(Vol. 1, No. 1 - Fall 1996)

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IDEAS:
Too many managers, not enough leaders?


By Barnett Berry

"Change, by definition, requires creating a new system, which in turn always demands leadership," John Kotter wrote last year in the Harvard Business Review.

Since superintendent Carl Cohn took over the LBUSD helm, "change" and "middle schools" have often been linked. Cohn and his staff are creating some real momentum for middle school reform, and they deserve credit for their determination.

Few urban school districts are seriously trying to improve teaching and learning by changing school governance, enforcing more rigorous curriculum standards, investing heavily in professional development, or searching for better ways to test students and hold schools accountable.

Are the efforts at change working? It's too early to say for sure. Major organizational change can take seven years or more -- LBUSD has been at it for only two or three. But there's no guarantee that after seven years, education will be better for the kids of Long Beach. New approaches must be supported, refined, and institutionalized. That's where leadership will be critical.

Successful change begins by communicating the urgent need for reform "broadly and dramatically" within an organization, Kotter says. Carl Cohn has done a good job framing the argument for change. But Kotter -- an expert on why change efforts fail -- warns that the message of urgency
is blunted when there are "too many managers, and not enough leaders."

Cohn's area superintendents are strong advocates for change, and he has worked with them to move more reform-minded educators into middle school principalships. But the district must create better opportunities for these potential reform leaders to increase their understanding of what must happen in the classroom for all students to meet academic standards.

The middle school principalship in Long Beach today is a busy but lonely job, with little time to reflect or learn from others who have been there. "I guess principals share at area meetings, but this is not enough," says Linda Moore, who served as the district's middle school reform coordinator before she became principal at Rogers Middle School last year.

"I am looking for someone to shadow me," she says. "We all need someone to help you know whether you are doing what you are saying you are doing. I miss the intellectual conversation I had when I was middle school coordinator."

Her statement is telling. If school principals have little opportunity to wrestle with ideas and possibilities, how likely is it that they will think their way through the many trials and errors on the path to meaningful change?

The need for better leadership development is also evident to knowledgable outsiders. Carl Cohn's leadership is substantive, says John Donaldson, a construction company executive and member of the Long Beach Community Partnership. "However, it seems that his area superintendents and principals spend most of their day putting out fires. We have turned them into managers. They're not leaders."

It's easy to explain away the lack of leadership development and principal brainstorming. In Long Beach, as in any urban school system, principals and area superintendents are deluged with administrative and safety issues that easily fill up each day. But it can be done differently. Some school districts are figuring out how.

The Flint, Michigan schools are radically changing the way they think about administering schools and preparing school leaders. They begin with the belief that principals learn from each other and push each other to reach reform goals.

In Flint's recent reorganization, a bureaucratic layer was removed from the central office. Principals no longer report to division directors (or in Long Beach vernacular, area superintendents). Instead, the district appoints its best principals as "liaison principals" who take on the additional responsibility of working with and leading their peers. Principals work together in "zone teams" -- not as competitors, but as collaborators focused on improving student performance.

Flint's approach is in sync with Donaldson's own prescription for better leadership. "I am convinced," he says, "that if the Long Beach school district is going to do what it says it will do then they must empower work groups to make the tremendous leaps we need to make. We need to reward them and give them leverage and status in the schools."

Next time: The role of teachers in leadership for reform.
Barnett Berry is associate professor of educational leadership at the University of South Carolina and a consultant to the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future.