Four years ago, the Baltimore Orioles were playing major league baseball in a run-down, outdated stadium. Nearby, students at the 60-year-old Canton Middle School were learning in a similarly outdated inner-city facility—void of computers, visionary educators, and any collaborative plan for improvement through school-based management.
Today, the Orioles play in a nationally acclaimed facility, and Canton Middle School students learn in a technologically rich, collaborative learning community. While the Orioles' management was seeking energetic, talented, and committed personnel to forge into a team that would produce a championship, Canton's leaders were also forming a team—made up of energetic, talented, and committed educators, empowered to become visionary program developers and school leaders.
Breaking with Tradition
Canton Middle School, like too many urban schools, had been held hostage for decades—by tradition, central authority, low expectations, and ineffective leadership. At a time when our society was being driven by technological advancements, the school seemed resigned to play a third-class role in America's future.
In 1991, Canton turned its back on tradition and embarked on a path that brought it to the forefront of national urban school reform. Several elements combined to propel the school forward. Among them were new superintendent Walter G. Amprey, who promoted school-based management and independence from traditional bureaucratic control, and the school's selection as a Maryland site for the Carnegie Corporation's Middle Grade School State Policy Initiative. As the new principal, I had distinct ideas about how to help transform Canton, a school with a racially mixed population of 800 students: about 57 percent white, 38 percent African American, and 5 percent Native American or Hispanic.
Two research reports from the Carnegie Corporation, Turning Points (1989) and A Nation Prepared (1986), guided us. Both promote bottom-up change, anchored by empowered teachers who assume leadership responsibilities previously held by either school or central office administrators. While many educational leaders give lip service to the concept of decentralization, most principals and superintendents continue to debate about how much of the decision-making process should be shared—despite substantial research that validates the benefits of teacher empowerment for classroom learning (Hannoway and Cannoy 1993).
The Educational Task Force of the Business Roundtable describes nine essential elements of a successful education system (1992). One of those factors is that schools should reach deeply into the teacher cadre and genuinely involve teachers in selecting school staff, as well as in making decisions about budget, curriculum, instructional practices, discipline, and student and teacher assignments. Many educators perceive such radical reshaping of the culture and climate of schools as a high-risk venture, and yet these same people clearly recognize that to succeed, any reform effort must be grounded in a commitment to nurturing professional development and increasing professional respect.
- a collegial team of empowered teachers linked through a collaborative school-based management design and supported by a comprehensive staff development model;
- a visionary group of educators committed to the expectation that all students can develop their intellectual and social potential;
- a teacher-designed curriculum and instructional model that address the intellectual and academic needs of every student;
- a wide range of programs and services designed to meet the social, physical, and emotional needs of every student;
- a nongraded, schools-within-a-school, interdisciplinary team teaching structure that delivers instruction to learners of all abilities in heterogeneous classes of no more than 30 students; and
- school/business partnerships resulting from an entrepreneurial approach to program development.
Empowering Teachers
Recognizing that the greatest untapped resource in today's schools is teachers, Canton Middle School drew on this powerful well. Before we could begin to redefine roles and shift authority, however, we needed to overcome a serious obstacle: the resistance of many veteran teachers to the establishment of a collaborative school-based decision-making body. Accustomed to the status quo, they didn't want to change roles or assume added responsibilities.
Too often, reform efforts have foundered because of a district's inability to place in its schools the quality of staff needed to effect radical change. It became evident that if we were to achieve our goal of school-based management, these opposed teachers needed to make room for energetic, creative professionals committed to improving conditions at the school. Consequently, we encouraged teachers who were resistant to fast-paced change to consider transferring to more traditional schools.
During the next four years, we tapped a variety of resources—the Peace Corps, Teach for America, and the Military Placement Program, for example—to recruit and hire more than 30 new teachers with talents, skills, and attitudes not usually found through traditional personnel routes. To prepare them for middle grade education, we provided these new staff members with intensive in-house training.
Thus, Canton was able to offset efforts of the old guard to thwart change by developing a cohesive team of leaders committed to making shared decisions and building a better place for children to learn. Most of those staff members remain at Canton to this day.
Supported by the Maryland State Department of Education, the School Leadership Team represents parents, community members, central office personnel, and every team and administrative entity in the school. Through a series of comprehensive assessments, the team established a set of priorities for a teacher-led program plan. Team members placed everything on the table for discussion and modification: organizational structure, curriculum, supplemental programs, operational matters, roles, and the decision-making process.
The team soon gained a reputation as a group of leaders eager to collaborate with others and to consider innovative ideas. One limiting condition guided our efforts: any new resource or program had to ultimately link with and enhance the team's priorities and teacher-led program plan.
