Culture Keepers: Leaders Creating a Healthy School Culture

[00:01] SPEAKER_00:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, bringing you the best in professional practice.

[00:06] Announcer:

Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center and Champion of High Performance Instructional Leadership, Justin Bader. Welcome everyone to Principal Center Radio.

[00:15] SPEAKER_01:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to be joined today by Dr. Anthony Muhammad. Dr. Muhammad is an internationally known education consultant, a former middle and high school principal, and is the author of numerous books, including Transforming School Culture, How to Overcome Staff Division. And we're here today to talk about his recent book, Overcoming the Achievement Gap Trap, Liberating Mindsets to Effect Change.

[00:37] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[00:40] SPEAKER_01:

Dr. Muhammad, welcome to Principal Center Radio.

[00:42] SPEAKER_02:

Thank you, Justin. I appreciate you extending the invitation, and I'm looking forward to engaging with you today.

[00:47] SPEAKER_01:

Well, likewise. I think it's such a critical topic to understand not only the achievement gap itself and how we talk about it, but how we think about it. So I wonder if you could start by telling us a little bit about what you saw in the mindsets of educators that prompted you to write this book, because I know so much of what we do starts with what we think and how we think. What were you seeing out there in the field?

[01:09] SPEAKER_02:

The achievement gap issue, particularly as it pertains to African American students, Latino students, and students of poverty from all backgrounds and ethnicities and cultures. It had kind of fallen to the backdrop of the American consciousness, and what was disturbing was that it had become normal. People would automatically associate African American students, Latino students, and students of poverty there would be assumptions that their level of achievement will be behind the national norm. So whenever something becomes normal or acceptable, then the vigor to actually address it starts to become less and less intense because it seems like it's a normal part of the landscape. So with the implementation of Common Core Standards, the move out of No Child Left Behind, which was a big political debate, 2014, 15, 16, the issue was getting lost.

[02:01]

And as soon as somebody accepts something as normal, then their focus on it starts to wane. So this book was a rallying cry for people to examine their thinking because there's been a lot of investment in the research on closing achievement gaps. Harvard Achievement Gap Initiative, there's been others around the world. John Hattie out of New Zealand did extensive work on the factors that affect student learning positively. From the technical or the pedagogical side, there's been a lot of work. We know how to close the gap.

[02:32]

But having a tool without the desire to use it makes that tool useless. So this book was about waking the country and the world up that school is about maximizing human potential. And the minute we start to marginalize certain groups of people because of personal characteristics, then we start to become the society that we say we're not or that we don't aspire to be. But yet, in fact, we've institutionalized discriminatory behavior and it's become a national construct. And that was my concern. And in the book, I try to lay out some of the issues around the relationship between race and real estate values, school accountability ratings.

[03:14]

One of the worst components of the No Child Left Behind law was the school accountability rating. because what it did was labeled some schools as progressive and others as as a failure and i think that diane ravitch does a great job in her book reign of error looking at the hidden hand behind no child left behind and the economic and political stimulation the hand behind that and it's really made the issue worse rather than better so this is a national cry for people to wake up

[03:43] SPEAKER_01:

So Dr. Muhammad, I think we tend to see the factors that influence student achievement broadly. We see all these different factors, and we know that one of the biggest factors is poverty. And we look at the lives of our students, and we look at the difference between our students, and we can't tell ourselves as educators that poverty doesn't matter. It's something that's undeniable to us. And yet all too often, I think we also tell ourselves, well, the solution to eliminating the achievement gap is to eliminate poverty.

[04:12]

And that's just something we have to do on a national level. And I wonder what you see as the path forward in the meantime, while we're still solving the poverty problem. What are some of the ways that we can take responsibility as educators for doing what we can do for putting the pieces in place that we actually can? can take responsibility for in school, even as on a national level, we still have a lot of work to do in terms of eliminating poverty.

