Equity-Based Leadership: Leveraging Complexity to Transform School Systems

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

[00:13] SPEAKER_00:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to welcome to the program Dr. Joshua Starr. Dr. Starr is an experienced educational leader who has served as the managing partner of the Center for Model Schools, the CEO of PDK International, and as superintendent, including in Montgomery County, Maryland, and Stanford, Connecticut. And he is a graduate of the Harvard Urban Superintendents Program. And he is the author of the book, Equity-Based Leadership, Leveraging Complexity to Transform School Systems.

[00:42] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[00:45] SPEAKER_00:

Josh, welcome to Principal Center Radio.

[00:47] SPEAKER_01:

Thanks for having me, Justin. It's a real pleasure to be here.

[00:50] SPEAKER_00:

So you've been at the helm of some fairly large and complex school districts. What did you see happening in the profession? What did you gain from your experience as a superintendent that prompted you to write equity-based leadership and talk about the complexity that we face in our large school systems?

[01:10] SPEAKER_01:

One of the fascinating challenges of being a superintendent of schools is that the public, including elected officials, board members even, and certainly parents, no school from a limited perspective, their own experience and the experience of their kids, whether it's positive or negative. And teachers, and for that matter, principals too, you know, they see it in a... limited kind of way. Not wrong, but it's just different.

[01:45]

And school districts are, in some ways, they're sort of two distinct organizations. There's what happens in schools, and then there's all the stuff that happens outside of schools. The system, the larger ecosystem that creates the conditions for success for principals to do their best work. And what I realized when I left the superintendency and then I was at PDK, kind of sitting at the intersection of research policy and practice, is that there aren't enough stories and examples of how system leaders, and by system leaders I mainly mean superintendents, but also cabinet level folks, deputies, can pull the different levers of the system itself to ensure that principals are doing their best work and to ensure that there's coherence and alignment. So I want to tell those stories, you know, of not only my own practice, but more importantly, what others have done to drive an equity-based teaching and learning agenda that improves outcomes for kids.

[02:44]

And so I just, I felt like there was an absence and that's what prompted me to write it.

[02:49] SPEAKER_00:

And I love that idea of coherence, you know, and I know the different authors have written about coherence. In your experience, is coherence possible? Because, you know, anyone who's had any kind of senior leadership position knows the thousand directions that any organization can get pulled in, and especially a large urban school district. Is coherence possible? And what does that look like?

[03:11] SPEAKER_01:

Well, if it's not, please don't disabuse me of my sort of delusions. Yeah, it is. But it's, you know, coherence requires courage in some ways. You have to say no to some things. You have to focus on, you know, what we call your hedgehog, right? You have to Be really clear about what your values are.

[03:34]

And when I say your, I mean the collective values of a school system. You have to know how to slow down the inquiry to speed up the action or step up on the balcony. There are all these different metaphors, right? So it is possible to ensure that all of the actions of a system are aligned and are getting towards clear goals and outcomes. But it's hard. It's really hard work and it takes time.

[04:01]

It requires a lot of collective effort. And it also means you have to say no if you want everything to fit together in a way that's going to serve kids at a higher level.

[04:11] SPEAKER_00:

But you started with the importance of saying no. And I wonder if you have any stories of things that you discovered just didn't fit, you know, and took away from that sense of coherence, because certainly there's pressure to do more. Everybody has every stakeholder has a priority for us to run after. What comes to mind for you as something that needed to be said no to?

[04:33] SPEAKER_01:

I'll give you an example that I write about in my book that came to haunt me, actually, and I probably shouldn't have said no. When I was superintendent in Montgomery County, very, very diverse district, right? White, Black, Latino, Asian, poor, you know, every kind of diversity, 14th, 15th biggest district in the country. We had seen a significant influx of Latino kids, unaccompanied minors at the time. Our literacy results were bad. And I was particularly looking at that group of kids.

[05:05]

Our black kids were also not doing as well as our white and Asian kids, but they were reasonably stable. And our budget had been cut significantly for years. We just didn't have much money and all that. I proposed to the board that we put $1.5 million in the budget for a program specifically for elementary literacy for our Latino kids. This is a two and a half billion dollar budget.

