The Learning Leader

How to Focus School Improvement for Better Results

Douglas B. Reeves

• Publisher: ASCD
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781416629412
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Liderazgo en educación

"We can't do that in our school district."
"I don't have time to add that to my curriculum."
"We're fighting against impossible odds with these students."

Sound familiar? School improvement can often feel like a losing battle, but it doesn't have to be. In this fully revised and updated second edition of The Learning Leader, Douglas B. Reeves helps leadership teams go beyond excuses to capitalize on their strengths, reduce their weaknesses, and reset their mindset and priorities to achieve unprecedented success.

A critical key is recognizing student achievement as more than just a set of test scores. Reeves asserts that when leaders focus exclusively on results, they fail to measure and understand the importance of their own actions. He offers an alternative—the Leadership for Learning Framework, which helps leaders identify and distinguish among four different types of educators and provide more effective, tailored support to

- "Lucky" educators, who achieve high results but don't understand how their actions influence achievement.
- "Losing" educators, who achieve low results yet keep doing the same thing, expecting different outcomes.
- "Learning" educators, who have not yet achieved the desired results but are working their way toward excellence.
- "Leading" educators, who achieve high results and understand how their actions influence their success.

Reeves stresses that effective leadership is neither a unitary skill nor a solitary activity. The Learning Leader helps leaders reconceptualize their roles in the school improvement process and motivate themselves and their colleagues to keep working to better serve their students.

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Chapter 1

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The Results Paradox

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This chapter is about the limits of "results"—or what passes for results in the worlds of business, education, and national policy. Leaders respond to what is measured, especially when what is measured determines their professional longevity. Unfortunately, as examples from business, medicine, and education show, the maxim "what gets measured gets done" has disastrous effects. We pursue success by clamoring for results, and that pursuit often leads to calamity.

A well-known aphorism, variously attributed to Mark Twain, Herbert Hoover, Will Rogers, Josh Billings, Walter Mondale, and others, goes as follows: "It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble, it's what you know for sure that just ain't so." What are the things in education that we know for sure that "just ain't so"? After decades of test-based accountability, you might think that standardized test scores are one of those things we know for sure are not accurate reflections of teaching, leadership, and learning.

Indeed, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) essentially repealed the test-based regimen of No Child Left Behind, giving states ample latitude to devise new accountability indicators beyond standardized test scores to reflect the quality of student learning. Yet in the 2020s, two decades after the signing of No Child Left Behind in 2001, most jurisdictions tenaciously cling to testing as the best way to measure student success (DuFour, Reeves, & DuFour, 2017). Even the completely discredited method of evaluating teachers based on test scores remains popular in the evidence-free environment of educational policy (Ross, 2019).

Lessons from Gambling

As tax revenues plummet—when schools and other governmental entities face financial shortfalls and legislators are reluctant to raise taxes to pay for vital services such as schools—there's an easy and seductive answer: gambling. After all, it's voluntary—nobody is forced to enter a casino or play the lottery, and it's consistently lucrative for state and local governments. At least until it isn't. Charles Ponzi, for whom his eponymous scheme is named, was arrested in 1920 when authorities finally realized his scheme consisted of taking the fortune of one person to pay illusory profits to previous investors. More than a century later, Ponzi's fundamental insight—that people love free money—prevails. Only now, it is the authorities and not the criminal underworld who embrace his logic.

Forty-eight states (all except Hawaii and Utah) have embraced legalized gambling as a source of revenue, jobs, and economic development (Online United States Casinos, 2020). The appeal is seductive—it's free money to the states, paid voluntarily by people who choose to gamble. No involuntary taxes need to be levied, as people will line up to play the slots, buy lottery tickets, and fork over their hard-earned cash to share with the casino owners, the state, and their lucky fellow players. Add to the mix heartwarming stories about the down-on-her-luck waitress or the hardworking hourly laborer who became rich overnight, and you have the makings of the perfect solution to strained state coffers.

More money for the states, no need for taxes, and everybody wins! Except they don't (Frum, 2014). Actual revenues have consistently fallen short of predicted revenues (Cazentre, 2019; Rosen, 2019; Schmelz, 2020), and no wonder! Massachusetts built a multimillion-dollar casino because too many Bay State residents were taking their gambling dollars to Connecticut. But it doesn't take a Harvard economics professor to explain that when the demand (the amount of available gambling dollars) is constant and the supply (the number of casinos) expands, the amount of dollars available to each casino will decline.

But what about the heartwarming stories of the down-on-her-luck waitress and hard-scrabble laborer who became millionaires? That's no miracle. These stories prevail because low-income people are far more likely to play the lottery, put money in the slots, and play the game, participating in a regressive tax scheme because state authorities are too cowardly to tax the wealthy—choosing instead to take money from the poor.

What does this have to do with education? A great deal, as we shall see. Where popular sayings are concerned, there are many variations on the concept of being driven by results alone: "Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets," "What gets measured gets done," "You inspect what you expect." If the expectation and measured variable is revenue, then the system will achieve it, no matter the cost. In the case of gambling, the evidence is clear that the social costs in terms of crime, addiction, unemployment, mental health, homelessness, and a variety of other consequences far outweigh the gain in revenue (Frum, 2014; Hyde, 2015). But if revenue is all you measure, then revenue is what you will get. After all, results are all that matter.