[04:37] SPEAKER_02:

I like to address the issue of poverty in two ways. Obviously, the lack of resources leads to issues like lack of access to proper nutrition. a lack of access to good health care, a lack of access to preschool. But yet, when we look at the state of California, who did an assessment about 10 years ago, they found that poor white students were scoring better on the California Achievement Test than middle class African Americans and Latinos. So I think part of our national debate about poverty is a way to cover a lot of the more sinister bias that we have that goes back to a history that's flooded with bias. I highlight in the book how ironic that as the founding fathers were developing the Declaration of Independence and developing the Constitution with a focus on liberty and justice, how a large percentage of them owned slaves.

[05:36]

So there's always been this national hypocrisy that we aspire for a certain principle, but yet our reality differs. So the poverty debate is real. But if we look at just some of the data we've already collected, just solving the poverty dilemma doesn't solve racial bias. It doesn't solve gender bias. It doesn't solve a bias against students with disabilities. There are so many different constructs at work.

[06:05]

And if we look at America's greatest period of growth, it was when European immigrants came over to the United States and the public schools started to become a integral part of the American landscape. These immigrants were poor, and they saw that education was the key to social mobility. A lot of the African Americans who started historically Black colleges in the South were poor. So poverty, though it presents a challenge, schooling and education has always been looked at historically by people who are marginalized as the pathway to social mobility. So much of the middle class that we have in this country came from people who are impoverished, who saw education as the means to social mobility. So to look at in 2016 and say our biggest problem is poverty, yes, it is a problem.

[06:55]

But education has always been the key to solving poverty, not an excuse for kids not to learn. So my grandmother came up to Michigan from Louisiana, poor. All of her children graduated from high school. Many of them graduated from college. We have a history of that. I think oftentimes the poverty debate blinds us to the other social factors that have created this distribution of the social hierarchy that creates the achievement gap.

[07:23]

And of course, we need to solve poverty. In no way do I want to marginalize that. I mean, being poor is not a fun thing to experience. But poverty alone, without addressing the constructs and the mindsets, becomes counterproductive. I think we fool ourselves when we think it's just poverty because the data wouldn't validate that.

[07:40] SPEAKER_01:

And things that are maybe correlated with certain levels of achievement are not a destiny. We can all think of many examples of people who, despite poverty, despite obstacles, had people in their lives, in their education experience, that helped them succeed. So talk to me about some of the mindsets that you have found among educators that are helpful, that get people doing the right work, that get people thinking about their students in the right ways. And let's contrast those with some of the mindsets that you see kind of trapping people. I mean, back to the title of your book, The Achievement Gap Trap, where do we get stuck? And what are the mindsets that can get us out of that?

[08:17] SPEAKER_02:

There are two counterproductive mindsets that I identify in the book. I actually present three different case studies of schools in the book who have studied, who have exemplified this, what I call the liberation mindset. Because school, especially for those who are marginalized, it works best when it's a liberating experience. And in fact, in the American Constitution, education is not even mentioned as liberation. A right that's not even mentioned in the Constitution because public schooling wasn't a factor. But the Supreme Court in the 1950s, when public schooling became compulsory, identified that education is a liberty right under the Declaration of Independence.

[08:54]

So even the Supreme Court viewed that you're going to have a hard time being liberated in American society without access to an appropriate education. Though at the beginning of the democracy, education was the privilege of the rich. Now it's a necessary component. So the two counterproductive mindsets are called the victim mindset and the superiority mindset. And I find these two mindsets floating around in schools that are not progressive and they can't seem to get out of their own way. The superiority mindset is rooted in a mindset that my construct or my standard is the standard that all others should be judged by.

[09:35]

So an interesting fact that I brought out in the book, if we look at national achievement, Asian students far outperform all other racial groups in the United States. So a question I pose and I keep getting crickets, how come we're not having a national debate about the white Asian achievement gap? Because our society has been based on a European construct and identify a concept that economists call the gold standard. The gold standard is to live in a community that's 80 percent white and above and 80 percent middle class and above. That's considered the gold standard. It's what real estate agents approach new couples about.

