December 1997
Report to the State Board of Regents

BY STATE EDUCATION COMMISSIONER RICHARD P. MILLS


The cost of high student performance

Our state aid proposal is a statement of how much New York should spend in 1998-99 to help children reach the new Regents standards. The Regents state aid committee and the State Education Department have crafted a powerful concept with three elements. I will recommend a significant increase in state aid along these lines at the December Regents meeting. We must secure these funds.

"We come to school to learn and we will learn!"

Those words are in the school pledge at Martin Luther King, School 9 in Rochester. It was an emotional moment when more than 800 children said those words in unison at the ceremony marking School 9 coming off the state's list of low performing schools. It was, after all, their work that made School 9 soar. The adults who stood by them performed brilliantly during the long years of effort.

We usually talk of leadership in these turnaround situations. But who are the leaders, and what do they do? At School 9, the leaders included parents, teachers, and a reading specialist from Nazareth College, the principal and vice principals, board members, the superintendent and so many others. They are impressive people.

And what they did was wonderful. School 9's corrective action plan is a textbook on how to transform a school. They adopted a school-wide reading series and coached each other on reading instruction. They bought more books for the library, and began a Reading Recovery program. They coordinated reading programs with parents. They started a summer reading institute for teachers and a summer school for students. They made a relentless commitment to professional development. And the list is much longer. What is surprising, in fact, is how many things they did to make good results inevitable.

Real leaders never lose a chance to drive the message home. So, at the end of the celebration, Superintendent Janey presented a gift certificate to enable every child in the school to get a new book to own and read.

Finding and supporting leadership

Years ago, I learned that managers in the Johnson and Johnson Companies participated in an annual leadership review. Together, they considered each management position and identified two or three people who could be promoted to each job when the opportunity arose. And then they reflected on assignments that would prepare those men and women.

Was it worth the trouble? Among Johnson and Johnson companies, when a profit center grew to a certain point, it was launched as a separate business. They never had to worry about where the leaders for the new ventures were to come from.

That's quite a contrast with what we do for school leaders.

We often beat them up. We leave their training to chance, or to teacher preparation institutions. We give them little control but massive responsibility. We distract them from the heart of the matter, which is teaching and learning. We sometimes give them staff that is underprepared. We provide inadequate buildings and supplies. We isolate them from the network of potential helpers in human services and the wider community. We don't really hold them accountable for results: the ones who can't improve poor performing schools remain on the job with those who can. It isn't always this way - but it is too often.

And they are catching on. People tell me that superintendent searches that used to attract fifty candidates now yield ten.

What should we do?

I would look to the men and women who are rescuing the low performing schools. This fall, 21 schools came off the SURR list. Look at the principals, teachers, district and board staff, and State Education Department staff who were part of that. And especially, look at the principals.

Who prepared leaders for this? It was a tough school of necessity. Let's spell out what we are expecting of leaders. The task of school leadership today is the transformation of the schools for high performance.

Vision. Leaders must project a vision of the future. Leaders, says Harvard scholar Howard Gardner, tell stories, and they have to live those stories. Lincoln retold the story of the nation in the Gettysburg Address. And so did Dr. King in a letter from the Birmingham Jail. School leaders must learn to tell and live stories, too. And their stories should be about children and the possibilities that lie within them to learn at much higher levels. The stories have to come from what they have seen of children.

Leaders build coalitions. Rockland County educators joined forces with elected officials, human services, business, parents, and many county officials because that's the only way they could be certain to get all children to school ready to learn and then out of school fully educated.

Leaders build capacity. When the School Boards Association conducted several community training sessions in Roosevelt to encourage participation in school board elections, that created capacity to do the public's business.

Leaders talk about results. The superintendents who got ahead of the report cards last January by telling the story to the press before they were called offered a great example.

Leaders know people. Canadian scholar Michael Fullan writes that, "Education reform is technically simple, but socially complex." He's right. Leaders need to pay attention to the followers.

