(Vol. 4, No. 1 - Spring 2000)

Leadership:
"Developing Talent From Top to Bottom"

With a strong central office staff in place, LBUSD has turned its attention to sharpening the leadership skills of talented principals and teachers who can support continuous school improvement.

By John Norton

Leadership, so the cliche goes, begins at the top. And there may be no better proof in Long Beach Unified than the story principal Sandy Blazer tells about a 60 Minutes segment she watched one Sunday evening last year.

Blazer had been puzzling over what to do for her "pockets" of low-performing kids at high-scoring Stanford Middle School. "Our average scores are very good, but when you look at the kids from outside our neighborhood, it's a different story."

60 Minutes told of the KIPP Academy in Houston where inner-city kids were excelling. "I watched it and I said, 'that's what we need,'" Blazer says. "So I called the superintendent the next day and said 'I need to go to Houston and see this for myself.' And he said, 'take who you want to take and send me the bill.'" Blazer and her staff made the trip to Houston "and we were one big goose bump for three days. We sat with these inner city kids in an algebra class and it was like being in a GATE class."

When the Stanford staff returned, they immediately began making plans to create the Stanford Academy for Intensive Learning (SAIL), based on the KIPP model. Then, Blazer recalls, "the superintendent sends me a handwritten letter -- remember, he's got 100,000 kids to think about -- and he writes, 'Let me know if anybody gets in your way while you're trying to start this program.'"

Blazer is one of several principals who recount another Carl Cohn story. The superintendent went to Sacramento to visit a program that was producing big gains for the district's weakest readers. When Cohn returned, he began asking his staff why LBUSD wasn't using the same program. It was "highly prescriptive," he was told, and teachers would resist the lock-step teaching method required. "Is what we're doing working?" Cohn asked. Long Beach Unified's reading scores indicated otherwise. "Then let's do it," he said.

The program was mandated last fall, over teacher and principal protests, and the results, admit even those who opposed the program, have been impressive.

"That's what's so great about the Long Beach Unified leadership," Blazer says. "They are very clear about expectations and they ask hard questions about how we spend our money. They're not dictatorial, but they want proof that what we decide to do is working for kids. We do have a lot of top-down here, but we also have a lot of bottom-up, as our SAIL experience shows."


A talented crew

"Leadership" may be as good an explanation as any for why LBUSD is beginning to beat the odds and create a successful urban school system. At a recent meeting sponsored by the Council of Chief State School Officers, CCSSO staff member Cindy Brown expressed the opinion of many when she told the audience that "I've never seen a more impressive district staff than we've seen here in Long Beach."

School board member Karin Polacheck gives most of the credit for the district's deep talent pool to Cohn. "He believes you go out and get the best and brightest. And you also develop the best local talent." Polacheck attributes the district's drawing and holding power "to the stability of our superintendent and board and the fact that we understand that school reform means being in for the long haul." Talented staff, she says, "want to work in place where they know the leadership isn't going to change every couple of years, as it does in many urban systems."

Cohn's support for leadership development doesn't stop at the central office, district insiders say. They describe a gradual shift in the district's "leadership outlook" over the past five years that -- while still evolving -- is helping the district move past the mostly district-owned "school reform" agenda toward a commitment to continuous improvement in every school.


Growing your own

Principal leaders -- "Our core of middle school principals is absolutely stronger than it was five years ago," says Polacheck. "We have more instructional leaders in our schools, and fewer 'managers.'" Polacheck believes a central office decision to hire more middle grades principals from the elementary ranks is part of the explanation. "That's where your strongest instructional people are."

Dorothy Harper, assistant superintendent for middle schools, also points to the district's somewhat belated effort to develop professional development programs for principals "that are focused on instructional leadership and creating standards-based schools." Harper is now developing a program that will send principals to other reforming districts (and bring outside principals to Long Beach) to trade ideas and mull over common problems.

In the past several years, principals' meetings have been transformed from routine administrative sessions to intense marathons focused on the district's reform agenda. "Principal meetings my first year were just dumb stuff," says Blazer. "But each year that goes by, the principals' meetings make me more tired, in a good way." Harper says she's trying "to provide more opportunities for principals to help shape different initiatives, so it's not so much us telling them what to."

While principal leadership in the middle schools is much improved, says one district administrator, "we still have some people who are not well suited for the job. And we still haven't put together a truly comprehensive training program for principals that matches the quality of what we're doing for teachers."

Teacher leadership -- The best-led school districts, experts say, start "at the bottom" by developing a deep pool of teacher leaders who rise up in the organization over time. Opportunities to become teacher leaders have expanded exponentially in LBUSD during the past five years. More teachers are working on district committees and and meeting with administrators to talk about what works in the classroom. The most striking development has been the decision to pull expert teachers out of the classroom to coach colleagues. The district has gone from a single math coach in 1996 to more than thirty middle grades coaches today. They provide leadership on standards, content, literacy and technology.

Convinced that standards-based reforms would never take hold without more leadership at the school level, district leaders began working several years ago on a plan to transform department chairs from "paper shufflers" into teacher developers. A new job description and better pay began to attract teachers interested in leadership. But even the middle schools' most enthusiastic chairs say they can not fill the shoes of a coach who spends half- to all of their time partnering with colleagues to improve practice."

Chairs in each subject have already begun meeting in the summer with district curriculum leaders and are becoming a force for instructional improvement, says Linda Bueno-Alawhal, Harper's assistant. "Even if the chairs spend most of their time in their own classrooms making it really standards-based, they become the role models in how things can happen and how to implement."

Hamilton English department chair Linda Moore is optimistic about the future of department chairs as curriculum leaders. "One of the wonderful things about Long Beach is that they trust us to be leaders in our content areas. And I think we're ready to do that."


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