[05:35]

We're talking 1.5 million. One of my board members who had come up in the 60s in the civil rights movement, African-American woman, had a group of community activists in her ear all the time said, where's the same money for our black kids? And I said, look, it's not that we don't have issues with literacy for black kids, but I've got an urgent problem with our Latino kids right here that has to be addressed and I need additional funds. So we have all these other things we're doing for black kids. I can show you, but I'm not putting in anything more.

[06:08]

And I said, no, came back to bite me. Right. So it's an example of where, like, I had to be consistent with what the data was saying. I had to try to focus on what the most urgent need was. I paid a political cost, frankly, by saying no. But I felt it was necessary to be honest about like, here's what the data is telling me.

[06:27]

I'm not going to play the politics around it. And, you know. and we got to do what we got to do for the kids who have the greatest need right now, where the urgency is, is that Eisenhower matrix of like urgent versus important that leaders need to make decisions. And sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. I like telling the examples, Justin, of where things didn't work because I think it's important that leaders are honest about all the mistakes you make or different kinds of calculations that can bite you in the butt if you're not careful.

[06:57] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, well, and it's great to hear kind of the real world trade-off there where like it would have been, tempting in the moment to say yes, to avoid the controversy, to avoid the pressure, you know, to respond to the pressure and to relieve that pressure. And in retrospect, perhaps, you know, you would have done that. But at the same time, like we can never be in a position where we can consistently just say yes to everybody because people will ask for things we don't have. They'll ask for conflicting things. I discovered that probably within my first week as a principal, that if I just said yes to everybody, I was going to be contradicting myself, you know, in hours or days at most. because schools are constantly under competing pressures from different directions.

[07:36] SPEAKER_01:

And the challenge in that, if I may, you know, it's one of the things I write about in my book is that decision-making processes are essential to good leadership and transparency and integrity is really important. If you are in a superintendency, you're in a principalship, whatever, and you want everybody to agree with you, you shouldn't be in the seat. It's not going to happen. But people have the right to know how you make a decision, why you're making it, what the process is, what the data are, how you're going to report out on it. And even if they – most people are silent but reasonable. And even if they don't like – the decision itself, if they can see, oh, yeah, you know, Justin, I get it.

[08:18]

He did what he said he was going to do. They're going to have confidence in you and trust you for the most part, even if they don't like the decision you had to make that that time. It's going to help you in the long run if they see that there's some consistency in how you went about making the decision.

[08:36] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. Yeah, because they can at least make sense of it, even if they don't agree with it. They can see how you got there. So you talk about six elements or entry points that can help us pursue an equity agenda. Take us into some of those six entry points.

[08:54] SPEAKER_01:

Sure. So the reason I call them entry points is that while they are core principles that need to be acted upon, they're gonna manifest differently in different contexts and leaders have to decide where to start. So they're not linear. Teaching and learning is one, right? What do we want kids to know and be able to do and what do adults need to do in service of them? And it's essential that there's a real clear vision for what teaching and learning should look like in the system and in schools.

[09:28]

Shared values is another. Do we have collective shared values that are used for our decision making processes that kind of bind us together as a community. Culture is another. What does it feel like to be a child or an adult or in our schools all the time? How do we want to be with each other as we're doing the hard work of educating our kids? Resource allocation.

[09:57]

How do we allocate time, people and money? towards our challenges and our needs? And is it clear? You know, again, go back to the story I told before about, hey, we have this urgent need for support for English language learners. I'm putting money towards it, but I'm also putting people towards other urgent issues we have because, you know, people make is your biggest resource. And then talent management, you know, I feel like we have not spent enough time focusing on what our people need to do their best work.

[10:30]

So, you know, I hate the term fidelity of implementation, for example, right? Because it's a way of blaming teachers and blaming principals. We need to be more focused on people, which is 85 to 90% of our budget. How are people developing and growing in their careers? It's not only a recruitment issue, but it's also a retention issue, particularly when it comes to educators of color. So how are we really focused on our people?

[10:55]

Because they're the ones who do the work. And what did I miss? Talent management, culture, values, decision-making. Oh, that's the one I mentioned earlier. Decision-making. How do we go about making decisions?