Leaders are urgent. Management consultant Tom Peters says, "Move fast and slightly prematurely." When the kids can't read, we should study the data, but we don't need to analyze the problem to death.

Can we instill these qualities in enough people to create the leaders we need? Yes. But it will mean expanding our own thinking. This is not about deciding how many credits they are going to need in a traditional administration program. And it's not likely to come from the lists of standards for administrators produced by conventional national panels.

Showing results from our strategic plan

Most organizations write a strategic plan. But we actually carry ours around with us, use it to plan our time, drive quarterly performance reviews, shape our legislative proposals, and create the budget. Early in the new year, we will publish results in relation to that plan. In many places, we will show success, and in some cases, failure and the need for newly focused effort.

Time to implement

There is a time to plan change and a time to make change. We have come to that second stage. In the real world, planning and acting, the preparation and the implementation, go on simultaneously. But there is shift in emphasis now. Implementation comes to the forefront.

Together, we have argued and listened our way through some tough questions: What are the standards? How will we test performance? How will we report it? What core curriculum should students have to prepare for the tests? We are also far along in other big issues: What will teachers need to know and be able to do? How will we pay for high performance? How do we ensure that all children get a good start with a pre-school program?

There are still plenty of details to work out. We mustn't lose heart at the long "punch list" of tasks that emerge only as we start to implement. But as the year ends, take a moment to reflect on how much we have done together. There is a natural tendency to keep adding items to the agenda but let's resist it. Now is the time to complete what we have begun in the schools and encourage the virtues of follow through and continuous improvement.

Preventing fraudulent practice

Each year our Office of the Professions receives more than a thousand complaints alleging fraudulent practice among members of the 38 professions that we license. We take them all very seriously. In addition to what we do directly to protect the public interest, we can also help members of the public protect themselves.

We are now releasing a series of consumer brochures that will help the public learn about the quality of professional service that they have a right to expect. We are distributing the brochures through health care providers, business and libraries, community centers, religious institutions, and schools. There is one more step. In January, the Office of Professions will open an e-mail option for initiating complaints 24 hours a day.

Students with disabilities; improving opportunities and performance

Some months ago, the Regents VESID committee reviewed proposed standards for students with severe disabilities. These standards are linked to the standards for all students. The State Education Department has completed ten public hearings on the alternative standards and the response has been favorable. We will share the results with the Regents in February and seek approval of the standards.

We will establish six regional consortia of districts to improve math and reading achievement of students with disabilities. Requests for proposals are out there now.

The federal Office of Special Education Programs is visiting the State Education Department from December 15 - 19 to help us conform to recent changes in the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. Their visit is timely. New York's special education law must change and we are proposing such change as part of the Regents legislative and budget packages.

Defending the status quo

The Regents and the State Education Department have made extraordinary use of public forums and hearings in the last year. It shows that we take public participation seriously.

Three recent hearings on the Regents Teacher Task Force report left me with several impressions. Speakers who take the time to read the short report carefully and then come with tightly focused criticism and proposals for change - even when they are sharply critical of the draft report - are like a breath of fresh air. Those who don't read the report but demand that the Regents add what is already in the report in the first place puzzle us, yet we listen to them also. But voices for real systems change are few. In general, many teacher association representatives speak against the proposal for outside teacher evaluation. Many college representatives counsel against national accreditation of their institutions. Some speakers argue for continuation of the existing standards board.

As was the case with the hearings on graduation requirements, the time will soon come when we must weigh what we have heard, let go of the hope to please everyone, make the adjustments that seem sensible, and decide.

Becoming competent in another language

Regents have signaled their intention to reconsider the immediate graduation requirement in foreign language, and I welcome that. Regents still want students to gain real competence in language as quickly as feasible. Therefore, I propose an expert panel to report in June to the Regents and me on how best to accomplish this goal. A language expert and a school superintendent will co-chair the panel. The charge will not be to debate the importance of performance in languages at a high level but to prepare a detailed plan to accomplish this result in a timely and feasible manner.


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