Educational results have been similarly disrupted. When states started to measure high school graduation rate as an important indicator of success, schools miraculously reported improvements. Students who had failed classes were able to make up classes and, in a flash, attain the credits necessary for high school graduation. I watched one school in which students were able to achieve in three hours the credit that previously required a full semester of work. This is no more credible than the state treasurer who assures the governor and legislature that the coffers will miraculously grow by millions of dollars without raising taxes.

At the elementary school level, similar distortions result from a focus on results. If reading and math are all that matter, then we forget about science and social studies, notwithstanding the research that concludes that reading comprehension is best achieved with background knowledge in the content areas (Willingham, 2018). And what of the nontested grades and subjects? The evidence is overwhelming that early childhood education has a profound and multigenerational impact on learning (Reeves, 2020a; Zanoni & Johnson, 2019), yet when accountability starts only at 3rd grade, prekindergarten and kindergarten are systematically ignored and devalued in many systems.

The lessons of history are clear: The "results paradox" shows us that when we focus only on results without focusing on the causes behind the results, the achievements we celebrate will be illusory. If the only results that matter are stock prices, we reward accounting fraud, as was the case with Enron in the late 20th century. If the only results that matter are test scores, then we reward cheating or, at the very least, a distorted and narrowly focused curriculum.

The pernicious impact of the results paradox goes well beyond mismeasurement and distortion. There is a real effect on students' lives. For example, if the only objective is improved test scores, it's much faster and easier to have underperforming students drop out of school than to craft effective intervention programs for them. It is the same when the illusory rewards of gambling focus only on short-term revenues and ignore the long-term social consequences on the health, housing, employment, and family disruptions that gambling leaves in its wake.

Although the folly of gambling is easy to spot in hindsight, today's leaders in business, education, nonprofit, and government organizations still cling to their illusions (Buckingham & Goodall, 2019), believing that some mystical insight bathed in the language of precision can help them accurately evaluate the performance of their peers. Yet we all intuitively know what a reliable scale looks like. If you were to step on the scale and it read 150 pounds one day, 410 pounds the next day, and 75 pounds the day after that, you would know that the problem was with the scale rather than you. But this kind of thing happens all the time in education: the very same teacher can be rated as highly effective one year, ineffective the next, and then highly effective again the year after that. This wild inaccuracy is replicated around the nation as legislators and policymakers pursue the illusion of accurate evaluation without a scintilla of reliability.

The prevalence of high-stakes testing could lead to improved teaching, leadership, and learning—but it could also lead to cheating. There is no excuse for cheating, but the fact that educators caught in cheating scandals received longer prison sentences than white-collar criminals involved in multibillion-dollar fraud reflects how warped our sense of justice and priorities has become. Let us stipulate that cheating—either in business or in education—is bad. But there is little evidence that prison or public humiliation is the answer. Rather, what we must do is reconsider the meaning of the term results.

The Limits of Results

This book is not a screed against testing, and I certainly don't mean to suggest that focusing on results is inappropriate. Rather, I believe that results can be improved by applying the Leadership for Learning Framework, which posits that multiple factors (teaching, leadership, resources, policy, parents, community support) affect student results. Here's how Mike Schmoker, author of Leading with Focus (2016), once framed the issue for me:

When you are really obsessed with results, you don't just stare at the data and display some colorful charts. You don't just talk about what the kids are doing. You display courage and you are willing to do unpopular things. The only schools that truly get results are the ones that say, "I know that the buffer serves to protect teachers from outside inspection or scrutiny. Nonetheless, I'm going to inspect and scrutinize, and I'll encourage my colleagues to do this as much as they can themselves. I'll ask the uncomfortable questions, make sure certain things are happening, and confront the people who are not doing them. I'll do it as tactfully and painlessly as possible, but if the good things are not happening, there will be a confrontation." We have to shock the system. We are required to expose the system as being ineffectual. If enough people say the emperor has no clothes, we will prove it. But as things are now, we don't even pretend to improve most of our schools, we only talk about it.

Schmoker's pessimism is not without merit. The curricular anarchy of our system allows teachers to take credit for student achievements that are really due to factors like affluence or parental involvement and to blame poor achievement on hormones, television, or video games rather than inadequate instruction. In such a system, leaders elevate the care, comfort, and convenience of adults above the interests of children.

It is necessary that we challenge dominant notions of leadership success. As I've noted in writing about what I call the "results paradox" (Reeves, 2005),

The more myopic the focus on results, the lower the probability that the results will improve. An important corollary is this: A myopic focus on process rather than results yields neither improved results nor improved processes. Only a comprehensive focus … leads an organization to achieve an optimal, multifaceted view of both results and the antecedents of excellence. (pp. 4–5)

The Limits of Intelligence

Dissatisfaction with analytical intelligence as a leadership characteristic is hardly new. Howard Gardner (2006) suggested that the traditional view of intelligence as a unitary element, commonly called g, for "general intelligence," is inadequate. Sternberg and Sternberg (2018) have provided an enormous research base to support the contention that practical intelligence is distinct from analytical intelligence, and the former is vital to survival in any walk of life. Yet even though some school curricula nod to the notion of multiple intelligences, the prevalence of analytical intelligence remains predominant in graduate schools and, in particular, leadership training programs.