[11:04]

Does it have integrity? Is it clear? You know, I always tell people there's only one decision a superintendent gets to make on their own, right? And that's calling a snow day. Every other decision, whether it's state and federal law, whether it's procurement rules, whether it's contractual obligations. board policy, whatever it is, it goes through other people.

[11:24]

And folks have the right to know how a decision is being made, where the authority lies, and what they can expect to come from it. So those are the six. And again, the point of them being entry points is that as you're organizing a transformation agenda, an equity-based transformation agenda. You have to attend to those. But when I got to Stanford, Connecticut, teaching and learning was the crisis that I had to address first. When I got to Montgomery County, it was a culture issue.

[11:49]

That had to be addressed first. So depending on where you are is going to determine which entry point you're going to focus on first.

[12:00] SPEAKER_00:

Good deal. Good deal. I wonder if we could talk in a little bit more depth about decision making. And I'm currently working on a book chapter that addresses decision making and clarity around the different elements of a decision. But I think a lot of us in this profession have had the experience of being tasked with making some sort of recommendation. Let's say it's a curriculum adoption.

[12:21]

Hey, you're on the curriculum adoption committee. review the materials that are out there let us know what we should do and then we'll you know we'll make the purchase and adopt those instructional materials so many of us have been through a process like that only to find that at the end of the process the district goes in a completely different direction and it turned out that there was some constraint there was some factor there was some stakeholder that we didn't know about And people's feelings get hurt. People feel like their time was wasted. Trust is damaged because there wasn't that clarity of like, what are you going to do with our input? Who's actually going to make this decision? Why do you think so many educators have had experiences like that?

[12:58]

And how can we avoid some of those pitfalls?

[13:05] SPEAKER_01:

So I think it's a couple fold issue. I am a really big believer in interest-based decision-making processes and interest-based negotiations where you focus on particularly when you negotiate with employee unions, why do we want what we want, not just what do we want, right? What do we want is our positions. Why we want it is our interests. And the more we can focus on that, the better decisions tend to be made. But when it comes to the kinds of processes that you're describing, a lot of it, I think, is about transparency and lack of attention to process and lack of sort of upfront design of what that, in this case, a curriculum decision-making process should be.

[13:53]

So you have to be really transparent about, okay, you all are coming together because we're going to make this decision collaboratively, which means we're going to do consensus. This is what consensus looks like. Or I'm bringing you together just to get your input on this, but I'm going to make the decision, right? So you have to be really clear with folks upfront about what the process is going to be and what they're being asked to do. The other thing though, I've seen Justin is a lot of senior leaders, superintendents, deputies, they are so either A, so enamored with their own expertise or B, so afraid to be wrong that they end up shh, like not hiding information, but not just being open and upfront with folks and saying, hey, I know you guys did all this work and we got completely derailed because, you know, Moms for Liberty came after us and we couldn't sustain it.

[14:50]

And I am sorry. And like, thank you for helping us out. But it's just the way, like people just aren't willing. They're just not honest in school districts enough, like just open about what's really going on. And it can be really detrimental to the culture. Yeah.

[15:05]

And then people don't want to participate in the next committee because like, why would I waste my time?

[15:10] SPEAKER_00:

I wonder if we could circle back to teaching and learning, because you said in Stanford, that was the kind of the number one issue that you started with. Not always, you know, the place to start, but for a superintendent, for a senior leader who is interested in curriculum and instruction and cares very much about the quality, the learning experiences that students are getting, what are some of the big takeaways that they can get from your book or some of the experiences that you bring to bear in the book?

[15:36] SPEAKER_01:

One is the need for a vision. I was actually having this conversation yesterday with someone about the superintendent needing to be a civic and political leader. And there is that aspect of it as well. But a lot of superintendents and even principals, particularly high school principals, see themselves as the...

