"There are enough progressive thinkers in this room to completely reinvent education," Phil Schlechty told ASCD members in his lively General Session presentation, "but the important thing is to develop structures that sustain those changes."
President and CEO of the Center for Leadership and School Reform in Louisville, Ky., Schlechty recalled that he had experienced school reform throughout his entire career. "The only thing that's different now is the rate at which we're encountering it," he said. But he acknowledged that schools are much better than they used to be.
On the topic of creating change-adept schools, Schlechty stated that schools are actually more prone than resistant to change—but they are not adept at sustaining it. "When you're good at initiating changes but not good at supporting them, it breeds cynicism," he observed. With gentle humor, Schlechty compared school reform to NASA's first missile launch. He recalled that the missile promptly fell over and exploded after takeoff. "Had NASA been like schools," joked Schlechty, "they'd have said, ‘Well, missiles don't work. Let's try slingshots.'"
Encouraging his audience to use failure as a chance to learn, Schlechty proposed a framework for analyzing the quality of school improvements and changes. The framework has three elements:
- a future orientation
- sustained direction and focus
- the capacity to act strategically
To build a future orientation, school leaders must develop a shared understanding of the need for change along with a shared vision, both of which require ownership, Schlechty said. "Involve your people in gathering data first," he advised, "such as on literacy and dropouts." Then, he said, develop a descriptive vision statement. "Most vision statements are platitudes," he observed. "They ought to be pictorial—how you see things in the future. It was NASA's vision of man as an interplanetary space traveler that got man on the moon." Schlechty disparaged vague vision statements such as "Every child can learn," arguing that such statements don't say what a child can learn, or how, or when.
"Rather than command students' compliance and attendance, we must earn their commitment," he said, noting that "our real competition is not home schools, private schools, or charter schools, but the people who earn kids' attention though high-tech media." Schlechty predicted that by the year 2020, online curriculum options could take 45 to 50 percent of students away from schools. "Still," he said, "the most important technology is the ability to read," assuring his audience that good teachers will always be in demand.
Sustained direction and focus come from concentrating on results rather than on programs, Schlechty continued. "We need a developmental focus on students and the quality of instruction," he said, but warned of the dangers of test score improvement through "bribery"—external motivations—that lead only to short-term gains. "The important thing is to develop structures for continuity: participatory leadership and results-oriented decision making."
Strategic capacities, said Schlechty, arise from fostering innovation and flexibility, collaboration within and across school districts, professional development, and the use of technology. But none of these efforts, he warned, will result in a change-adept school unless school leaders develop systems that support changes over time. Reforms unsupported by systems fade away. "So your biggest decision," stated Schlechty, "is whether you are going to work on improving little bits within the system or on systemic reform. Lasting reform goes hand in hand with support systems."