Achieving Equity and Excellence: Achieving Equity and Excellence: Immediate Results From the Lessons of High-Poverty, High-Success Schools

[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, Dustin Bader. Welcome, everyone, to Principal Center Radio.

[00:15] SPEAKER_01:

I'm honored to welcome back to the show Dr. Douglas Reeves. Dr. Reeves is the founder of Creative Leadership Solutions, the author of more than 30 books and 80 articles on leadership and organizational effectiveness. He's worked in all 50 states and more than 20 countries around the world as an educational leadership and change expert. And we're here today to talk about his new book, Achieving Equity and Excellence, Immediate Results from the Lessons of High Poverty, High Success Schools.

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And now, our feature presentation.

[00:47] SPEAKER_01:

Dr. Reeves, welcome back to Principal Center Radio.

[00:49] SPEAKER_02:

Well, thanks. Delightful to be with you. This really began more than 20 years ago with the study of schools that were 90% poverty, 90% linguistic or ethnic minority enrollment in 90% meeting or exceeding standards. And that was really quite an outlier study 20 years ago. But there's been a lot of scholarship since then. And I particularly acknowledge in this book the work of Karen Chenoweth.

[01:12]

She's now had four separate books from Harvard Ed Press that I just think are remarkable. It's being done, getting it done, and so on. And in the contribution that Karen has made to this discussion, is that every time somebody hears a story of success in a high poverty school, it's like the Freedom Riders, it's like Jaime Escalante, it's the heroic teacher dying at the end. That's not a sustainable model. What we have to do is say, what are the systemic elements that we can use to have sustainability? I want to acknowledge Heather Zadofsky, who wrote Bringing School Reform to Scale, rather, a study of the Abroad Award winners.

[01:50]

And it was interesting that in these different books of Karen and Heather and myself and others, there's a lot of of overlap because we're we're just we're finding some of the same things even though we were operating completely independently so as a research footnote i think it is important to say you look at the mountain of research not the pebble if one person finds something that's an anecdote it's their own personal journey but if you see the same things being noticed year after year different researchers different perspectives operating independently then i think it's it's really got credibility so what we found in the course of this research for excellence and equity Is the remarkably consistent things? I'll just illustrate with a few examples without giving you a laundry list because it's it's not huge Nonfiction writing when I first did this research I found very strong relationships between nonfiction writing and math performance reading comprehension social studies and science achievement and a lot of people were putting writing kind of as the caboose on the train well you got to speak first and then you got to read and

[02:53]

And because writing took a lot of time, it was easy for people to put that aside. But the evidence was overwhelming that the schools, high and low poverty, that were doing really good jobs had writing at the very core. And not, I should add, just in the back of English language arts teachers, but something that everybody was doing. So that's one example. Another example is collaborative scoring, one of the part of effective professional learning community practices is that we agree on what student proficiency means. And the interesting thing is that when people first do collaborative scoring, it seems like a time-consuming pain in the rear.

[03:31]

And we documented that it actually gets faster and faster and faster. Collaborative scoring not only gives students higher levels of consistency, which is really important for feedback, but actually saves teachers time, which is a very counterintuitive notion when people think that, no, that's going to take take me extra time. I think one of the things that also is culturally true is this focus on achievement where it's literally what do you see in the trophy case? So if all you see in the trophy case is athletic trophies, that's fine. But that kind of tells you what culture is. If you look at the same trophy cases that I looked at and you find, for example, middle school individual student goals, learning goals in the trophy case, you see student essays, artwork, musical compositions in the trophy case, that tells you something else about their culture.

[04:24]

And the trophy case is kind of emblematic of what we really say that we value. I'm all for athletics, I should tell you. I really believe that that's one of the most valuable things that we do, but It can't be the only thing that we focus on. One of the new things about this book that I found really gratifying and interesting was, although my career and my heart has been working in high poverty schools, and that's still where most of my life is, I also have been able to travel the world and see Places like Singapore American School, one of the highest performing international schools in the planet. I've gotten to see New England prep schools that are also very high performing. And the stereotype that I would have had before is, well, shoot, they're just rich.

[05:05]

They're just lucky, born on third base, thought they had a triple, and of course they have good performance. But I had to challenge my stereotypes. And what I saw was actually rich kids have trouble reading too. Uh, international schools have, have trouble with math too. It wasn't always easy to them. And, and some of the very same practices, collaborative scoring, nonfiction writing, professional learning communities that I was documenting in successful high poverty schools are exactly what I was seeing in these very wealthy and very advantaged schools.

