Leadership With Latoya

We’ve all heard it before. A child’s zip code should not determine the quality of education they receive. We’ve sat through or read numerous pieces on why we cannot continue to allow zip codes to determine the success of our children. I agree. I believe with my whole heart that every child deserves a quality educational experience that allows him or her to reach their highest potential. However, it almost seems silly for us to reduce the well known inequity students experience to geography and zip codes. We need to go beyond the idea that location of where you receive your education matters and dig deep into the mindsets that hold some communities hostage in the fight for equity.

I guess my frustration with the zip code argument is that there is nothing one can do, no action a student can take, to change where he or she lives. Additionally, seeking teachers or educational leaders who are “beating the odds” signifies that we’ve given up on changing mindsets, on creating more equitable communities, on calling out White flight and segregation academies meant to keep children separated during the time they spend in school. All the zip code rhetoric in the world doesn’t answer these questions:

1. Why can’t all of our students attend a quality school together?

2. Why can’t we pool our resources and provide a great education for every child instead of spreading resources and opportunities thin because there are separate systems of schooling (both formally and informally)?

In Mark Elgart’s 2016 Huffington Post article, Student Success Comes Down To Zip Code, he shares:

A study recently released by sociologist Ann Owens of the University of Southern California showed that access to good schools in the nation’s 100 largest cities continues to exacerbate income inequality between neighborhoods. Income disparities in communities increased by 20 percent from 1990 to 2010, largely because of the desire people have to live within the boundaries of top-performing schools. The study also indicates that income segregation between neighborhoods was nearly twice as high among households that have children compared to those without.

Instead of talking about the impact of zip codes and residential location on school quality, why isn’t there more conversation around who is drawing attendance lines that exacerbate inequity? Why aren’t we discussing how we can create more mixed income neighborhoods? What’s keeping us from talking about the root causes of the income disparities this researcher speaks of and how we begin changing that?

Zip codes aren’t the problem. It’s the mindsets of those who have forgotten or either don’t believe that the public education of all children is for the public good of all of us. As long as we champion a “beat the odds” mentality instead of a “level the playing field one” the zip code narrative will hold true. While I applaud every student who overcomes the obstacles of poverty and trauma, and every educator who is able to help students be successful in spite of the obstacles they face, wouldn’t it prove helpful to work on reducing the disparities and obstacles instead of giving all of our energy and attention to how we overcome them? If we were to spend more time addressing the causes instead of the effects, perhaps we might be able to shift this conversation to one that boldly and courageously addresses what we’ve known to be a key issue in our work since James Coleman’s 1966 report: We are better together. Coleman notes,

The research results indicate that a child’s performance, especially a working-class child’s performance, is greatly benefited by his going to school with children who come from different backgrounds,” Coleman said. “If you integrate children of different backgrounds and socioeconomics, kids perform better.”

We have an opportunity before us as educators to call on policy makers and others who make decisions about economic development, jobs, quality housing, and more to help reduce the inequities that plague these areas where zip codes are credited for the lack of success children experience. If we know we are better together, that all of our children are better when we educate them together, let’s stop talking about zip codes and start talking about how we can live, work, and learn together for the benefit of all involved.

Until next time- Be you. Be true. Be a hope builder!

Latoya

@latoyadixon5

High expectations matter. There’s no doubt about that. There’s plenty of research to support the claim that teacher expectation matters a great deal when it comes to student outcomes. In 1968, Rosenthal and Jacobson published Pygmalion in the Classroom. This study provided evidence that teacher expectations can significantly impact student achievement. You can read more about the historical overview of scholarly research on the impact of teacher expectation here. Today, as I read multiple perspectives on the achievement gap and listen to practitioners it seems the solution is often boiled down to this: “The soft bigotry of low expectations.” These words came from then Gov. George W. Bush of Texas in 1999 in a speech he gave on how he planned to improve education. It’s not that I disagree with the significant impact expectations has on our students, but here’s the myth: Expectations alone won’t fix the achievement gap because these low expectations are rooted in something far more detrimental: bigotry.

