A Principal Looks Back: Standards Matter

After 15 years as the principal of Boston's Mather School, the nation's oldest public elementary school, Kim Marshall, Ed.M.'81, resigned last year and took an unflinching look at his accomplishments and his failings. With some 600 inner-city students—many of whom did not speak English at home—and teachers who did not initially share his goals, his drive, or his sense of hope, Marshall faced the challenges of every urban principal. But nothing, he insists, contributed more to the surge in student performance that the Mather achieved in the late 1990s than rigorous state standards and the high-stakes Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) test. Marshall looks back now and describes his personal and professional journey. [caption id="attachment_8928" align="alignleft" width="185" caption="Former principal Kim Marshall, Ed.M.'81 (© 2003 Bill O'Connell)"] [/caption] I became principal of Boston's Mather School after three experiences that neatly framed some of the challenges of school leadership. Fresh out of college in 1969, I taught sixth graders in a Boston middle school and operated pretty much as a lone wolf, writing my own curriculum. Afterward, in 1980, I spent a year at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, steeping myself in research on what seemed to make some urban schools work, and then was hired as the chief architect of a new citywide curriculum. I worked under the leadership of Boston's Superintendent of Schools Robert Spillane, a forceful advocate of higher student achievement and more accountable schools. This was right around the time "A Nation at Risk" came out, and I found myself in the thick of Boston's response to the "rising tide of mediocrity." When I finally became a principal in 1987, I thought I could make a difference for teachers and kids. Was I right? First, the good news. In my 15-year tenure at the Mather School, students made significant gains. Our test scores went from rock bottom in citywide standings to about two-thirds of the way up the pack. A recent in-depth review gave us a solid B+ based on an intensive inspection of the school and standardized test scores. And in 1999, the Mather was recognized for having the biggest gains in the MCAS (the Massachusetts statewide tests) of any large elementary school in the state. I am proud of these gains and of the dramatic improvements in staff skills and training, student climate, philanthropic support, and the physical plant. But now some sobering news. The gains we made came in agonizingly slow increments, and were accompanied by many false starts, detours, and regressions. Graphs of our students' test scores did not show the clean, linear progress that I had expected. Far too many of our students score in the bottom category on standardized tests, too few are Proficient and Advanced, and our student suspension rate is too high. Looking back, I can see that my colleagues and I were struggling to counteract powerful tendencies that work against high student achievement in urban schools: If teachers work in isolation, if there isn't effective teamwork, if the curriculum is undefined and weakly aligned with tests, if there are low expectations, if a negative culture prevails, if the principal is constantly distracted by nonacademic matters, if the school does not measure and analyze student outcomes, and if the staff lacks a coherent overall improvement plan—then students fall further and further behind, and the achievement gap becomes a chasm. City schools need strong leadership to push back against these forces, and the principal is ideally situated to provide that leadership. But it is a tremendous challenge, and principals need help from the outside. Let me share a few stories in the Mather's struggle before and after the arrival of external standards and high-stakes testing. No Standards: No Unified Front In my first months as principal, I was struck by how cut off Mather teachers were from each other and from a sense of schoolwide purpose. I understood teachers' urge to close their classroom doors and do their own thing; I had done the same thing when I was a teacher. But my experience in the central office convinced me that if Mather teachers worked in isolation, there would be pockets of excellence but schoolwide performance would continue to be abysmal. So I struggled to get the faculty working as a team. I circulated a daily newsletter (dubbed the "Mather Memo") and tried to focus staff meetings on curriculum and effective teaching strategies. I encouraged the staff to share their successes, publicly praised good teaching, and successfully advocated for a record-breaking number of citywide Golden Apple awards for Mather teachers. I recruited a corporate partner whose generosity made it possible, among other things, to have occasional staff luncheons and an annual Christmas party. But morale never seemed to get out of the sub-basement. Staff meetings gravitated to student discipline problems, and as a young principal who was seen as being too "nice" to students, I was often on the defensive. We spent very little time talking about teaching and learning, and did not develop a sense of schoolwide teamwork. The result? Teachers continued to work as private artisans, sometimes masterfully, sometimes with painful mediocrity—and the overall results continued to be very disappointing.

