James Alan Sturtevant—You’ve Gotta Connect

[00:01] Announcer:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, helping you build capacity for instructional leadership. Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center, Dr. Justin Baeder. Welcome, everyone, to Principal Center Radio.

[00:13] Justin Baeder:

I'm your host, Justin Baeder, and I'm honored to welcome to the program Dr. James Lane. Dr. Lane is Managing Director of K16 at ETS and has served as the CEO of PDK International and held senior leadership roles in the U.S. Department of Education.

[00:27]

He served as Virginia's 25th superintendent of public instruction after a career as a band director and then superintendent in three districts. Dr. Lane holds degrees from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and North Carolina State University, as well as a doctorate from the University of Virginia. And he is the author of the new book, Leading with Laser Focus, The Seven Steps to School Success.

[00:49] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[00:52] Justin Baeder:

Dr. Lane, welcome to Principal Center Radio.

[00:54] James Alan Sturtevant:

Yeah, thanks, Justin. Excited to be here with you today.

[00:57] Justin Baeder:

I'm excited to speak with you because you've had quite a career advising the U.S. Department of Education, leading public instruction for the entire state of Virginia, and now you work across systems at ETS. What was it in your career and what did you see happening in the field of education that prompted you to write Leading with Laser Focus?

[01:15] James Alan Sturtevant:

Thank you. And that's such a great question. After 25 years in schools and government service, advising the White House and the U.S. Department of Education, one of the things that I often thought was, there are some really simple structures that I learned from the principalship to the superintendency, frankly, to state and federal policy, that I felt like if folks just knew these structures, it might help frame, especially for principals, and I really do think the book is geared at principals, to help think about how you structure your school for the success of every student. And one of the phrases I often talk about is, as leaders, we should know what happens at the very moment that a student shows failure.

[02:04]

And so many times like a kid will fail a quiz, fail a test, you know, fail the interview assessment. And there will be something that might happen because of that test. But if you want to make it where you're ensuring that student's success is systemic, Then there are systems that should be put in place in every school so that there is a responsive culture at the school to support the student. And so I led schools where I took over in some subject areas where had pass rates in the 50s and we were able to get them the 90s the next year. There were schools that weren't accredited. One year later, we were able to get them accredited.

[02:40]

And so as I've seen the NAEP scores and test scores roll out, especially in these post-COVID years, I thought, gosh, I really wish principals knew some of these things that I learned and was able to put in place in other schools. And maybe this could help somebody make their school better. And that's really why I wrote the book. I've enjoyed having it out there and getting questions from principals and supes about the work. But For me, I just have this passion for trying to make sure every kid is successful in our schools. And I think these seven structures that I think about will allow us to do that.

[03:11] Justin Baeder:

Well, Dr. Lane, you start with something that I think has almost become kind of unpopular in recent years and maybe is making a little bit of a resurgence, but that is curriculum. Why do you start with an aligned curriculum?

[03:23] James Alan Sturtevant:

Yeah, absolutely. So these seven steps are largely shared in the book through stories around how I came to learn that these made a difference with students. And I understand, you know, not everyone loves to talk about test scores and raising test scores. But for me, you know, test scores are a diagnosis of how our school or how our students are doing. And ultimately what we know is that, especially in this post-COVID world, You know, we're seeing some of the lowest results we've seen for students in nearly 20 years on NAEP. And so, you know, whereas I'm always a big believer in that if you teach the right way and make the right difference with kids, the test scores will follow.

[04:06]

There are structures that you can put in place. And so regardless of this is about test scores, this is really about just ensuring that every student is successful. And so the first step is about aligning curriculum. And, you know, we're not getting into the more political pieces of curriculum and what's in your curriculum or how do you choose curriculum and all of that. It really is about making sure that that as you are creating your map for how you're going to teach curriculum, that you're making sure that you're pacing with what's expected from the state standards. And that seems like a no-brainer, but you wouldn't believe how often teachers do otherwise.

[04:45]

And I tell a story in the book about a teacher I knew who just loved the War of 1812 and spent a ton of time on the War of 1812. And when you got to the state's expectations, there might be one question on the War of 1812, but, well, they spent... Only a few days or a couple of weeks in the American Revolution, that's like 30% of the test or something crazy like that. And so that's what is at the heart of aligning curriculum.

