Over the past five years, I have interviewed a host of exceptional educators—some of them well-known nationally or internationally and others known only in their local area. All of these interviews were published in the Portrait Series in Educational Leadership.
Many readers recognized Ted Sizer, the late Madeline Hunter, Seymour Papert, and Ernest Boyer; some knew of Dennie Palmer Wolf and James Gray; few knew Audre Allison, Florence Mondry, and Sig Ramler. All these people made a difference to children and teachers, and all made us feel more professional.
After conducting about 10 interviews, I began to notice that my subjects had more in common than extraordinary achievement. They shared patterns that constituted a leitmotif in their careers. These patterns include five characteristics: vision, tenacity, recursiveness, time commitment, and dedication to career.
Vision
Most of these educators early on in their careers knew on a deep level that they would work to bring their personal dream to fruition. Years before Jim Comer went to work as a psychiatrist at the Yale Medical School and made a very focused commitment to children and schools and family, he had this broad vision: While I was at the School of Public Health, I began to think about how you could make a difference for low-income kids, and I decided that the only place in society—because you can't get to families earlier—is the school. Everybody comes down that pathway.
Typically, the early vision was relatively unspecific. It might have evolved over a period of years and slowly came into focus, or it might have percolated for a time and then struck with great force.
The genesis of the Coalition of Essential Schools began in the early 1980s when, as founder Ted Sizer explained, he began to conclude the following about American students: Most kids were intellectually flabby, including the academic hotshots—the kids with pretty good test scores. The schools were extraordinarily tolerant of sloppy and superficial thinking. The Coalition that he founded to change such conditions has since grown from 5 to some 800 schools.
Seymour Papert's initial perception about the future of computers was more dramatic: In 1967 I was walking on a hilltop in Cyprus, and it just sort of hit me like a thunderbolt. What in our culture has the greatest potential for making a difference? Computers.
At a time when there were no personal computers and computers had hardly touched the public schools, Papert understood that within a decade there would be a seismic shift and that computers would become an increasingly powerful force in American education. Today, his LOGO system is used in at least one-third of American classrooms. In 1989, he was named LEGO Professor of Learning Research at MIT, a chair that was newly endowed that year.
When New York English teacher Audre Allison first learned about the National Writing Project and realized that the process fit her sensibility, she saw only broad outlines of how she could decentralize her classroom and make process and product of equal importance. She went on, however, to place composition at the center of her curriculum, using reading logs to help students interpret literature and extract meaning from their efforts.
Sig Ramler, still roiled by his experiences during the war in Europe, knew more than 30 years ago when he made his first trip to Tahiti that student exchange and appreciative understanding of other cultures was a potent force. He thought it might prevent a recurrence of what he had lived through from 1938 in Vienna to 1948 in Nuremberg, where he served as a translator at the War Crimes trial. Ramler's Pan Pacific Program is now firmly rooted in Hawaiian educational life.
Reuven Feuerstein's life-threatening illness and his work with retarded and culturally deprived children in the 1940s convinced him that “the human being can be modified. If you don't believe that ..., your success will be very limited.” He had not yet worked out the details of Instrumental Enrichment programs for culturally deprived, retarded, and autistic children, or even coined the phrase, but the basic vision of intervention and modifiability was in place.
Tenacity
Tenacity, a deep commitment and determination to continue in spite of impediments, requires that you deeply believe what you are doing is right. It requires that you persevere in the face of insignificant or very modest support.
More than a half-century ago in a rural Canadian school, John Goodlad, known for his school renewal project and for reforming teacher education, “bumped up against the regularities” that he has fought against his entire career. He saw that it was far more important to implement his own ideas about structuring education to fit the needs of particular students in a particular place than to observe the “custodial functions and systemics” that a bureaucracy tried to impose on him.
Jim Gray, whose National Writing Project was the precursor to the Bay Area Writing Project, had to fight those who were not convinced that teachers could teach other teachers how to write. Now in semi-retirement, he still endlessly raises funds and palliates doubts people may have about the power of the Writing Project, which today operates in more than 200 centers in this country and abroad.