[05:38]

And so there's no question about what wealth has. Um, wealth has a lot of advantages. Not to mention, you know, feeling safe and that sort of thing. But we'd be kidding ourselves not to think that effective teaching and learning is still what holds all these things together. Independent, charter, international, urban. It's those common characteristics.

[06:02]

So one challenging thing that came out of this book was asking the question, what would we do if our kids were rich? If instead of going to a public school in an urban area where you are, they... They had wealthy parents paying $50,000 tuition. I guarantee you what we do is we would, A, never let them fail because we'd intervene like lightning.

[06:24]

If they needed extra reading, if they needed extra math, we'd give it to them. We wouldn't blame their parents because their parents are writing big checks to us. So there's a lot of parallels in what I saw in these wealthy schools with what I saw in high poverty schools. And to tie this in a bow, what I want to encourage our listeners to do is really push back on anybody who says, well, come to this conference and we'll tell you how to get achievement from 15% to 18% because that's about the best a high-poverty school can do. And I've seen a bunch of that kind of nonsense going on. And instead, what I want to ask is if we thought of our students as wealthy and we thought of our parents as wealthy – How would that change what we do with respect to teaching, leadership, and parental relationships?

[07:12]

And that to me is one of the fundamental equity issues of our time, is to treat kids as if they were rich. Because that changes the whole dynamic about all the assumptions that we make for them and for their parents.

[07:25] SPEAKER_01:

so seeing them, you know, seeing all of our students as clients who have what it takes to succeed, but we, you know, we need to figure out, uh, what to do. I like, I, I, I'm struck by the directness of that approach, you know, especially around nonfiction writing and reading and argumentation and, you know, the things that often we see as the things that eventually students in high performing schools will get to do maybe in high school, but, you know, schools that are getting great results without having $50,000 a year tuition, without having wealthy students, uh, they're doing those things directly and not seeing them as something that you can do only after all of these prerequisites.

[08:01] SPEAKER_02:

So one of the schools I talk about, Oliver Street School in Newark, 100 percent poverty. Dr. Doug Petty was the principal there. He's now been promoted to superintendent in another district. I would I would match the quality of third and fourth grade writing that Doug Petty had in that school against what I've seen in middle schools. in more advantaged communities.

[08:22]

It's all about his expectations, and he's relentless about that. And every time I see that, it makes me completely intolerant when I go into a class that has got kids writing on post-it notes, because after all, they're not really ready for multi-paragraph writing yet. You know, rich kids do it all the time. Their brains are no different than poor kids are. It's all about what we expect. So you're right.

[08:44]

It is a very direct message, and I'm getting more strident about that, because I... I think this issue of expectations remains pervasive that we have to challenge.

[08:53] SPEAKER_01:

And just the idea, you have it right in the subtitle of the book, high poverty, high success. I mean, that remains a very controversial idea. The idea that that is even possible remains controversial. And I think because we have such a strong association, we know that parental wealth matters. We know that district resources matter. And I think there's a justifiable frustration with the calls to do the impossible and the expectation that individual teachers can be miracle workers if they can stand on their desks and deliver.

[09:25]

You know what I mean? We know we can't be miracle workers, but there are things that are working. And I wonder what you see being some of the keys around leadership. Because for me, one of the things that I see over and over in high poverty schools is turnover, turnover, turnover. and just the huge challenges that turnover causes. So what are you seeing in terms of leadership in these high-performing schools?

[09:49] SPEAKER_02:

If I could ask, make one plea, it is that those principals are in classrooms. They are true instructional leaders, and there's an awful lot of administrators out there who are not instructional leaders, and maybe not through any fault of their own, rather, but other demands that have been placed on them. But part of what I hope makes this research compelling is when I'm documenting differences where they've got the same teacher assignment policy, the same salary schedule, the same per-pupil funding, the same labor agreement, all that stuff is the same, then we can't say that those are the things that caused some people to be successful and other people. All those variables are identical. So what is left to explain why one school has a 97% graduation rate and another school has a 60% graduation rate? I just want to suggest that if we've eliminated unions

[10:42]

And money and teacher assignment policy and all those things, all that's left is leadership and teaching that explains those variabilities. I also, I want to acknowledge something you said a minute ago, that some of this research is controversial. And I think it's sometimes been misused. I know I've been misquoted by having people say, well, if you can document that success is possible in a high poverty school, that means poverty doesn't matter. I have never, ever said that. Poverty matters a heck of a lot.