Making Decisions at the School Level
School-based management requires role changes at every level. To remain effective, the process must inspire open lines of communication and high levels of trust.
The key role change is the principal's shift from top-down manager to a supporter and facilitator who maintains his or her leadership responsibilities. For many traditionally trained administrators, this delicate balance has proven difficult to sustain. Once achieved, however, shared governance results in increased accountability, responsibility, and production across the entire school staff. The power of school-based management is that it draws on the vast amount of untapped energy, talent, and leadership that exists in every school.
At Canton, a leader-of-leaders model evolved. The two house principals assumed full decision-making authority for their individual schools in our schools-within-a-school design. Interdisciplinary teams of teachers, with the benefit of daily common planning time, shouldered complete responsibility for class membership, daily instructional time allotments, and organizational/program decisions affecting their students. Control of curriculum and program development shifted to an interdisciplinary team of teachers and academic department heads.
Since our move to shared decision making, the School Improvement Team has met faithfully once a week to monitor the school plan, identify and design staff development, make organizational and operational decisions, and analyze student data for further program changes. Unlike principals in many other schools, I am a participating member of the teacher-led team rather than its chair. To make programmatic decisions, we use a consensus method. If all efforts to reach consensus fail, however, we yield to majority rule.
Figure 1. Effects of Canton Middle School's Move to School-Based Management
Transforming an Urban School - table
Percentage of Daily Student Attendance | Number of Students Proposed for Suspension | CTBS Results for Reading (Grade Mean Equivalent) | CTBS Results for Math (Grade Mean Equivalent) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1991–1992 | 85 | 41 | 6.5 | 6.1 |
| 1992–1993 | 86 | 28 | 7.0 | 6.3 |
| 1993–1994 | 87 | 7 | 7.2 | 6.6 |
| 1994–1995 | 87 | 8 | 7.4 | 7.2 |
Helping High-Risk Students
The first priority of Canton's School Improvement Team was to address the needs of high-risk students. With 78 percent of our student population eligible for the federal free lunch program, and daily student attendance averaging only 79 percent, team members realized that we needed to take a holistic approach.
Further, one of the Carnegie Corporation's key goals for project schools is the development of school-based medical and mental health resources. Carnegie bases this position on national research showing a direct correlation between untreated physical or mental illness and poor school performance and high dropout rates. As Hechinger (1993) says, Of 28 million adolescents [in 1992] between the ages of 10 and 18, approximately 7 million are at serious risk of being harmed by health- and even life-threatening activity, as well as school failure.Another 7 million, Hechinger goes on to say, are at moderate risk, and of the remaining 14 million, most, at the very least, lack sufficient problem-solving skills.
As school leaders identified community resources to help bring health services into the school, I concentrated on forging two school/business partnerships. First, I contracted with an area hospital to use third-party billing to provide a full-time psychologist at Canton. Second, working with a nonprofit private health provider, we were able to establish a school-linked health clinic staffed with a full-time school nurse. The local public health department supported both partnerships.
This multi-agency approach to acquiring on-site resources has had an enormous impact on our students. Many who had previously stayed home for minor illnesses now come to school for treatment. Because they usually remain in school after a trip to the nurse, rather than being sent home ill, students don't lose valuable instructional time.
Facilitation of these and other school-based resources, such as obtaining the services of counselors or a social worker, is the responsibility of Canton's Primary Assessment Committee. This standing committee is made up of school-based psychologists and health care staff from nearby medical institutions, as well as our own counselors, psychologist, social worker, and special education staff. Committee members meet once a week to review referrals, assess and recommend treatment, talk with families, assign case loads, and evaluate outcomes.
To help students become independent problem solvers, the Primary Assessment Committee redesigned the school's advisory program. Under the direction of an advisory teacher, no more than 15 students meet weekly to discuss problems in their lives and to learn how to deal with them. Each advisory teacher serves as the primary advocate for the students in his or her charge. Members of the Primary Assessment Committee also designed an advisory curriculum with an emphasis on service learning.
Another resource aimed at Canton's high-risk student population was an entrepreneurial approach to dropout intervention. Working together, the general manager of a downtown Baltimore hotel and I hammered out an experimental program in which the hotel provides jobs one day a week for high-risk students. (The hotel is nestled between Baltimore's renowned Harbor Place development and the major league baseball stadium at Camden Yards.) As a condition for receiving jobs, students sign contracts in which they agree to attend school regularly and to improve their academic performance on the other four days.
Impressed by the project's initial success, the state of Maryland awarded us a grant to hire a project director and to expand the number of job sites. Subsequently, the director collaborated with content-area teachers to develop an interdisciplinary curriculum that links the work experience with the school's core curriculum. Results of the project for student participants include better attendance and fewer incidents of misbehavior.