[05:08]

And then the second step is about putting people first. And I have a phrase I always use in leadership, which is, if you're going to be maniacal about anything, but be maniacal about people first. And this is about making sure that as a principal, that the people that you're putting in front of our kids have a deep passion and care for our students and an academic optimism that's going to lead them up, lift them up. And then it's, you know, then there's common assessment. During the year, you should have frequent enough checks where you can compare student groups across grade level, subject areas, schools even, to know how kids are doing. The fourth step is about not just doing all of this data, but actually putting it to action.

[05:50]

And so feeling they were driven insights so that you know what's going on with the student. And then step five is about targeting interventions. Everyone in the school, And in my schools, I mean, we would even talk to some of the support staff and custodial staff and cafeteria staff that if a kid started to show that he was struggling, everyone in the school knew what would happen, that you recommend them to this entity or this piece or this intervention or whatever it may be. And then it's about step six, about purposeful collaboration, that as a school community, we should be sitting down and talking about our kids every day so that everyone knows how our students are progressing and making sure that those structures that we talked about are in place for those kids. And finally, I talk in the seventh step about technology that. In this day and age, there are a lot more students than ever that need our interventions.

[06:40]

And so to be as efficient as possible where the teacher needs to be working, or even tutor, needs to be working in small groups with kids, during those times we should be leveraging technology to move all of our students forward while we're really honing in on some kids that may need a special or more intensive intervention. Those are the main seven steps, and those have shown success for me over and over again. We've turned schools around time and time again. Also in the book, I go on how to support principals and how to set up the school for structure and how to get buy-in on all of these things and general leadership concepts, but that's at the heart of the seven steps.

[07:12] Justin Baeder:

I wanted to ask your perspective as someone who's been both a national leader, a state-level leader, and a district leader about alignment because I have seen highly successful school districts decide that that alignment around curriculum and around common assessments is absolutely central to their success. And yet it's fairly rare. I don't see the majority of school districts taking that approach. And instead we have things like maybe common curriculum adoption. We'll decide which company will buy a textbook from But that's not quite the same as aligning our curriculum and aligning our common assessments. Take us into that a little bit more.

[07:50]

What do you see as really the function of those and how they work together? And what's some of your advice for school and system leaders on those questions of alignment about what we teach and how we assess?

[08:02] James Alan Sturtevant:

So back to alignment, it really is about deconstructing the state's blueprint. I mean, every state puts out a blueprint for what's going to be on their end of year test. And whereas many, many of my teachers, and certainly the most savvy, could pull the blueprint off immediately. I guess people don't pull out paper anymore. Pull it up immediately on their computer and assess it. It's not just about knowing what's in the blueprint, but it's deconstructing it.

[08:28]

You know, that... okay, these are the topics that are going to be focused on. Everyone complains about curriculum being a mile wide and an inch deep and all of this. Well, what deconstructing the curriculum map and the blueprint allows you to do is to hone in on where you have more time to go deeper so that you know exactly what's expected of students at the end of the year.

[08:54]

That doesn't mean you ignore other pieces of the curriculum, but when you're looking at what's going to be expected of your students at the end of the year, you ought to structure your time around that. And that's how I focused most of my thinking from a structural point on curriculum alignment. And then when it comes to common assessment, I actually am open to a number of ways of doing this. And I actually think AI is going to change this significantly. I was in a tool the other day, it was incredible, where you start talking to the AI, it starts to hone in on your zone of proximal development. The next thing you know, it's only asking you questions that are right at the fringe of where you can be challenged.

[09:30]

And so I don't even know that it has to be these benchmark assessments or unit tests or quizzes anymore. The tools that are going to be available to teachers now are going to be incredible, but ultimately what we want to know is, and I go back to zone of proximal development, we want to know what a kid has already learned, what they are ready to learn. and what they're not ready to learn, so that we're kind of guiding our instruction around those pieces. And so what Common Assessment has generally allowed us to do is to kind of take a scan of all of our students, see where everyone is, see who needs more intervention, see who's way ahead, and see who's right on track with the rest of the class. And those two pieces of kind of aligning to those expectations and staying in tune with where kids are throughout the year are the precursors to knowing what types of interventions you need to put in place for the kids in the school.

[10:19] Justin Baeder:

Talk to us a little more, if you would, about intervention, because often we have the data, as you said, and as long as we do something with it, we will know who our students are who need intervention and what type of intervention they need. What have you seen in terms of the response, though? Because I think often that's where things fall flat is we know we have kids who need support and we, in some cases, have the people to provide the support. But for whatever reason, it doesn't happen. What's your view on that issue?