New York English teacher Florence Mondry slowly and thoughtfully crafted her teaching to reflect what she was learning in several National Writing Project courses. It took her more than five years to fully integrate cooperative learning, revision, journal writing, and other techniques into her work and to “feel a lot stronger about what I do, much more grounded, much more self-aware.”
Most of the people I interviewed made light of the notion that anything important could happen very quickly. Almost to a person, they emphasized the ideas of time and perseverance as critical. Said noted educator and psychologist Madeline Hunter, who died in January 1994 at age 78, “Two months is a drop in the bucket in terms of what we now know about training.” She needed two decades as principal of the UCLA lab school to get her work to a place where she could feel confident about its efficacy.
Papert has worked on his various computer projects for nearly 30 years. In the beginning, he said, people “laughed or they criticized me in a way that really hurt,” but he never ceased believing in how consequential his work could be for children.
Comer explained that his school-community partnership program “grows out of a relationship. If all of the conditions are reasonably ripe for success, you can do it in three years,” but he also underlined the need to stay with a project for several more years if that school and community require it, and many of the schools he worked with did.
Dennie Palmer Wolfs's groundbreaking work on assessment has been consuming and exciting, but her projects take years because they are complex and human and “something falls off the truck here every day.” She is currently involved in a five-year urban middle school portfolio project (PACE) with Rockefeller Fund support.
Starting something new or working against common belief is very difficult. Al Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers, spent thousands of nervous hours planning negotiating strategies and leading his fledgling union through strikes. “I had tremendous fears I was leading people into a terrible trap.” But he continued.
Recursiveness
Recursiveness is the twin art of learning from errors and staying committed to improvement. The work we do is human and, therefore, infinitely complex. Mistakes are inevitable, and one must continually shuttle back and forth to get it right and go forward.
Secondary principal Dennis Littky took risks, such as insisting that a bright, pregnant teenager be allowed to stay in school in conservative Winchester, New Hampshire. In his zeal to protect this youngster, he offended people. Recursively, he went back over what he did, and found better ways to be of help, such as appealing to the girl's family to support her and staying in close touch with selected teachers and community members whose backing he needed. Eventually, he handed that girl a diploma and saw her go to college, the first person in her family to do so.
Comer spent too much time in schools during his first year, he said. People felt that his constant presence was not realistic: “We wanted to develop a model that was replicable, and psychiatrists are not present in most schools.” He began to understand that his ...role was that of conceptualizer and interpreter of what was going on..., one who would apply knowledge of the social sciences to every aspect of that system....
Perhaps Madeline Hunter was the toughest on herself. While proudly stating that she always did the best work she could, her self-examination was rigorous and honest: One of the egregious errors on my part was when I was teaching principles of learning; I never taught under what conditions shall you not use them. Hunter's work in the years just before her death was on brain functioning, work that she constantly reviewed, much like a writer revising. “We kind of had the hang of it, but we were making some terrible errors.”
Former New York City School Superintendent Felton (Buddy) Johnson sponsored his first inservice sessions 15 years ago when he was an inexperienced principal. It was to train his teachers in the techniques of open education—a school without walls. Although he provided perfectly sound training, he never engaged his teachers emotionally in the concept, so “none of it happened.”
A few years ago, when Johnson set out to train his faculty in mastery learning, he seeded the idea, got the faculty excited, convinced them of the idea's merit, provided excellent training, and saw the concept take root.
Al Shanker has seen his union grow into a national force, but he well understands that the gains of the past 35 years occurred in a very different political, financial, and educational atmosphere from the one that prevails now: The only way to get things that we want is to organize the schools in a different way. From the teachers' point of view, we can only fulfill our dreams and ambitions and goals if we have a totally different workplace. Shanker is today making his union an important part of the reform movement.
Time Commitment
There is nothing subtle or complicated about my use of the word time. Unlike tenacity or recursiveness, it simply means putting in years to make a vision full-flesh reality—brief lapses, minor blemishes, but an overall impression of completeness.
Seymour Papert has been working on LOGO and related programs for nearly 30 years but says, “It's not been a static thing.” He's still enhancing the idea. It took Reuven Feuerstein 50 years to refine his Learning Potential Assessment Device.