For years I’ve listened to speaker after speaker share insight on how low expectations are the cause of the gap in performance between minority children and their White counterparts. While that may be partly true, the root cause of this is due to bigotry, prejudice, and systemic oppression sometimes inherent in our policies and practices in public education. Let’s get real honest here. Giving high expectations lip service doesn’t mean one truly believes that all students deserve a high quality education.

It is important and essential for us to acknowledge that being educators doesn’t mean we are universally agnostic to bias or prejudice of any kind. It means recognizing we all bring our biases to the table and it is our professional and moral responsibility to check ourselves and others when we see these skewed perceptions or biased beliefs and attitudes manifesting themselves in our classrooms and our school buildings.

If we were to really tackle the achievement gap, there are lots of things we would do, but one of them is that we would move the conversation beyond low expectations and really get at the heart of bias and bigotry. We’d talk through how we end up with skewed perspectives when we limit our personal experiences to being around other humans who live, work, worship, love, and believe like us. We’d end up digging deep into people’s hearts before we tried changing their minds. Even then it may not change anything, but the perpetual conversation around low expectations for Black and Brown children hasn’t either. I’m convinced it is because most are afraid to call it what it is: bigotry and bias. I don’t see it as soft either, but that’s a post for another day.

Those individuals who desire to lead with equity at the center must understand that this work goes far beyond having high expectations for all. It means recognizing when there are policies or practices that create inequity (intentionally or not) and making changes to those to create a more equitable experience for all students. Every educator has a set of core values that impacts their perspective and behavior. It can be difficult to see the inequity in practices and policies depending on your experiences, and especially if you’ve not been on the end of a practice or policy negatively impacting your access and opportunity. If leaders are interested in leading with equity in mind,they evaluate every decision with reflection questions like these:

1. Who are we leaving out?

2. Who is being excluded?

3. What barriers are impeding their access and/or opportunity?

Then, they work tirelessly to remove the barriers so that when they use the phrase “all students” it truly means all students. They call out practices that exclude and offer solutions to make them more inclusive and equitable. They build in deliberate ways to ensure that low expectations are checked along with bias. They create policies and practices that create a more equitable experience, equitable access, and equitable opportunities for all students. They are courageous enough to do this even when they are alone in their advocacy.

If we truly are interested in closing the achievement gap, we’re going to have to talk about the root causes: hearts and minds that believe some students are less capable and deserve different opportunities than others. The conversation will be difficult, but it has the potential to lead us to a place we’ve needed to address from the very beginning: the hearts of those who serve.

Until next time! Be you! Be true! Be a hope builder!

Latoya

@latoyadixon5

In the Spring of 2014, I graduated with my Doctorate of Philosophy from the University of South Carolina. After five long years of a rigorous and intense dual Education Specialist and Doctorate of Philosophy program, I was looking forward to nights and weekends again. Additionally, I was seeking a new professional challenge. I had served as principal in the same school for 6 and a half years and our school was able to make dramatic improvements in student achievement. For five consecutive years, our standardized test scores improved. We were proud of our hard work and the success of our students, yet I knew it was time for a new professional challenge. In a discussion with a colleague and fellow administrator, I expressed my desire to embark on a new journey. My colleague agreed that it was indeed an appropriate professional next step for me. She said, “Latoya, face it. You are a turnaround principal.” I accepted what she said at that moment. I had heard the term before. It was a term for principals who had gone into underperforming schools and helped improve their test scores or who were leaders who were able to help their school be removed from the state’s low performing list and those people were considered a rarity in the profession. My next professional move had to be just that if I was going to be able to be seen as a turnaround leader.

