There can be no significant innovation in education that does not have at its center the attitudes of teachers.—Neil Postman and Carl Weingartner (1987)
It has long since become commonplace to note the chronic, cyclical, ephemeral nature of school reform. Indeed, one might now say of reform, as Samuel Johnson did of remarriage, that it represents the triumph of hope over experience. Will the latest round of reform—“restructuring”—avoid the fate of its predecessors, or will it fail to make the transition from advocacy to implementation? Although it has already won the support of policymakers, business leaders, and legislators, its success is far from certain.
Whether the nation's classrooms will be restructured depends on whether educators will make the changes asked of them—a vast process of adaptation that must be accomplished teacher by teacher, school by school. And while many teachers have embraced the new agenda, many more have not. In schools that are supposedly restructuring, it is easy to find faculty who have made only minor changes or none at all. A teacher says: Our principal claims cooperative learning has “restructured” us. A few of us are into it. A few say they are. For most, it's business as usual. And in schools everywhere can be found teachers who are strongly opposed—even when innovation aims to empower them. A superintendent reports: Listening to faculty concerns, I decided to decentralize—truly: to hold each school accountable for results, but let each control its budget, curriculum, etc. Their response? “This is an end run around our union. No way.”
To implement reform in the face of such resistance is an enormous challenge for school leaders and one that they must undertake with little help from advocates of restructuring. With some notable exceptions, the school critics in the first and second “waves” of restructuring, like those of earlier decades, have largely neglected the realities of implementation. However accurate their diagnoses or inviting their prescriptions, they show a remarkable naiveté about how people and institutions change.
Some critics simply expect teachers to carry out their proposals; others seek to compel change by regulatory mandates or market forces—strategies that have failed in the past. Most see innovation largely as a rational redesign of the school's “goals, official roles, commands, and rules” (Deal 1990). They treat reform as a product and, focusing on its structural frame, often overlook its human face. But change must be accomplished by people. The key is to focus on this human face, to see innovation as a generative process (Shahan 1976) and understand its personal and organizational dynamics. To do this, we must broaden our perspective on change and rethink the essentials of leadership.
Realities of Change
Students of organizational behavior recognize that resistance to innovation is deeply rooted in individual psychology and group culture (Schein 1985). Human beings are profoundly ambivalent about change. We exalt it in principle but oppose it in practice, disliking alterations in even our smallest daily routines. Hence, reform inevitably involves a double standard: when we advocate change, we usually mean by other people.
Our ambivalence is sensible. Change raises hope because it offers growth and progress—but it also stirs fear because it challenges competence and power, creates confusion and conflict, and risks the loss of continuity and meaning (Bolman and Deal 1991). When institutions are restructured we worry about adjusting, about losing status and influence, even our job. And when radical change reshapes roles and disrupts the stability of our workplace, it threatens our very sense of purpose. The primary metaphor for change is, as Marris (1986) has eloquently shown, loss: we suffer bereavement not just from the death of loved ones, but from the discrediting of the assumptions by which we live and make sense of our world and our work.
It is precisely to preserve stability that organizations build culture—a set of strongly embedded assumptions, values, and customs that ensure continuity and sustain meaning. This fundamental conservatism in the culture of institutions shapes their response to demands for change. As Sarason (1990) notes, schools, like most organizations, accommodate in ways that require the least modification because “the strength of the status quo—its underlying axioms, its pattern of power relationships, its sense of what seems right, natural, and proper—almost automatically rules out options for change.”
Because resistance is inevitable, the primary task of managing change is not technical but motivational: to build commitment to innovation among those who must implement it. This requires a focus not just on an institution's need for reform, but on its readiness.
Five Dimensions of Change
Implementation depends on five dimensions of change: the content of the reform, the faculty's willingness and capacity for change, the strength of the school as an organization, support and training, and leadership. To examine restructuring in light of the first four dimensions is to see that it places an exceptional burden on the fifth.
Substance. If staff members are to commit themselves to innovation and risk its anxieties and losses, they must find the new goal both desirable and feasible (Beckhard and Harris 1987). Teachers are most likely to accept change when it is espoused by someone they trust, its content linked to values they hold important, and its target focused and practicable.