[10:17]

It is the construct that we consider the model of Americanism. is to move to a racially exclusive area, within socioeconomic exclusive clientele, and to put a racial and an economic fence around that community. And when you think about communities like that, people automatically draw conclusions that there's gonna be high achievement, involve parents. So if we've been socialized that way, any community that doesn't fit that construct, we start to draw different conclusions about those communities. so-called inner city schools, schools that may be in a rural community. We start to draw different conclusions, not because those human beings aren't capable, it's because we've been trained to believe that one brand is superior to the rest.

[11:08]

And that brand has been taught to us as white and middle class. So there are educators who work in inner city Detroit, inner city Cincinnati, inner city Houston, who walk in with a fixed mindset about their idea of the potential of those students. And they're concerned about closing gaps rather than maximizing the potential of the students. If they carry that mindset into the gold standard community, there would be all types of pushback and communication that that's not an accepted mindset in this community. We expect a majority of our students to take AP classes. We expect high graduation rates.

[11:49]

So imagine a poor educator walking into a world that he or she didn't create. They have a very fixed idea of what the profile of success looks like. And then when they interact with students in a community that doesn't fit that profile, it automatically drops their level of expectations. Well, the flip side of that is what I call the victim mindset. It's when the communities who don't fit that construct accept their place in the hierarchy. I did a lot of a background study on this Justin I tried to find a movement in the United States or anywhere around the world where charity or outside philanthropist or outside entity their charity led to the evolution of a culture or society I couldn't find it every movement starts organically and

[12:45]

And it builds from a need from the people to see themselves do better. So the same way the superiority mindset meets a need, the victim mindset does as well. If I can paint myself as a victim, look at the condition of my school, look at the students that come to me, look at their backgrounds, look at the lack of literacy and a lack of numeracy skills that they walk in and do it with. automatically lowering the bar and expectation. And if the bar is low, then you never have to improve because you get to fit comfortably within that box that nobody expects anything. And then if you live in a culture of protest, where the only time people get active is if they feel somebody else is unfair, but yet there's no advocacy,

[13:36]

to make your community and your schools better, those two unhealthy mindsets can coexist together. I can maintain my superiority construct. You're comfortable being a victim, because when you're a victim, there's no expectation. Very little is expected of you. You don't have to fight. You don't have to advocate.

[13:54]

You don't have to push back and stir the pot. If you look at every progressive society, there was a fight. And the fight came from people who were dissatisfied. As long as schools who are at the bottom end of the achievement gap are satisfied, And the fight is about funding or about a test rather than we're going to advocate for what's best for our children. And you're going to see us and we're going to be an active part of making sure that we do this and not just demanding it of government and of others, but demanding it of themselves. There are some statistics that I quote in a book about a study called the Home Index.

[14:35]

about African-American Latino parents and the ratio of cognitive stimulation in the home compared to white and Asian. That's something that those communities can do something about right now. The ratio of big screen TVs and Xboxes to books. That's a choice. It's not a lack of resources. It's a choice of how you spend those resources.

[14:59]

Trips to the amusement park as opposed to trips to the museum. See, these are the conversations that good principals who are liberated should be having with their parents. It's not all about protesting the bias of the state test. We should do that. But how do we start to put our kids in a better position for them to be productive? So the flip side of those two unhealthy mindsets is what I call the liberation mindset.

[15:26]

The liberation mindset starts with the belief that your children have the capacity to be as intelligent as any other human being on the planet. Starts with the change of thinking. Then it moves into advocacy. We have to advocate for our children. And finally, that we are responsible. And responsibility doesn't just take the educators.

[15:47]

We have to teach the children to be responsible for themselves. We have to teach the community to be responsible for our children. It's hard to respect somebody if they don't respect themselves. That won't make a lot of friends in certain communities because the victim mindset is very comfortable. But if you ever want to be liberated, You have to first respect yourself before you can expect somebody else to respect you. Their respect for you is the product of your respect for yourself.

[16:14]

And I'll close with this. I took a look at the evolution of the Japanese society. And prior to Hiroshima, there was, if you remember some of the vignettes and some of the photos and cartoons just come about the dumb Jap, I don't remember those. They would have the Jap with the buck teeth and made them seem unintelligent. There was a stereotype that the Japanese society was backwards. They were savage.