Most of the people I interviewed are experts on educational change and know how long it takes to bring about lasting behavioral and attitudinal shifts. Developing a fine classroom writing program or a national inservice writing project is more like evolution than revolution. Audre Allison said it quite simply: “It means a lot of slowing down.”
Jim Gray needed 10 years to get the National Writing Project on a solid footing. The project is not a three-day inservice course or a summer institute; it is both of these things, followed by endless refinement. Florence Mondry said about student growth through writing, “I don't think you can see it immediately or even within a month or two. It takes forever.”
Most of the important training programs Buddy Johnson sponsored as a superintendent in New York City took at least three years to complete. Madeline Hunter, in her usual definite and clear way, said, “It takes two years to stop a behavior.”
Dennis Littky claims that it takes “five to six years to get a school going,” to work carefully with teachers, students, and the community to shift toward a student advisory system, team-teaching, cooperative learning, and other features that Littky believes are crucial to good education. Jim Comer thought he could move several New Haven elementary schools from poorly functioning schools to well-functioning schools in five years. “It took 20.” When John Goodlad moved from UCLA to the University of Washington in 1984, he announced a 15-year plan for his school renewal project.
Ted Sizer's Coalition of Essential Schools, about a decade old, is just now in the healthy infant stage. Sizer, who, in addition to chairing the Coalition now directs the Annenberg Institute for School Reform, is learning that schools need three to five years just to get started on Coalition principles.
There is simply no way around time, and educators who try for rapid solutions are doomed to ephemeral effects and likely failure. As Dennis Littky says, “It only takes a minute to throw a kid out of school. To do things right takes time.”
Dedication to Career
The people I interviewed often seemed unambitious to move up in the hierarchy. They found satisfaction and often prominence through their work. And they spent the balance of their careers at one or two institutions, far more interested in perfecting a vision than in moving geographically or hierarchically.
Papert has remained a professor at MIT. Hunter served as principal of the UCLA lab school for 20 years and refined her work there. Goodlad, after 16 years as Dean of UCLA's School of Education, is now entering the 11th year of his 15-year plan at the University of Washington.
Allison and Mondry, both in their 19th year of teaching, have no interest in leaving the classroom. Dennis Littky has been principal of two secondary schools, one for 6 years and the other for 12. When he found his place as a principal, he noted, “It was the first time in my life that I felt all my skills were being used.”
Deborah Meier, co-principal of Central Park East, a renowned alternative high school she founded in 1985, has in the past two decades helped establish 11 similar New York City high schools. In I987, she won a MacArthur Foundation “genius” Fellowship. Still, she said, she remained close to her own school and its children and, in her own mind, was still a teacher.
Ernest Boyer's most serious criticism of life in official Washington, where he served as President Carter's Commissioner of Education was that Federal agencies don't have continuity of leadership.... continuity of memory, shared loyalties that reinforce values over time, and that's a definition of a sick system whether it's a school, a college, or a federal agency.
In New York, Boyer worked in the State University of New York (SUNY) system from 1965 to 1977, the final seven years as Chancellor. He had a real and lasting impact, from instituting a review of college presidents and creating the Empire State College to the dramatic expansion of the role of student government and the formation of serious international programs for students. He is now president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.
Through her studies of “subordinated populations,” Shirley Brice Heath, another MacArthur Fellow, has not only written about linguistic communities, but “lived and worked in and became a member of each of those communities over a period of a decade,” making her better equipped to foster an appreciation of diverse cultures in the process.
Making your own dream develop from the inside makes the very idea of a career something other than work. Gordon Cawelti got so caught up in the pleasure of his task as Executive Director of ASCD that “in 19 years here, I took one week's vacation.”
While most of the people I interviewed had strong and happy personal lives, their devotion to work was very complete. As Shirley Brice Heath confided, “My work is my life. Everything I do contributes to my work.”
In sum, to bring a powerful idea to fruition requires an inchoate vision, the tenacity to stay with the idea through its inevitable vicissitudes, a willingness to learn from errors and to accept setbacks as opportunities for growth, a commitment to time measured in years, and the desire to stay in the job or type of job that will allow the early vision to develop into something rich and detailed.