I spent the next few years at a low-performing middle school in North Carolina. Using a co-principal model and with the opportunity to work daily with my dearest friend and colleague, Michael Waiksnis. We wanted to improve our school. We implemented professional learning communities, improved the climate and culture as evidenced by the teacher working conditions survey, and after two years of diligence, hard work, sweat, and many tears and frustrations, the school was no longer on North Carolina’s low performing list. We celebrated. We were thrilled that our efforts had manifested in the way in which we needed them to in order to be removed from the low performing list. I went on to undertake a new professional challenge, working with low performing schools at the state level just across the border in my home state, South Carolina.

After nearly 20 years in public education, I must confess something here in this blog: I am not a turnaround leader because turnaround leadership is a myth. That’s right. I said it. I see myself as a transformational leader now, and it’s far more accurate than the trendy word, turnaround, that is used in education far too often. I am sure some are wondering where my ultimate aim might land with this post. If you’re brave enough to consider something different than what others generally believe, keep reading.

When public educators and others use the word turnaround leader or school turn around, what exactly are they referencing? What has to change for a school leader to be considered or categorized as a turnaround leader?  In my experience, it seems that the turnaround is only about raising student achievement on a standardized test. What’s often left out of the concept of turnaround are all the other things that also need to be turned around: inequity, teacher and principal retention and recruitment, community and/or district mindset, culture, climate, equitable access and opportunity for students, and more. While we may, in fact, be able to improve test scores in spite of serving high concentrations of low-income students, our ability to raise the test scores of students doesn’t turnaround the other equally and sometimes significantly more important elements that impact students in ways far beyond their K-12 experience.

We have yet to implement a solution or deliberate strategy to close the achievement gap. Instead, we seek leaders who can help students improve their performance on standardized tests in spite of all the barriers and obstacles they face. We accept the barriers and laud those who can improve test scores in spite of at all as turnaround leaders. I find this extremely problematic because this is, in essence, an acceptance of the inequity our students of poverty and often, of color face. Our youngsters in high poverty schools across our country are often taught in educational settings that are highly segregated by socioeconomics and sometimes race. They are often also subjected to less experienced and effective teachers, to a constant turn over of school and district leaders, and to fewer opportunities and access to more rigorous and advanced coursework, extracurricular activities, and the like. While test scores may take a different direction, these things that also gravely impact the success of students well beyond their K-12 years, don’t turn around at all.

When we subscribe to language and usage of terms like school turn around, we inadvertently agree that subjecting students to a less equitable learning environment and still being able to educate them enough to pass the standardized test as acceptable. While I am very proud of the work we did in both schools where I served as a principal, I remain concerned about the struggle to find and retain effective teachers and school leaders, the lack of access and opportunities for students of poverty, the impact of schooling in environments where there is a lack of resources and a high concentration and homogeneous grouping of students from disadvantaged backgrounds, and the turnover in teacher and school leaders for these students, which I too, contributed to as a leader who left after just a few years.

Read my book Burned Out, Beaten Up, Fighting Back: A Call To Action For America’s Public Educators to learn more about that.

If turn around leadership were a real concept, our country would not have an achievement gap among students of various backgrounds and races in reading and math that persists across the country,  in spite of all the turn around leaders. You can read more about the persisting gap here.

Perhaps what we need  are not turn around leaders, but courageous and brave leaders who are willing to work to turn around the mindsets about the impact of creating schools of high concentrations of poverty, the idea that excelling in spite of having less access and opportunity to rigorous courses is something to applaud but also something to change, who are willing to admit that our issues of inequity and the achievement gap will not be solved and cannot be changed by simply hiring strong instructional leaders who can move test scores in a positive direction. While test scores may turn around, to improve the quality of schooling and ultimately of life that our students of poverty experience, we must also turn around the mindsets of those who create the policies that impact these students. We must turn around the lack of access and opportunity that these students experience. We must turn around the revolving door of less experienced and ineffective teachers these students are subjected to having as instructors. We must turn around the 30% turnover rate among principals in high-poverty schools. 

Only then can we truly begin to talk about the concept of turning around low-performing schools. Let’s have a conversation that matters and turn around our persistent and stubborn avoidance of the root issue: inequity.