[16:40]

It was a propaganda too. After Hiroshima and the evolution of the Japanese society as an economic and a manufacturing superpower, you don't see very many of those anymore. So Japan didn't change its image by protesting the unflattering images that the world had of it. Japan turned into itself and said, what is the best Japan that we could be? And by focusing on what they could do, they forced the world's respect. That's what I'm advocating for for marginalized community.

[17:13]

Quit begging other people to respect you. Respect yourself. And if you respect yourself, you'll do the things that respectable people do. And then people, by virtue of your achievement, will be forced to respect you.

[17:27] SPEAKER_01:

Well, let's talk in closing a little bit about that liberation mindset and the three schools that you feature as case studies for equality and responsibility and advocacy. Take us into that mindset a little bit. And obviously, people can get the book and get more detail on each aspect of that mindset. But just take us on a little tour there.

[17:48] SPEAKER_02:

Each one of these three schools, one of the things that they all had in common, strong leadership. Larry Lizotte and Ron Edmonds in the effective schools research in the 1970s and 80s had seven correlates of effective schools. And one of the correlates was strong instructional leadership, that they've never found an effective school that didn't have strong leadership, effective leadership. So that means that what if a school has weak leadership, but yet they get high test scores? Well, that's not really an effective school. That's just a school whose kids test well for various reasons.

[18:21]

It may have nothing to do with the school. But you can't separate school growth from effective leadership. So if there's any superintendents or associate superintendents or board members who are listening, one of the greatest responsibilities that you have is school principal and school leadership preparation and hiring people who have a vision of a better school. We have to get away from hiring people who kind of waited their turn. It's five years before retirement. They want to pad their retirement.

[18:55]

School leadership is too important. For any other reason, hire a person, somebody that we think is qualified. If you don't think they're totally qualified, you have the obligation to give them the training to help them become more qualified. So I know there are some communities that have a hard time attracting principals. You have to create yours. So all three of these schools had strong leaders.

[19:16]

were able to sell their faculty on a vision to really break that construct, to really counsel them out of some of their old habits. And one of the schools is in Jefferson County, Kentucky. Um, and, uh, it's a high school and I don't know about Jefferson County. That's where Louisville is. And historically, uh, they had really low test scores compared to the rest of Kentucky. And they had been on all of the watch lists for failure, et cetera.

[19:48]

And, um, they got a new principal. And that principal came in with the idea that all students can and will learn. She called them scholars, kind of like Rita Pearson. And every scholar needs a champion. And she started to change the language of the school. they organically created a mission statement for themselves.

[20:10]

They created a data picture of the school to really take a look at where we're strong, where we're weak, and really challenging them on those areas where they had been historically weak, like graduation rate, like students taking AP classes, like ACT scores, freshman achievement. And she started to, her surname was Michelle Dillard, she started to address very specific goals. and they use their collective efficacy to really focus on a targeted set of goals. Her whole thing was, we're not going to build Rome in a day. Let's start with where we really need to address and what can we control? And she started to focus them on that.

[20:51]

The other school was a school in Georgia, led by a principal named Dr. Marcus Jackson, where he really pinpointed boys. And he was about responsibility. These young men, many of whom were in single parent homes, parents working two, three, four jobs, a mother working two, and really no man around. So he took it upon himself, along with other faculty members, to really have a focus on boys. how they're socialized, how they view themselves as smart as opposed to aggressive or highly sexualized, looked at them as responsible, productive, ethical human beings.

[21:33]

And he really took a great interest. He changed how they thought, how they dressed, how they communicated. They developed experience for them to help them create a vision of the men that they could become. And by their really intense focus on boys, who the data show were struggling the most. They really started to transform their environment. And boys started to stand up tall and speak in an articulate fashion and have confidence and not identify themselves through popular culture, but by a new example that was created for them in their school.