The link between emotional intelligence and leadership effectiveness was documented by Daniel Goleman (2019) and Richard Boyatzis and colleagues (Boyatzis, Smith, & Van Oosten, 2019). The latter cite more than three dozen studies on what effective change looks like and how individuals and organizations can promote meaningful change. Despite the incessant talk about different kinds of intelligences, the prevailing practices in leadership training, development, and evaluation are firmly rooted in favor of the concept of general intelligence and are therefore inadequate.

When there is clear and convincing evidence of leadership strategies that are effective in motivating staff and stakeholders, and there is equally clear evidence on the characteristics of effective educational leadership, it is worth asking why leadership myths are so persistent. In the next chapter, we will address how to challenge these pernicious and counterproductive myths.

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Chapter 2

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Challenging Leadership Myths: Hope for the Exhausted Leader

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People believe in myths because they explain the otherwise unexplainable. Evil is not the result of human frailty but the fault of Pandora's Box. The sun crosses the sky every day not due to the motion of Earth but because Helios crosses the sky in his chariot, led by winged horses. Of course, there is often some truth embedded in myths: Narcissus exemplifies the real risks of self-infatuation, for example. Perhaps most relevant to education, however, is the myth of Cassandra, the prophet of doom whose words went tragically unheeded. Cassandra was right—just not popular. And as in that myth, it would do today's educators well to heed the warnings of those who point to serious problems in the field.

Influential leadership thinker Dan Heath's book Upstream (2020) makes the fundamental argument that most leadership decisions are reactive. We get the bad news, then try to solve yesterday's challenges. A far more effective process is to consider the root causes of problems and solve tomorrow's problems—not today's. This has special resonance for educational leaders who have fallen into a cycle of receiving accountability reports and test score data in the fall for tests that were administered the previous spring. They then engage in endless data analysis drills that, however interesting the results, do not help the students who have already moved on to the next grade level. It's a bit like conducting an autopsy and then expressing surprise that the procedure did not improve the health of the patient.

Though the premise may be obvious, the procedure is not. In order to engage in "upstream thinking," it is important not merely to look at effects but causes. Heath's work is a welcome respite in a genre plagued by simplistic solutions and vapid aphorisms.

Too often, educators who face obstacles conclude that "it just shouldn't be this hard." But as Heath reminds us, it is this hard, but it's not impossible. Humans in organizations—families, corporations, schools, governments—are complex, offering opportunities for both heroes and cowards, peak performers and sluggards, loyal soldiers and traitors. We must redefine the challenges of educational leadership in a way that recognizes the complexities of leadership and leaders.

Historical Models

Herodotus warns us that history is written by the victors, and Thucydides cautions us not to confuse oratory with character or wisdom. We have much to learn from the thinkers and leaders of the past; plenty of insight can be found in biographies of great leaders in history and today. For an example of how historical models of leadership can illuminate leadership decision making in the 21st century, Erik Larson's (2020) analysis of Winston Churchill during the blitz, when Nazi aircraft destroyed entire sections of London, reveals both the strengths and flaws of one of history's great leaders.

Assuming the office of Prime Minister at the age of 65, Churchill brought out the very best of Britons—their courage, resolution, sacrifice, and care for one another. He knew these qualities marked not only the soldiers on the front lines but also civilians, including senior citizens and teens, women and men, the able bodied and those injured in the previous world war. He was also a braggart, egomaniac, and spendthrift, but the best histories are not hagiography. We learn from mistakes as well as success, from defects as well as qualities of character.

Analytical Models

I am a quantitative methodologist. According to the creed of my profession, truth lies in numbers. Two and two is four, and the square root of 100 is 10. But when I taught statistics to college students, I was forced to acknowledge that not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be observed can be expressed in quantitative terms. So, for example, whereas a regression coefficient can express the statistical relationship between demographic factors and student achievement, only a narrative analysis will explain why some students and teachers defy the odds and perform at an exceptionally high level despite the presence of factors statistically associated with low achievement. An analytical model would call these extraordinary students and teachers "outliers," but an inclusive leadership model would encourage us to learn from them.

For example, there is a persistent gap between the achievement of Black and Hispanic children and their Caucasian counterparts. The purported causes range from institutional racism (Benson & Fiarman, 2019) to disparities in housing and parental employment opportunities. More rarely studied are the differences in the professional practices of leaders and teachers. Nevertheless, all those factors have strong correlations with low student achievement, and many are related to one another.

In order to isolate bias as a factor, Stanford professor Jennifer Eberhardt (2019) assembled a significant body of evidence, including detailed analysis of implicit bias tests and compelling...