Until next time-Be you. Be true. Be a hope builder.

Latoya

@latoyadixon5

In an earlier blog post, I wrote about overcoming the deficit mindset in public education. My post concluded with this thought:

There is an enormous opportunity in public education right now for us to create a new view. That perspective is one in which we balance our approach with an assets based culture and exploit the strengths of educators in our effort to mitigate our weaknesses. We can begin by creating a structure that makes the celebration of what is going well in our classrooms, schools, and districts routine and expected. We can create a new narrative, one that elevates the profession and encourages educators to continually find ways to improve at the same time.

If we were to spend our time and efforts on identifying the practices and pedagogy that are working, effective at helping us to achieve the results we desire, that improve both learner outcomes and teacher practices, we’d use our best skills and knowledge to spread and scale what we know is effective. We’d exploit our strengths instead of spending so much of our time identifying the deficits our kids have based on a high stakes assessment. We’d spend more time planning how we would do more of what’s working instead of planning for the implementation of a new concept when our teachers are still attempting to master the ones that were initiated last school year. The constant change in strategy works against us in so many ways. This lack of stability and focus counters the idea that effective concepts should be scaled and spread and we should figure out how to do just that instead of figuring out which new instructional program to implement to address the deficits we’ve identified.

To be clear, I am not suggesting we ignore the areas where our children need additional support. What I am suggesting is that we look to what we know works and find ways to replicate effective practices to address said deficits instead of the addition of new pedagogies that are somewhat experimental in nature when we have yet to see evidence that that the newest innovation works for our students. I was particularly moved last week by a workshop I sat in led by Dr. Anita Archer at the MTSS Innovations Conference. Dr. Archer spent several hours talking to us about the high yield and effective learning strategies and pedagogical methods that are supported by evidence. One particular item she highlighted moved me a great deal. It was a slide with some of John Hattie’s effect sizes for various teaching practices.

When I saw the effect size for problem-based learning I was immediately moved to share the information. I’ve read Hattie’s book, Visible Learning. It’s a critical read for anyone who intends to be an instructional leader. Dr. Archer went on to clarify that there are some critical pre-requisites for problem-based learning to be effective and to me, therein lies the often missing pieces.

She went on to highlight nine essential teaching strategies that can support reducing the variation in instructional effectiveness in our classrooms. I’ll be sharing those in a later post, but many of them can be found in the tool my colleague and I developed: Elements of An Effective Lesson

We’re at a critical point in public education and there is a grave need for us to shift the conversation, the narrative, the mindset, and the work. Our focus needs to be centralized in how we replicate what is working for our students. Our efforts must be driven by their needs and their learning. Far too often, the high stakes assessment environment leads us to abandoning what we know students need or rejecting a concept we know is effective for learning because we are unsure if it will manifest on the test. We must have the courage to do what is best for our students to learn and to improve the practices of teachers. We are professionally and morally obligated to be loyal to their needs well before we are loyal to any high stakes test. I dare you to be courageous!

Until next time! Be you! Be true! Be a hope builder!

Latoya

@latoyadixon5

“It was time that Negroes were treated equally with whites, time that they had a decent school, time for the students themselves to do something about it. There wasn’t any fear. I just thought — this is your moment. Seize it!”-Barbara Johns, Civil Rights Activist, 1935-1991

Equity has been a central theme in the education of American students since the earliest times. Well before the landmark, Brown v. Board of Education case in 1954, there were many others who expressed concern and raised awareness that separate was inherently unequal. This advocacy was carried by many educators and other external stakeholders who elected to become active participants in the fight for educational equality. Today, as America faces an increasing number of segregated schools, educators have a new opportunity and moral obligation to honor those who carried the fight for equity long ago, for the sake of the country’s children. In Alexander Nazaryan’s, March 2018 Newsweek article titled, School Segregation In America Is As Bad Today As It Was In The 1960’s, he notes:

“Charlotte, [NC] in 2018, looks like most other American cities, where schools are nearly as segregated as they were before the 1954 Supreme Court decision of Brown v. Board of Education, which declared separate but equal schools to be unconstitutional. Some cities, like New York, never really integrated their schools, hiding for decades under the guise of Northern liberalism. Many others complied with court orders, but did so unwillingly and incompletely, without ever convincing people that integration was a public good.”