[22:04]

The last school is Martin Luther King Elementary School. This is in Hanford, California. And Deborah Colvard was a principal there. And her big thing with her staff was that they started to take responsibility for their students. It's a migrant community, migrant farming community in the Central Valley of California. I know you've read about Central Valley.

[22:23]

It's kind of the new Appalachia. Between Fresno, that Central Valley area was pretty much run by agriculture. and migrant workers. And people had pretty much written the schools in Hanford off, but they had a different idea. So they created this five-tier vision of things that they could enhance their students' experience with. And every teacher in a school belonged to a task force.

[22:48]

where they would focus on parent involvement or getting students access to resources or extending students' learning on certain academic standards. They said, heck, we work here. It's our school. These are our kids. We're going to be their advocates, and we're going to take responsibility. Here are areas where we identify that they have some gaps.

[23:11]

How can we organize and collaborate in ways that we can work on certain areas for their growth, and we can start to make a difference. They stopped talking about what they couldn't do and they started to focus on what they could do. Kind of Stephen Covey's, your circle of influence as opposed to your circle of concern. And it's amazing when people drown out the white noise of the outside constructs and they start to focus and zero in on what they can do, how much progress that they can make. That's what I talked about earlier, that intrinsic motivation. If you respect yourself, Other people will respect you.

[23:48]

The school became a California distinguished school. In California, they used to have a rating system called API, Academic Performance Index. And a successful school is considered an 800 school or above. In just two years, they reached a threshold of an 800 school. I think when they got rid of API, they were hovering right around 850. which would be really good for one of those gold standard schools.

[24:12]

Here's a school in Central Valley. I had the pleasure to work with all three of these schools that I've mentioned and had a chance to study their mindset and how they were able to break that cycle of the victim and the superiority mindset. So I think that these three schools serve as good examples that it can be done. And these aren't private schools or charters where they only accept certain students. These are public schools. open to anybody who lives in the community.

[24:39] SPEAKER_01:

So the book is Overcoming the Achievement Gap Trap, Liberating Mindsets to Effect Change by Dr. Anthony Muhammad. And Dr. Muhammad, if people want to get in touch with you, where can they find you online to learn more about your work and possibly working with you?

[24:52] SPEAKER_02:

Good thing about the World Wide Web is that I have a website. My website is www.newfrontier.com. the number 21.com.

[24:59]

Also, I'm on Twitter. You can follow me on Twitter at New Frontier 21. And on Facebook, you can like my page, Dr. Anthony Muhammad. So those are three different avenues to reach you. But the website is the most comprehensive.

[25:18] SPEAKER_00:

And now, Justin Bader on high performance instructional leadership.

[25:22] SPEAKER_01:

So high performance instructional leaders, what did you take away from my conversation with Dr. Muhammad? One thing that really stands out to me is this idea of mindset, that if we have the idea that our students are deficient, if we have the idea that they're not normal, that normal is, say, white and middle class and high scoring on standardized tests, and anything other than that is deficient, that's going to powerfully and negatively shape the way we treat our students. So I think that that mindset that we bring to the table is so critical. And I appreciate Dr. Muhammad's comments about how we think about our students as capable.

[26:01]

And as Dr. Muhammad contrasted, the superiority mindset and the victim mindset with that liberation mindset, a mindset that emphasizes equality and responsibility and taking responsibility for advocacy on behalf of our students and our students taking responsibility for advocacy on their own behalf. I think it's a difference that you powerfully see when you actually visit schools where this is a reality. And I've seen some great videos. We'll try to post some in the show notes They kind of give an example of what that looks like in action. I want to challenge you to think about the mindsets that are at work in your school.

[26:40]

Do we have a fixed mindset about our students that because they're not of a certain demographic category, that they're not capable, that they can't achieve at high levels? Do we have a mindset that there is a right way for a school to look, and if a school doesn't look that way, then it can't be an excellent school? I think we've got to really challenge ourselves on those mindsets and strive to develop that liberation mindset that Dr. Muhammad talks about. So again, if you'd like to learn more about Dr. Muhammad and his work in supporting schools to develop that liberation mindset, you can find him online at newfrontier21.com.

[27:13] Announcer:

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