“Turning around failing schools is extraordinarily difficult. My 15-year struggle to make one school effective brought me face-to-face with my own personal and professional limitations, and made me a student of school effectiveness...I have learned that the starting point has to be an almost religious belief that it can be done.”

During my early years as principal, I was also struck by the fact that most teachers resisted using a common set of grade-level standards. In the central office, I had been involved in creating Boston's citywide curriculum goals, and I was stunned by the degree to which they were simply ignored. While teachers in one grade emphasized multiculturalism, teachers in the next grade judged students on their knowledge of traditional historical facts. While one team focused on grammar and spelling, another cared deeply about style and voice. While one encouraged students to use calculators, the next wanted students to be proficient at long multiplication and division. These ragged "handoffs" were a frequent source of unhappiness. But teachers almost never shared their feelings with the offending colleagues in the grade just below theirs. That would have risked scary confrontations on deep pedagogical disagreements, which teachers were sure would undermine staff morale. The absence of honest discussion—culminating in an agreed-upon grade-by-grade curriculum—doomed the Mather to a deeper morale problem stemming from suppressed anger and lousy test scores. I saw curriculum anarchy as a major leadership challenge, and I tried again and again to get teachers to buy into a coherent K-5 sequence. I was intensely frustrated that I could not find a way to change it. "Teach, Test, and Hope for the Best" As I wrestled with the curriculum issue, I saw that tests were a vital part of getting teachers on the same page. But virtually all of the standardized tests that students took were poorly aligned with the classroom curriculum (whatever that was) and were not well respected by most teachers. The only tests that got a modicum of respect were the Metropolitan Achievement Tests, which were given in reading and math at every grade level except kindergarten, with school-by-school results published in the Boston newspapers. Sensing that teachers cared about the Metropolitan, I thought that it might be a lever for getting them on the same curriculum page and making predictable handoffs of skills and knowledge to the next grade. I did a careful analysis of the Metropolitan and told teachers at each grade level what the test covered in reading and math. Did teachers use my pages and pages of goals? They did not. In addition, I was pushing the ethical envelope by briefing them on the standards that were covered by a supposedly secret test. If Mather scores had skyrocketed, there might have been a major scandal. But I had stumbled onto an important insight. We needed to find both a clear grade-by-grade curriculum and aligned tests—at the same time. I could not persuade teachers to buy into one without the other, and without both I could not coax them out of the isolation of their classrooms. I became increasingly convinced that the most important reason for our disappointing scores was that we were spending too little time actually looking at what students were learning. The teachers' contract allowed me to supervise classroom teaching and inspect lesson plans, but woe betide a principal who tries to evaluate a teacher based on student learning outcomes. Resistance to evaluating teachers on results is well-founded at one level: Unsophisticated administrators might use unsuitable measures like norm-referenced tests or unfairly evaluate teachers for failing to reach grade-level standards with students who were poorly taught the year before or who had significant learning deficits. But not looking at the results of teaching during the school year is part of a broader American tendency to "teach, test, and hope for the best." The headlong rush through the curriculum (whatever that might be) is rarely interrupted by a thoughtful look at how students are doing and what needs to be fixed right now or changed next year. Teachers rarely pause at the end of a unit to look at which materials produce the best gains, which ones are less successful, and which students need more help. With one notable exception, I failed to get teachers to slow down, relax about the accountability bugaboo, and talk about best practices in light of the work students actually produced. The Standards-Based Breakthrough In 1996, the Mather finally made a successful foray into the world of standards-based thinking. Spurred on by a summer workshop, we wrote scoring guides for student writing that described the criteria for grading Mechanics/Usage, Content/Organization, and Style/Voice. For the first time, we could guarantee that the same piece of student writing would get the same scores no matter who graded it. Encouraged by our success, we began to give students "cold prompt" writing assignments (on topics they had never