The advocacy of educators has been central in bringing about change to the American educational equity landscape. If educators like Septima Clark and Sue Cowan Williams Morris had not seen themselves as having a key role to play in bringing about such change, the change that eventually was ordered to occur based on the 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education may have been delayed or possibly could have not occurred at all. Their bravery, courage, and conviction is to be admired, but most of all educators must honor their legacies by becoming advocates themselves.

Sue Cowan Williams Morris began her career as a teacher in Little Rock Arkansas in 1935. In March of 1941, a petition was filed with the Little Rock School Board demanding equal salaries between Black and White teachers. When the board failed to make changes, Morris became the plaintiff in the lawsuit, Morris v. Williams in 1942. The suit requested a balancing of the salaries between Black and White teachers. Morris lost that case, but went on to appeal the decision. In 1945 the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis, Missouri overturned the initial case ruling and decided in her favor. Morris was then fired as was the principal of her school. Seven years later in 1952, she would get her teaching job back, but only after a call from then-superintendent Harry Little, asking if she had “learned her lesson”. She taught in the Little Rock School District until 1974, when she retired.

Septima Clark was a South Carolina educator and civil rights activist. She began her teaching career in 1916 on Johns Island in South Carolina. Motivated by the racial disparity between the salaries of Black and White teachers and school facilities, she became an advocate for change. She went on to teach in Charleston, South Carolina and played a key role in changing the policy that prevented Black teachers from working in public schools. In 1919, Clark joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and worked tirelessly to get the city to hire African-American teachers. In 1945 Clark along with the NAACP, was represented by Thurgood Marshall in a case that sought equal pay for Black and White teachers. When the case was won, her salary increased by three times as much. Clark’s internal urging to challenge the status quo did not end here. When South Carolina made it lawfully illegal for public employees to belong to civil rights groups like the NAACP in 1956, she refused to rescind her membership and was fired. Her advocacy didn’t end there although her teaching career had been brought to a halt in the Charelston County School District. She went on to labor tirelessly as an educator at The Highlander Folk School which later became known as the first citizenship school because of its centralized efforts on literacy and voting. Highlander’s Citizenship School program helped people learn how to instruct others in their communities in basic literacy and math skills, and as a result more people were able to vote, despite the literacy tests that many states used to disenfranchise African-American voters. Clark is often described by various scholars as calm, yet unafraid, and fiercely brave in her advocacy for equity.

Today’s educators have a moral and professional obligation to channel the courage of heroes like Clark and Morris and work tirelessly to bring equity to America’s schools. A perpetual discussion on the achievement gap should not exclude the importance of educators who advocate for equity. There is a false narrative that the gap is a sheer result of low expectations and minimal efforts. Conversations abound about how educators must not make excuses, but be held accountable for the performance of ALL students. This accountability focus, however, must be a comprehensive and shared one. Educators have a duty to bring this conversation to light about how segregation is still negatively impacting the academic achievement of Black and Brown children. This is not a simple exercise in raising expectations and rigor. Access and opportunity are central to providing ALL students with the education they deserve and in closing the achievement gap output that is often highlighted while the inputs of such remain in the shadows.

We honor the legacies of folks like Clark and Morris when we raise our awareness, we speak up, and we commit to serve in ways that help change the educational equity landscape in this country. Clark and Morris did not wait on those who set the policies and developed the law to change them. They saw themselves as instrumental in bringing about change. Today’s educators must start by seeing themselves in the same way and only then will we honor the legacies of those who came before us.

Until next time-be you, be true, be a hope builder!

Latoya

@latoyadixon5