Far from commending itself to teachers in these ways, restructuring invites their skepticism. Developed mostly by those they mistrust—policymakers and university experts—it emphasizes practices they commonly oppose, such as heterogeneous grouping and mandated curriculums and testing. Moreover, teachers know that in substance most proposals are not new, but resemble previous failed efforts, joining a “carousel of reform” that has left many practitioners cynical (Deal 1990). To many, the restructuring agenda seems both murky and unwelcome due to its lack of focus and the extent to which it expands the school's accountability. Though critics of schools appear to agree on the need for swift, radical redesign, they disagree about the key problems. Their divergent views have produced a rash of rival proposals. In many districts, this translates into a press for what one principal calls “simultaneous, multiple improvement”: We're tackling school-based management, K–12 science revision, cooperative learning, and full-tilt mainstreaming. Each gets one inservice a year, and their other meetings conflict with one another. We don't know what to focus on or how to do it all.
Restructuring also exaggerates the school's responsibility. Where earlier reformers saw educational issues in a broad social context, current advocates focus on the school. Reversing the infamous rising tide of mediocrity depends directly on improving instruction (Elmore and McLaughlin 1988). The accountability assigned to the school is clear, but excessive. Poor scores and high dropout rates reflect not only the shortcomings of the school, but also the decline of family and community and the growing diversity and poverty of students. Teachers react bitterly to the view that, as one puts it, “We cause it all and should cure it all.”
- a shift away from work priorities toward personal concerns, including one's health, mortality, and transitions in one's family;
- a growing focus on material—vs. intrinsic—job rewards;
- loss of the experience of success with consequent damage to morale—mastery lessens both the challenge in the job and recognition for performance; and
- reduced flexibility and openness. Though normal, these characteristics have enormous, largely ignored implications for restructuring. They make teachers more vulnerable to stress and more sensitive to criticism, leaving them less able and less willing to respond to calls to restructure.
Setting. The adoption of innovation also depends on the specific setting in which it occurs, the institutional readiness for change created by the school's organizational and cultural resources. A strong fiscal and political base and a culture that nurtures competence, morale, and initiative help staff adapt to the requirements of change. Unfortunately, teachers can rarely turn to their schools for such sustenance.
As organizations, schools are themselves trapped between rising demands and limited resources. For years they have contended with relentless expansion in the scope and sophistication of their tasks, from curriculum to social services. At the same time, the students they serve have grown more diverse, disadvantaged, and challenging to teach. Even as they struggle to meet these burgeoning responsibilities, many districts have lost the funding that underwrites innovation—shrinking budgets mean larger classes and less staff development. Across the country, few educators can remember when the disparity between expectation and resource was greater.
In such a setting, to foster any degree of forward movement requires a vital institutional culture that maintains continuity and reaffirms for staff members the value of their work. A faculty that shares a common purpose and a strong tradition is buffered against despair and better able to sustain its effort (McLaughlin and Yee 1988). If the culture also supports risk-taking, educators are more willing to innovate. Sadly, in many schools the culture nurtures neither commitment, competence, nor initiative: teachers cannot identify a mission that unites them and drives their work. Though there are many educators whose dedication and skill thrive despite the most difficult circumstances, too often the culture of the school fails to encourage teachers' best.
Support. Perhaps the most obvious requirement for change is technical support—training and materials—for staff. Indeed, some see support as the key to reform: a common pattern is to announce change and accompany it with some inservice training—though teachers, in my experience, rarely praise its quality. Moreover, training and resources, though vital, are never sufficient. Good support nourishes commitment; it doesn't create it.
These issues make teachers' resistance understandable, but do not deny the urgent need to improve schools. On the contrary, they argue that reform must reflect the realities of implementation, especially the need to build teacher commitment. This poses a unique challenge to school leaders and requires a new emphasis in leadership.
Getting There from Here: Authentic Leaders
Over the past 30 years, many leadership theories have been urged on school administrators. Some prescribe systematic rules; others advocate a range of “styles” to be applied situationally. Most emphasize leadership-as-technique, reducing it to lists of skills and competencies. Expertise is surely important, but a preoccupation with leadership as primarily technical is seriously flawed, particularly in pursuit of radical change.