[10:47] James Alan Sturtevant:

Well, the study's a couple years old now, but when I was at the U.S. Department of Education, and one of my responsibilities as the acting assistant secretary was that I led the team that put out the American Rescue Plan dollars, you know, which $130 billion, one of the largest investments in education of all time. And I was really tasked with making sure that that money was spent on time and spent wisely. And I met a researcher during that time named Tom Kane from Harvard. And he was somewhat critical in his research around how schools were spending that money.

[11:25]

And so I talked to him about it. I said, well, tell us what we need to know so that I can pass this on to the field. And what we found is that during that time with this massive investment of money, almost every school in America was doing tutoring because we knew we had kids that we had to recover. But what was really interesting is we were nowhere near doing it on the scale that needed to be done to actually have kids recover by the time the money ran out. Of course, the money has now run out and the NAEP results and everything else indicates that we're still behind where we were pre-COVID. And so what Tom found was that on average, kids that needed intervention due to COVID deficits, we're getting about 30 to 40 hours a year of tutoring.

[12:10]

And if you think about nine weeks, four quarters of nine weeks, that's about an hour a week. And what Tom said is to do the level of tutoring that we'd need to actually catch kids up and move them along, they needed well over 100 hours a year, which therefore amounts to about three hours a week. And so what I learned there is that it wasn't about whether schools had the right strategies in place. Yes, every school is doing some form of tutoring. Every school is doing some form of intervention. All of that's great.

[12:40]

You're not doing enough to make a difference with the kids that are behind. And so that's the biggest piece I would tell principals listening today is don't rest on the fact that you have these strategies in place. Make sure that you're scaling it at the level that each kid needs. That's why zone of proximal development becomes so important. Some kids might need two or three hours of tutoring and then be right back into tier one and they don't need any support anymore. They're caught up and they can move on.

[13:06]

But some of these kids who are behind a grade level or even two grade levels, they're going to need three to four hours a week on top of the instruction in the classroom and some of the other interventions that you have in place sustained for some time before they're able to achieve on grade level. And I, you know, I hear the pushback on that too. Like, You know, what, are you going to make a kid stay after school four days a week? Are you going to take them out of electives? No. You know, I mean, you just have to figure it out.

[13:33]

And with the technology we have now and third party tutoring companies and everything that's going on, it doesn't always have to be during the school day. It doesn't have to be right after school. It doesn't have to be, you know, predictive of whether the kid can catch transportation. We can send tutors into the neighborhood. There's all kinds of ways that we can think about doing this. We can partner with churches.

[13:51]

We can, again, bring in virtual vendors. There's a number of ways to do this. But when we allow the simple barriers like time and place to get in the way, now that we're in this much more virtual world, that's going to keep us from moving kids forward. So we've got to do it on scale and we've got to meet kids where they are.

[14:10] Justin Baeder:

And certainly, you know, when we had $130 billion to work with, and that I think maybe gave districts the push that they needed to really invest at scale in tutoring, because it's one of those things that everybody knows about. Everybody's heard of tutoring. Every school I've worked at has had tutoring, but it wasn't necessarily at the scale that that would meet the demand, that would rise to the occasion if you have a student who is very far behind. And I was just reading a couple of days ago, an article by Alan Safran and Susanna Loeb in Education Week, high dosage tutoring should be here to stay. And they review a lot of the research on this very question that like high dosage tutoring works, but it has to be high enough dosage and it works at scale, but we have to implement the scale. I wonder if we could talk next about the second key where you talk about people, because all of this work has to be, you know, we can use technology, but for the most part, this work has to be done by people.

[15:07]

And I know a lot of your book is about the people that work in schools and the teams that we put to work serving our students. You say we need to be obsessive about people. What does it mean to be obsessive about people?

[15:22] James Alan Sturtevant:

Well, At the end of the day, the work that we do in schools is about humans and human progress and maximizing human potential. And I would often say, whether I was a principal, a superintendent, or any of these other roles, none of us would be here doing this work if it wasn't about that teaching and that learning experience between students and teachers. And we've got to remember that all of us are in service to what's happening in the classroom And sometimes I feel like we forget that and we're thinking about systems and politics and everything else that's going on. But really, we should be maximizing what's happened in the classroom. And so, you know, for me, I believe that it's essential that we think about. what it's going to take to make sure that there's a phenomenal teacher in every classroom.