[11:12]

And in John Hattie's research, it's more than a year of learning. So we know poverty really matters. And to say otherwise is disingenuous. But in the same breath, it's not determinative. And that's why I think it's so important to study these schools where all the other variables are the same and people can no longer blame the system, the contract, the schedule, the funding. Because when all those things are the same and some succeed and some don't, that's teaching and leadership.

[11:41] SPEAKER_01:

Well, and I think poverty is a convenient measure because we have universal data on poverty thanks to the federal free lunch program. But poverty is really a proxy for many, many other things that individually vary among schools that even have identical poverty levels, doesn't it?

[11:59] SPEAKER_02:

Absolutely. And including family structure. But part of my learning in international schools and in elite schools Independent schools, they've got some messed up family structures, too. And when kids struggle to read or struggle to perform, they don't say sink or swim, kid. They don't say, hey, the real world is tough out there. They intervene like lightning.

[12:20]

And that is what. That is what effective schools do for students of any economic status.

[12:26] SPEAKER_01:

When I think about my own kids in terms of reading, and certainly there are advantages that our own daughters have had in terms of learning how to read, but I can't say that one of the advantages that we specifically provided was anything in the way of curriculum or pedagogy. I mean, really the only thing that we have done as parents is make sure that our kids read a lot. And that is pretty much free. The library, the school library, just spending time reading has required no expertise and very little in the way of resources. And it is something that is replicable regardless of income. But I see so many schools doing these things that are a prerequisite or perceived to be a prerequisite to reading.

[13:08]

Oh, before you can do more of the thing that we know works, we have to intervene first. And that just seems so backwards to me.

[13:15] SPEAKER_02:

Absolutely. You know, that said, you probably saw the New York Times study a few weeks ago that said half the reading instruction of the country is deeply flawed. And what we as teachers have to hold ourselves accountable for is that your kids and my kids both had were being read to in the womb. Right. Since infancy, they had this opportunity. And sometimes what happens is the teacher's.

[13:36]

attribute that automated learning to other students when, in fact, reading does require systematic instruction. It's not either or. We can do both. We get books into the hands of kids. We create this enormous joy of reading and the joy of what we see. And at the same time, they need to learn decoding and phonemic awareness and all the structural stuff that happens with reading.

[13:56]

But my footnote to this is that's true for high poverty schools. It's also true for high wealth schools. That's just plain good instruction. And we'd be saying the same thing about mathematics. or any other kind of pedagogy. I do want to acknowledge that people of goodwill can disagree about some of these things.

[14:12]

So that's why I've tried to be modest in my claims. I've tried to say, here's what I think works. Here's what I think is a focus. But also, I am a footnote on this mountain of research. I think there was a time when I was doing more of it than other people. But I am so proud to honor the work of people like Karen Chenoweth and Heather Zadofsky and Kim Marshall, for goodness sake.

[14:32]

You know, what a joy to, and I know he's a big fan of yours, by the way, too, that I just saw him this week and he mentioned you. You know, there are so many other researchers and scholars that we, my encouragement to your listeners is don't walk away with, one expert versus another expert, but look at the mountain of research and the large scale contributions that I think have been made out there. And that's, if I've done anything right in this book, it's the reference section to try to really honor the work that other people have done.

[14:59] SPEAKER_01:

So the book is Achieving Equity and Excellence, immediate results from the lessons of high poverty, high success schools. And Dr. Reeves, if people want to get in touch with you or learn more about your work, where's the best place for them to go online?

[15:11] SPEAKER_02:

Creativeleadership.net. And you'll find... Not only lots of articles and videos, they're all free tools.

[15:18]

My contact information, I always answer all my own emails. In fact, you'll even see my personal text and phone in there. So that's what I do when I'm traveling 4 million miles is make sure that I respond to teachers and principals all over the world.

[15:30] SPEAKER_01:

Thanks so much for your time again. Great to have you again on Principal Center Radio.

[15:34] SPEAKER_02:

My pleasure. Thanks.

[15:35] Announcer:

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