As Badaracco and Ellsworth (1989) observe, few of us can switch styles effectively—we are creatures of habit, experience, and personality. Moreover, all leaders have developed an implicit philosophy of leadership, a set of assumptions about human nature, about organizational behavior, about leadership, and about what produces outstanding results. Though often tacit, these assumptions shape a leader's behavior. They are his or her true colors, readily visible to colleagues and staff. Trying to vary this style or apply technique risks making the leader seem inconsistent and insincere. This is damaging to reform because respect for, and trust in, the leader are crucial to staff willingness to undertake change.
On this key question of motivation, a new group of theorists is emphasizing the primacy of authenticity in leadership. Badaracco and Ellsworth, Sergiovanni (1992), and Schlechty (1992) all stress that leaders must aim not at manipulating subordinates, who do as they're bidden, but at motivating followers, who invest themselves actively. This requires leaders who are skillful, but who above all are credible. To be credible, they must be authentic.
Authentic leaders link what they think, what they seek, and what they do. They join, in Sergiovanni's terms, “the head, heart, and hand” of leadership. They make their assumptions explicit about such questions as: Which basic values guide my work? What motivates teacher performance? How do I define my role as leader? What are my goals for this school? How do my actions demonstrate my values and my goals? Principals whose personal values and aspirations for their schools are consistent, coherent, and reflected in daily behavior are credible and inspire trust—they are leaders worth following into the uncertainties of change.
Five Biases for Action
Clarifying their own assumptions helps leaders develop biases for action—general operating principles, not rigid rules—for shaping change. From the organizational research and from my own work with schools that are restructuring, five biases stand out as fostering innovation: clarity and focus, participation, communication, recognition, and confrontation. Each relates to measures recommended in many leadership theories. In calling them “biases,” I emphasize that they are not techniques but guidelines for action that are rooted in a leader's fundamental convictions.
Clarity and focus. Many school leaders have been taught to enlarge their repertoire of styles, the better to manage multiple constituencies. Flexibility has its uses, but can deprive a school of a sense of unity and direction. More important, it cannot provide the sine qua non of change: a clear, compelling vision. It is widely accepted that effective leaders inspire commitment and invigorate performance by engaging their schools in a commitment to shared purposes.
Authentic leaders are biased toward clarity and focused on their goals. Their vision for change may be broad and deep, but it has a definite center that concentrates effort, attention, and resources—ideally, on one initiative. This does not mean innovation must be narrow. It may be wide-ranging and multifaceted, provided its elements mesh well and have a unifying focus. An excellent example is Sizer's (1984) “essential school,” which is based on nine “common principles” that combine into a comprehensive program for secondary school reform. But the larger any one project, the fewer there must be. Hence, though authentic leaders do not ignore the competing interests of different constituencies, they are explicit about which have priority, and they guard against fragmenting the efforts of their staff.
Participation—not paralysis. The value of collaborative decision making in schools is also widely acknowledged: participation is a primary path to commitment, and implementation improves when teachers help shape reform. Collaboration has been enshrined as an ideal in school governance—so much so that many advocates of reform expect teachers to embrace enthusiastically any opportunity for participation. But when teachers have little history of meaningful involvement and when they struggle with the problems outlined earlier, they engage less readily than leaders anticipate, particularly when the reform undertaken is complex.
Authentic leaders are biased toward participation, but are ready to assert themselves as needed to foster innovation. In Chicago, newer principals committed to site-based management discovered that many teachers, unused to any role in decision making, became anxious when given a voice in schedules, curriculum, and teaming arrangements. When principals slowed the pace of change, framed choices more extensively, and provided greater guidance, teachers began to respond more confidently.
This readiness to intervene persists even when change is well under way. At Parkway South High School in Manchester, Missouri, Principal Craig Larson has found that even with the active support and extensive involvement of a strong core of teachers, restructuring has sometimes meant giving an extra push and renewed permission: Sometimes people hesitate and worry: can we go the next step? Can we really try a major change in our system of assessment or graduation requirements or our schedule? A principal needs to say, “Yes we can.” Even while encouraging collaboration, leaders must be the voice of change.
Communication. It is an axiom of organizational change that the larger the innovation, the greater the need for communication. The anxiety and uncertainty caused by major changes in role and structure guarantee confusion and misunderstanding. They require extra effort to assure schoolwide clarity about ends and means, and to keep leaders aware of staff reactions. Yet schools often plunge into reform without adequate provision for monitoring and feedback.
