier. Again, If there were ever a time when we needed to step up and support leaders, this is it.
So, with these three issues in mind, as well as deep respect for the work you do, we invite school leaders to step up, and to start talking!
Wishing you the best in your work,
Wayne and Larry