Developing a School-Based Curriculum
The School Improvement Team's next priority was to develop a school-based curriculum. If teachers are to be held accountable for student achievement, team members reasoned, then they must be the principal authors of essential curriculum documents.
Decades of top-down, rigid control of curriculum design and implementation had conditioned teachers not to challenge the quality of formal curriculum documents or the wisdom of faceless curriculum developers. As principal, I assumed full responsibility for placing the curriculum in the hands of classroom teachers. “Curriculum development,” Elmore (1991) maintains, “is critical to professionalism because it provides a concrete focus for teacher planning and decision making, a context within which to join theory to practice.”
Two critical issues to address when assessing and redesigning a school's curriculum are the fit and the focus (Dufour and Eaker 1992). Using a data analysis performed during the initial assessment phase of the project, teachers began to focus the curriculum by writing clear goals, objectives, and activities that targeted specific learning outcomes. They soon realized that the current curriculum required extensive modification in order to effectively serve Canton's unique population. In particular, students with special needs required an expanded, flexible curriculum, which teachers could individually adapt.
Again, I sought funds to accomplish this task, and, again, Maryland's State Department of Education provided a grant to ensure continuity of our school-based reform efforts.
At this juncture, the School Improvement Team recognized the need for large blocks of staff development time for teachers to learn how to create instructional programs, write new curriculums, and modify the existing curriculum. Another priority was professional development in effective ways to communicate with and teach students. The team decided to commit our newly acquired funds to summer stipends for teachers to accomplish these professional goals.
To encourage their talent and creativity, I requested an easing of the mandated district curriculum. It is important to note that local and state learning outcomes were the framework under which all development occurred. In addition to a new focused curriculum, the summer activities also produced an unanticipated bonus: a cohesive team of educators who established self-imposed accountability as a natural trade-off for their newfound responsibility.
After two years of summer program planning and curriculum redesign, we believe that quality time committed to school-based program development is necessary for substantial change. As the NEA (1994) recommends: Collaborative time among teachers and other school personnel is essential in sustaining reflectiveness and collective self-examination so necessary for effective functioning, self-renewal, and reform.
Creating Inclusive Classrooms
With the new curriculum in hand, the Canton staff used Wheelock's (1993) research on untracking middle schools to establish nongraded, inclusive classrooms. This heterogeneous grouping ensures all students equal access to the new curriculum and an opportunity to experience the full range of instructional strategies and techniques developed to support its use.
We view our reorganization as a way to raise staff and student expectations for learning. Canton's dedicated special educators became the essential resource for delivering instruction within the inclusion framework. Two special educators joined each academic team to collaboratively plan and teach lessons, modify curriculum, and support students with special needs. Common team planning time, a daily part of flexible block scheduling, facilitated this interaction between content-area and special education team members. Students responded to the untracked design with increased attendance, decreased incidents of disruptive behavior, improved achievement, and greater satisfaction with the total school program.
Using the Tools of Technology
With the curriculum undergoing renewal, the School Improvement Team requested funding for technology. We were able to obtain grants from and forge partnerships with private foundations, a major university, the State Department of Education, and several technology vendors.
Three years ago, we had only 15 seldom-used, outdated computers scattered around the building. Today, Canton Middle School has a sophisticated network of backboned file servers, CD-ROM players, and more than 200 third-generation IBM/Tandy/Macintosh computer work stations. This network links every classroom and office and provides every student access several times daily. In addition to the latest in integrated instructional software, the network uses several student databases for managing attendance, discipline referrals, achievement data, and a variety of other purposes.
Every class and office is also linked by individual telephone to voice mail technology and the media center's closed-circuit television system. Telecommunication software interacts with computer software to maximize technology usage. Library media technology, using local area network software, affords each classroom the luxury of accessing card catalog information and CD-ROM research information. Communication between parents and the school has also improved. Parents can call teachers right at their desks in classrooms or access a 24-hour homework line.
Investing in the Future
Restructuring, school improvement, reform—these words mean different things to different people. No matter how one chooses to define the process, change must take root in our schools, for it is only those who dwell in the school on a daily basis who can effect long-lasting reform.
Canton's reform effort is an investment that pays dividends to teachers and the children they serve. The true value of our experience is that any urban school can replicate it, as long as visionary leaders are empowered to use successful organizational strategies. Just as the catalyst for restructuring in the private sector is a strong leader who handpicks a leadership team, Canton Middle School has demonstrated that such a leadership team can also provide the vital spark that lights the flame of lasting school-based reform.