[16:15]

Now, I understand there are a lot of issues. Ultimately, we have a teacher shortage. We don't have a shortage of humans, right? And so what that means is we're not incentivizing enough humans to want to teach to fill all the classrooms that we have. That's a financial issue. And I'll admit, I was a state leader, and we would celebrate the pay increases that we did every year.

[16:40]

and work really hard with our teachers associations to find ways to maximize what we could do. But much like with tuning, that's not nearly on scale. Getting every teacher from $40,000 to $50,000 a year is not gonna solve the teacher shortage. it's not even close to what they can earn in the market generally compared to other like businesses. So let me first start off by saying, one of the things that you can do to be maniacal about people is to compensate with them what they're worth, and then you'll get better candidates when you do so. But knowing that largely that's out of the control of most of our educators and in the hands of policymakers, then there's other pieces that we can do.

[17:20]

And in the context of the shortage, it's even more important for us to be rigorous because when there's a shortage of people willing to do the work, you're much more likely to not have the quality that you would have if you were flush with many candidates. And as a principal and superintendent, I can remember I went from having 50 applicants a year for elementary jobs to I was lucky to get one or two by the time I left school leadership. And so it's really important that we are selective about that. But then it's also important that you're matching teachers that I call this strategic scheduling. You're matching teachers to their strengths. You know, if you have a teacher who is phenomenal with students with disabilities, but maybe it was in great with students that are gifted.

[18:04]

Maybe you should be scheduling them such that they're working with more students with disabilities and vice versa. If your teacher is great with giving students, but maybe not the other students, let's think about that, or great with English language learners or whatever that may be. And so I spent a lot of time doing talent reviews and making sure I knew what my teacher's strengths were. And then I tried to build the annual master schedule, as they called it, around honing in on maximizing Uh, you know, that some teachers, it's even just a personality thing. This teacher is better with students who are shy or this, this teacher is better with students that are extroverted. And, you know, I'd find ways to build a puzzle so that every classroom was built out so that I can maximize each, each student's opportunity.

[18:49]

But then. The other thing is we've got to reduce, of course, the burdens on teachers. We've got to support teachers. That's in the research clearly about keeping retention and all of that. But also I talk about building a culture of innovation in my school and a culture where everyone cares. And there's a notion that I often refer to, and I learned this from one of my assistants who were in tennis back in the day, called academic optimism.

[19:14]

And this basically is based in the research around teacher efficacy. And what we know is that Teachers who believe that it's their job to make a difference with kids are more likely to make a difference with kids. And that seems like a no-brainer as I say it, but what we know in the research on education is that On the first day of a teacher's career, they have some of the highest efficacy they're going to have. They believe they're going to change the world. It doesn't matter. I'll knock down walls for these kids.

[19:41]

And over time, on average, this isn't every teacher. I can tell you there are definitely teachers that break this mold. But over time, what we find is that teachers begin to believe that other factors outside of themselves matter more. Oh, well, Johnny couldn't learn because, you know, this is his home life situation or whatever it may be. And so as a principal, I started to flip my belief that my job was certainly to make you a better teacher and to give you the tools to be a better teacher. But what I read in the research there is that actually teachers do get better over a 30- or 40-year career.

[20:15]

And so my job might not be as much to actually focus on the tools and the structures and the techniques with you because teachers are inherently focused on improving and learning that themselves. My job is to... Build up your efficacy and your belief in yourself that you're making a difference. And when I was able to do that and give maniacal with my APs and as superintendent, my principals about that, and my teachers really believed that it was their job.

[20:43]

If for no other reason than perseverance alone, they made a difference with kids. And so that is part of what I talk about with being maniacal about a teacher. But then it's also giving them permission to really go after it. And I call this the culture of yes. Teachers would come to me all the time with what they would call crazy ideas, which I just thought were good ideas in some cases, most cases, I would say. And they would say, well, I know the rule or the policy says I can or can't do this.

[21:08]

And I'm not here to say you can violate policy. You can't. You can't violate the law. You can't violate the rules. But what I have found in nearly 30 years in education now is that there's actually more flexibility in the policy than people are giving credit for. And I remember when I was state superintendent, I did a waiver.