[15:59]

civic leader the mayor they're the convener they're the politician the communicator but they're not necessarily the champion for a clear vision for what kids should know and be able to do beyond like the state test scores and you know we want all our kids to graduate college and career ready And I don't expect superintendents, for that matter, to be deeply involved in and knowledgeable about curriculum alignment processes and all that kind of stuff in curriculum writing. But you got to know what good teaching and learning looks like. You got to go into classrooms and be able to see. You have to be able to articulate to a community why you're doing this new curriculum or making a change or adopting a new assessment or whatever it may be. You have to be able to tell stories and describe what you want kids to know and be able to do. And not just have 21st century skills, be creative problem solvers.

[16:50]

Gotta be able to describe it and tell a story around it and know what it looks like and know what good pedagogy looks like. Kids are bored in school, particularly at the high school level. It is shameful what kids go through, again, particularly high school level, in school. The experience they're having is not helping them succeed in their futures. And there's a lot of research on this. And if a superintendent is not owning teaching and learning, it's like a CEO not owning profit, right?

[17:24]

You know, it's not exactly, oh, well, you know, we do all this stuff, but well, I mean, if we actually get results, that's not, you know, it's not on me.

[17:32] SPEAKER_00:

can't operate that way right so i think you got to really have a clear vision for what kids should not be able to do and be able to engage the community in in helping you get there and understanding what that means for their kids what would some of your advice be for a leader perhaps who's new to their organization and wants to get a sense of that student perspective like what is it actually like to be a high school student in my district how can they gain that perspective

[17:59] SPEAKER_01:

So when I went to Montgomery County, I can't remember my first year, my second year, I made my executive team, which is about 25 people visit. I spend a day. I'm shadowing a kid from soup to nuts. Right. And I insisted that it be an average kid, not, you know, the top. rockstar kid.

[18:17]

And so I think that shadowing a student for a full day is eye-opening and mind-boggling because of what they have to go through on a daily basis. I'm a big believer in activating student voice. And if I were If I update my book, one of the things I'm going to build into that is student voice is such a powerful equity lever. Kids will tell you the truth. And most kids are really thoughtful and mature and responsible in the way they articulate it. So you can do a bunch of different things.

[18:47]

When I used to do not only school visits, you know, like trying to do at least once or twice a week. And then again, the formal shadowing. But you can also have student forums. You know, I used to invite, not only would I do student forums at every school, which is kind of open Q&A, but I also used to invite student government in and the newspaper, the editorial boards of each newspaper would come in a couple of times a year. I actually found they were better explainers of the school budget than the local newspapers. Right.

[19:18]

And so, yeah, no, they really are, particularly because there's been such a decline in local journalism. Some of the kids in your student newspapers are awesome and they will explain what's going on better than the local journalists who just may not have the time to cover it. So the more the leaders can engage with students, the better you are. And it also helps politically. to push an equity agenda when kids are behind it, because it's really hard for the naysayers and the resistors to reject the voices of kids.

[19:52] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, I've heard various things about shadowing students for the day over the years, but one of the things that strikes me now, what would it be like to have to have your own phone put away the entire day, just as we ask students to do, and what would that experience be like? And help me understand, what happens next after an experience like that where you have a very clear sense of your opportunities for improvement and maybe some frustrations. Wow, this is not the experience that we want for our students. How do I translate that into an agenda that I can pursue for improvement? without it becoming an exercise in teacher bashing, like, oh, you high school teachers are so boring. That's not where we want to go next.

[20:37]

So where do we go next after we gain that insight and hear from students firsthand what they need?

[20:45] SPEAKER_01:

I love that question. And the reason I love that question is because it speaks to the larger issue that we have in school districts oftentimes, which is about the sort of propensity to listen to the loudest or last voice. And I would oftentimes talk about that with board members. I would say, okay, you're telling me this, but like, is this one person who's complaining or is this a hundred or is it a thousand? And it's the same with kids. So when you go when you are doing something like, you know, shadowing kids, whatever, you have to be really clear about how that information is going to be used and whether it's going to be confidential.

[21:30]

Right. In terms of I saw in such and such class that this was going on, like you're not going to name the teacher, whatever it may be. And then how it's going to be used, how it's going to be analyzed, reported back out and then used for decision making purposes. And on reflection, Justin, I can't remember, frankly, how we used that experience, the collective experience of shadowing kids other than debriefing it, helping it certainly out. drive or or reaffirm our commitment to social emotional well-being and engagement of kids and need to increase student voice i probably could have been a lot better at determining what should be done with that information but it does speak to this larger question of like okay, how are you collecting information? How are you using it?