seen before, with no help from teachers) in September, November, March, and June. Teachers scored the papers together and then discussed the results. This process was a breakthrough. We had found a way to score student writing objectively; we were sharing the criteria with students and parents in advance (no surprises, no excuses); we were giving "dipstick" assessments at several points each year; teachers at each grade were working as a team to score students' work; and teachers were analyzing students' work, giving students feedback, and fine-tuning their teaching. We began to see significant improvements in our students' writing. And in response, our own standards for the kids rose. Two years later, in 1998, the MCAS, Massachusetts's high-stakes test, arrived—an 800-pound gorilla knocking on our door. After that, the turnaround happened with amazing speed. As our fourth graders took the first round of MCAS tests, one of our most effective teachers burst into tears at a staff meeting and proclaimed, "No more Lone Ranger!" She pleaded with her colleagues in kindergarten, first grade, second grade, and third grade to prepare students with the necessary building blocks so that she would never again have to watch her students being humiliated by a test for which they were so poorly prepared. Some of our colleagues joined the handwringing across Massachusetts about making students the victims of a forced march to high standards. But in a subsequent meeting, the staff actually took portions of the MCAS and came to these conclusions: Although the test is hard, it really does measure the kinds of skills and knowledge students need to be successful in the 21st century; because the MCAS is a curriculum-referenced test whose items are released every year, it is possible to align the curriculum and study for the test; and finally, our students have a long way to go, but most can reach proficiency if the whole school teaches effectively over time. The Principal's Turn at Learning Motivated by this last realization, we "teased back" the MCAS's assessment expectations to the lower grades, finally clarifying what students at each grade level had to know and be able to do. Then we set a schoolwide achievement target four years into the future, and then spelled out SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timebound) for each grade level to act as stepping-stones toward the long-range target. Each year afterward, we updated the SMART goals with higher and higher expectations. The grade-by-grade MCAS-aligned targets put an end to curriculum anarchy and kicked off the process of locating or writing during-the-year assessments aligned with those goals. This in turn focused the curriculum and produced data that teams could sink their teeth into, giving much more substance to their meetings. As teachers gave up some "academic freedom," their isolation from each other was greatly reduced, and grade-level teams had a common purpose. My work as an administrator was much more focused on student learning results. And finally, we began to focus all our energy on continuously improving each of the components of a "power cycle": clear unit goals, pretests, effective teaching, formative assessments, data analysis, feedback to students and parents, and a safety net for students who fall through the cracks. Turning around failing schools is extraordinarily difficult. My 15-year struggle to make one school effective has brought me face-to-face with my own personal and professional limitations, and has made me a student of school effectiveness and the key factors that get people and institutions to work more successfully. I have learned that the starting point has to be an almost religious belief that it can be done. A second necessity is an outline of what an effective school looks like, and the correlates of effective urban schools (which have held up remarkably well over the years) have given me a vision of the pieces that need to be in place for all children to learn at high levels. A third key piece is real expertise on turning around failing schools. If I could go back to 1987 and start over again as principal with current knowledge about school improvement, progress would be made much more rapidly. But student achievement would still not have reached its full potential without a fourth tool: strong external standards linked to high-stakes curriculum tests. I believe that the arrival of standards and tests in the late 1990s provided the traction needed for a principal to push back the powerful gap-widening forces that operate within all schools. Building on the accumulated lessons of researchers and practitioners, today's principals are in a much better position to be successful. If they believe passionately that their students can achieve proficiency, if they have a clear vision of what makes a school effective, if they learn the lessons of school change, and if they take advantage of external assessments, principals should be able to lead a school staff to bring a first-rate education to every child.