[21:27]

We call it opportunity schools. And essentially, you had the potential to apply for any waiver of any regulation at the state, and I would consider it. And the first year we rolled out that new opportunity, no one applied for any waivers. They didn't ask for any waivers. And then when they started applying for waivers, I showed them in the regulations where you had the flexibility that you're asking for. The same tends to be true in our schools.

[21:53]

And so what I try to do is start from a place, I call it the culture of yes. I start from a place of every teacher believing if they come to me with a new idea, I'm going to say yes, unless I absolutely can't. And then we're starting from a place where everyone in our school believes that they have the flexibility to make a difference with kids. Now, there were times I had to say no, or the budget wouldn't allow it, or the board wouldn't allow it, or whatever. Sure. But what I found is that more often than not, we can do the things we want to do with kids.

[22:19]

And all we have to do is just realize that if we say yes to our teachers, they're going to find ways to make a difference. Wow.

[22:25] Justin Baeder:

I love it. That's such an interesting story that nobody applied for a waiver at first for anything.

[22:30] James Alan Sturtevant:

Oh, that happened at the federal level. It happened at the state level. I've seen it time and time again. You would not believe how many waiver opportunities are out there. And there's a belief that we're going to say no. And again, I won't say that we won't say no.

[22:43]

It happens. I've said no several times. But I start from a place of trying to figure out if I can say yes. And when I can, I absolutely do. And this fear of people saying no hampers so much innovation. And I think you'll find that if you start asking for ways to do something different, folks will find a way.

[23:02]

And frankly, if your legislator finds out you have a really good idea to make a difference for kids and a lot of regulations in the way, you might find legislators that'll help you think through flexibilities on that. Again, can't promise anything, but if you never ask, the answer is always no. But if you ask, there's a chance there's a yes. And in a culture of yes, you're going to try to find ways to make that happen.

[23:25] Justin Baeder:

And what I love about what you're saying and what you have in the book is that student learning is the bottom line, right? This is all about finding ways to deliver for kids and get them to where they need to be, whether that's through the curriculum, through the people, through the intervention, through the data. All of it is about getting students to where they need to be. Is that what you mean by the laser focus that that needs to be our bottom line or?

[23:50] James Alan Sturtevant:

Yeah, well, LANESA actually started as an acronym for me. So it's sort of, this is when I was a superintendent and principal in Middlesex, Virginia, but it's sort of for learning advancement through support, enrichment, and remediation. And essentially it was a block, when I was a middle school principal, I figured a block during the day because the teacher said, oh, we can't do tutoring, we can't do it after school, the kids can't stay after school, transportation issues, you know, all those things that I mentioned before. And I said, okay. then we'll build a block during the day where we can do intervention with our kids. And I call it the laser block.

[24:23]

And then, again, the acronym so that we can do support, enrichment, or remediation with those kids during that time. And so the idea became laser focus in that we need to have a laser focus on our kids so we know exactly which kids need support, exactly which kids need enrichment, exactly which kids need remediation. And then we lasered in and made sure all of our kids were successful. So yes, at the end of the day, it's about making a difference for our kids.

[24:46] Justin Baeder:

And as you said earlier, we figure it out. Like there are going to be a million logistical questions and challenges of, you know, how and who and money and all that. But the bottom line is, is we figure it out for kids. Absolutely. So the book is Leading with Laser Focus, The Seven Steps to School Success. Dr. James Lane, if people want to learn more about your work or find you online, where are some of the best places for them to go?

[25:07] James Alan Sturtevant:

Yeah, so certainly you can reach out to me on social. I'm on Insta and X as at Dr. James Lane. If you go to LinkedIn, you know, it's like LinkedIn, whatever, backslash James F. Lane. If you go to my website, which is laserfocus.education, which you're not allowed to have URLs without education.

[25:27]

So I just bought that URL to make it even easier. You can also go to leadingwithlaserfocus.com, but I'm going to shorten it for ease. But just reach out to me. Anyone has questions, want to learn more about the book, want to talk about it, on my webpage you'll be able to see where you can see me out and about at the various conferences and speeches and all that. And just would love to talk to more people about the book and how we can help improve schools.

[25:50] Justin Baeder:

Thank you so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio. It's been a pleasure.

[25:54] James Alan Sturtevant:

Yeah, thanks, Justin. So great to meet you and be on today.

[25:56] Announcer:

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