Such leaders can make a difference if if they have permission to organize. When they don’t one gets less than a desirable outcome, e.g., Virginia’s ‘turnaround’ specialist program. Where there is some light is New Orleans and D.C. but they do it by starting from scratch and with permission. While it is very early, these districts are trying to create the conditions for success, i.e., Wallace Foundation studies call for creating the conditions for success as a go-no-go requirement. In all of my turnaround school and district ventures I have had (demanded) permission, created the conditions for success, and used a portfolio of mentor schools paired with high priority schools in a parallel theory of change (Kanter, 1983) to scale success across the district. I’ve done this successfully with communities and schools over several decades. This is not easy nor quick…..the alternative is starting from scratch and I am not sure wholesale change like that is doable across the nation. And in New Orleans and D.C. where wholesale change is at work, they have a start but in my humble opinion not enough resources (partners, money and human capital) to sustain it or scale it across their communities or states/districts. If Louisiana were to use New Orleans as a renorming unit in a parallel theory of change cycling principals, school and district leadeship teams in and out like a top gun school, they may be the first state to scale and sustain a powerful turnaround engine. Maybe……..if any one has the stomach and vision it is Paul Pastorek the Louisiana superintendent.

And the quote is somewhere in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, but I don’t remember the page number, I’m afraid.

Oh, and do you have a Pirsig reference for that quote?

SLA is, still, a, urban school. We have over 45% of our students on free / reduced lunch, and our kids face many of the same hardships that kids at Douglass face. Many of the “things we cannot blog about” journal entries on my computer are about the lives our kids lead, and how frustrated we feel at where our ability to protect them ends.

All that being said, you ask the right question. I don’t know how I would have done at Douglass. Certainly, if the only thing I was asked to do was raise test scores, I wouldn’t be the right leader for that school. But I look at the success of my friends at places like Bronx Laboratory (granted, another start up) in NYC, and I do believe that we can build progressive schools in our cities that aren’t pure magnets. In fact, I offered to start a school in Philly that wasn’t a magnet because I didn’t want our ideas to be easily dismissed with the “Oh, they’re just a magnet school, it doesn’t work with OUR kids…” comment. (And, sadly, I hear that comment far too much.) But the idea of SLA was magnet-driven, and the opportunity to partner with a institution like The Franklin with its shared focus on inquiry was too good to pass up. So we made ourselves into a “weird magnet,” and I can tell you we’ve turned down kids with perfect Terra Novas to accept kids with low scores because the interview process really matters.

In the end, though, one of the things I say when I go out and talk is “If you put a good person in a bad system, the system will usually win.” (I stole it from Pirsig.) I believe we are squandering the energy and intelligence of thousands of educators in this country — and especially in our cities — because our systems are badly broken. We need to question what schools should look like, we need to question the way we need to teach today, and we need to question what our goals are so that more people have the opportunity to learn and lead in schools that matter.

Thanks for the post, Jon.