Authentic leaders are strongly biased toward clear communication. Many are eloquent, but all convey their goals through their very consistency. And they are eager, respectful listeners. Their bias toward communication is reflected in steps that facilitate information sharing and constructive feedback at all levels. At the individual level, this may involve an “open door” policy and an active personal outreach to staff. It may also include the creation of a group to help manage transition—a “kitchen cabinet” or a formally chosen advisory council that meets regularly with the leader to monitor the project, transmit staff views, and plan modifications (Beckhard and Harris 1987). At a collective level, it is helpful to plan periodic faculty meetings to take the pulse of change, respond to concerns, and renew commitment. The emphasis throughout is on clarity and candor as cornerstones of sound planning.
Recognition—in all directions. In most schools, recognition levels are chronically low. Yet veteran teachers, who are encountering life and career issues, need more reward, not less—a need that intensifies when they are asked to undertake change. So, restructuring leaders must be active cheerleaders and coaches. These roles, often devalued by administrators, are repeatedly endorsed in studies of organizational change and, as Mojkowski and Bamberger (1991) observe, are especially apt in schools because they capture “the essence of mentoring at the heart of mastery.”
Authentic leaders know that especially in the early stages of change, when uncertainty is highest, a faculty needs confirmation (public and private) of its effort and its initial successes, even if these seem modest. They are likely to recognize not only teachers' results, but their effort. A key goal of innovation is to enhance experimentation, to encourage teachers to do not just better, but more and different, so leaders reward any willingness to explore the new agenda or pursue new approaches. They also know that morale and innovation are both improved by greater lateral recognition among colleagues, so they look to engage teachers in direct discussion of ways to improve the flow of appreciation in all directions.
Confrontation vs. avoidance. Despite these constructive steps, some staff still resist change. Of these, some try to fulfill the new goal and fail, but think they are succeeding; others refuse to try. Together, they test a leader's authenticity and commitment to innovation. A bias toward confrontation is essential. To ignore resistance is to lose credibility and undercut reform. Yet, to challenge it is uncomfortable and violates a tradition in schools of avoiding conflict. Moreover, there is no proven methodology. Schools lack many of the extrinsic motivators (compensation, promotion, demotion) used elsewhere to address resistance. And most systems of performance appraisal assume higher levels of commitment and self-reflection than staunch resisters demonstrate.
One model that does offer promise illustrates authentic leadership at its best. Schein's (1987) model begins by acknowledging a frank truth: no amount of feedback produces change in the uncommitted. Tenured teachers whose commitment cannot be won are virtually beyond reach. (Even so, if they actively oppose change, a leader must vigorously challenge them to affirm his or her commitment to the innovation and to support those staff who are “on board.”)
For staff members who think—incorrectly—that they are achieving the new goal, Schein calls for “unfreezing”: disconfirming feedback presented in a climate of psychological safety. The task is to arouse appropriate anxiety or guilt by showing a teacher how his or her performance fails to meet a shared aim or violates a shared ideal, but in a way that conveys respect and caring for the teacher as a person and a willingness to assist improvement. Schein rightly calls this “one of the most complex and artful of human endeavors.”
A Bridge to the Future: Reach and Realism
In truth, all the above steps are complex, artful endeavors. Yet each is easier and more effective when its artfulness is rooted in authenticity. Together they provide a crucial ingredient in building teachers' commitment to reform: continuity. On the one hand, authentic leaders demonstrate a clear, consistent commitment to new—and focused—goals: they inspire, push, model, advocate, and confront. At the same time, they show a strong investment in teachers: they acknowledge, encourage, reward, respect, and listen. When teachers see that a leader is truly invested in reform—but also in them—they are far more likely to risk change. They have a bridge to the future.
This bridge must be built on twin expectations: reach and realism. We know that many schools need sweeping change. We know, too, that high standards elevate performance. Yet restructuring could not be a tougher challenge. It demands perspective. To truly accomplish all that we can, we must appreciate what constitutes real achievement. We must measure progress against both the ideal outcome and the actual baseline. Real change is always personal, organizational change always painstaking. Success will require both high strivings and realistic acceptance—and authentic leaders who keep a steady focus on the human face of reform.