[22:17]

Are we clear about it? And don't get driven by the squirrels, right? And just follow the squirrels that exist because that's so easy to do. And we have to be careful about that when it comes to student voice as well.

[22:31] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. Well, and I think it gets back to vision, as you said earlier, that all of that is input for our vision, and then that feeds into resource allocation and so many of the other issues that we've already touched on. One more thing I wanted to ask about is around talent management and developing leaders and retaining leaders, because it seems like there is a lot of opportunity out there, especially when it comes to challenging assignments. And what I see happening over and over again, especially in larger districts, is that people are given challenging assignments that would be overwhelming for anyone, but especially earlier in their career, especially if they're kind of a rising star, especially if they're very promising. I've seen so many people get put in situations that are just untenable as far as workload, as far as the issues that the particular school might be dealing with.

[23:24]

How do you think about retaining leaders and supporting them so that they can succeed, especially in those challenging assignments?

[23:31] SPEAKER_01:

So one is... the need to differentiate. I feel like the culture of public schools in lots of ways, and I think we're moving away from that from somewhat I've seen, but the culture in lots of ways that everybody gets treated the same. And we don't identify people who are rock stars, nor do we identify people who may be really struggling.

[23:57]

And we don't sort of collectively talk about it. And in fact, principal supervision can be a hidden kind of experience or shielded from others. And we don't share information about, Hey, how's Justin doing? How's Josh doing? Are they ready for this? What do they need?

[24:14]

And I think that condition then hurts the ability to say, okay, let's assign talent to task. And if this task is one that is super challenging, let's make sure the resources are there. We're clear on what the plans are. We also don't do a good job of short-term iterative cycles and MVPs, the kinds of things that I've learned in business around like lean agile approaches, 30, 60 days, 30 60 90 day plans using leading indicators not lagging indicators so it's okay justin i'm going to give you this and i'll see you in june when we have our test results back and we're not looking at indicators along the way and adjusting strategies according to new results And being a partner in maybe protecting them from the politics, if that's an issue, making sure they have the resources and really thinking through what the dependence may be.

[25:09]

We just say, OK, here's an assignment. Go do it. You're a great principal. You're a great leader, whatever. You can do it. We don't think through enough the design of the actual work so that they can be successful.

[25:20]

It's like, oh, just figure it out. Right. And that's I don't think that's a good strategy.

[25:24] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. And I like the term you used, differentiation, that people are in different situations, they need different things.

[25:31] SPEAKER_01:

I think the other piece, this goes back to what I was saying earlier, we need to spend more time slowing down the inquiry to speed up the action. And we have to figure out the real problem we're trying to solve. And oftentimes people get thrown into this situation, there's a crisis, there's a problem, there's a thing, there's a need, got to do it. And we don't step back and say, okay, what are we really trying to accomplish here? Right. How are we going to know that we are tackling the problem in a way that's going to get to the root of it?

[25:58]

Who else needs to be involved? Again, I feel like I keep coming back to the same issue. The design, the upfront design work is so important so that you don't just end up spinning your wheels and going somewhere that's not going to actually be where you want to get to.

[26:15] SPEAKER_00:

So the book is Equity-Based Leadership, Leveraging Complexity to Transform School Systems. And Dr. Joshua Starr, if people want to learn more about your work or get in touch with you, where's the best place for them to go online?

[26:28] SPEAKER_01:

LinkedIn is probably the best place to find me right now. You can get my book on Amazon. You can get it at Harvard Ed Press. But LinkedIn is the best place to connect with me. You'll find me there. And feel free to send me a message.

[26:39]

And I love engaging with folks around these ideas.

[26:41] SPEAKER_00:

It's important work. Thank you so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio.

[26:44] SPEAKER_01:

Thanks for having me. I really enjoyed the conversation, Jesse.

[26:48] Announcer:

Thanks for listening to Principal Center Radio. For more great episodes, subscribe on our website at principalcenter.com slash radio.