Though
there are real policy barriers that get in the way of innovation, principals
have more authority than they think.
So concludes a new study that examined the real and imagined barriers to
school improvement in four Northeastern cities.
The
study, released Tuesday by the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the
University of Washington Bothell, found that two-thirds of the 128 barriers to
change cited by the eight principals who were surveyed were
"imagined" impediments, meaning that the barriers were not immutable
and there were ways to get around them.
Imagined
barriers were those that could be overcome through waivers or alternative
interpretations, or could be ignored altogether without real consequences,
according to the researchers;
while "real" barriers were those that were rooted in statutes,
policies, or managerial directives.
The
researchers also found that of the three states in the study— Maryland,
Connecticut, and New Hampshire— the one with the highest support for principal
autonomy, New Hampshire, had the fewest number of real roadblocks. Connecticut,
the state with the least support for principal autonomy, had the highest number
of real barriers. The differences between the two, however, were not great.
Larry
J. Miller, a senior research fellow at CRPE, co-authored the report, "Policy Barriers to School
Improvement: What's Real and What's Imagined?" with Jane S.
Lee, a doctoral student at the University of Washington. He said the results
were both encouraging and troubling.
The
researchers said the results were encouraging because only 31 percent of the
barriers to progress cited by principals were determined to be real. The other 69 percent could be
circumvented using creativity or ignored without serious consequences. Some policies that are viewed as
encumbrances result from misinterpretation of labor contracts and by accepting
long-established district practices as policies.
They
can include labor agreements that may appear to bar teachers from working on
evenings and weekends, impose strict class sizes, or policies that restrict the
movement of funds in the budget.
"Our
advice to principals, after we did this study, is whenever you're told no, ask
for the justification in writing, and then review that justification very
carefully to make sure there are no workarounds within that written policy,
because often workarounds are often written right next to the policy
itself," Miller said.
"For
instance," he continued, giving an example. "Class sizes are capped
at 30 students in the district,
but [the contract] will say that for every additional student added to
the classroom, the teacher is entitled to an additional $2,000 stipend. Well, there is your workaround. But no one read the second sentence of
the barrier. So be careful. Take
the time to look at the statute or the policy. Look for workarounds within that
policy, and also look carefully at
the consequences of violating the policy.
Sometimes there are policies that don't have any consequences attached to them and the
principals have to weigh that when making those decisions."
But
where real barriers existed, such as forced placement of teachers and staff,
those tended to have significant impacts on school culture and students. The hurdles were generally rooted in
federal, state, or district policies and statutes and were a lot more difficult
to get around. The researchers called for a loosening of those policies that
restrict innovation.
They
found three general sets of barriers: those that affected the pursuit of
instructional innovation; changing resource allocation; and improving teacher
quality.
The
principals in the study cited "instructional innovation"— such as
personalizing learning by offering a combination of in-class and online courses
for credit and starting school earlier or later in the day— as the category
where they faced the most challenges. But the researchers found the fewest
number of real barriers in this category, with only two of the 22 cited as
real.
There
is real fallout from thinking that an insurmountable impediment exists when, in
fact, it doesn't, they said. One
Baltimore principal, for example, canceled plans to apply for a school
improvement grant because the money were not expected to arrive until
October/November and he had planned to use the money for summer professional
development class for his staff.
But, according to the central office, the principal could have used
money from another line item to pay for the professional-development classes
before the grant arrived.
Nearly
half of the barriers to teacher quality —such as forced placement of teacher
and staff members, inability to fire low-performing teachers, or restrictions
on hiring from outside the district—turned out to be real, and teachers' union
contracts were thought to be the major contributing factor.
But
even in this scenario, reading the contract is important. In Pittsfield, N.H. , for example,
principals thought the teacher's contract restricted the district from asking
teachers to work on weekends and evenings. The district wanted to do this to
staff a learning lab. It turns out, the contract didn't forbid it, the teachers
just needed to be asked to work evenings and weekends and they had to agree to
do so.
Principals
have found ways to work around the barriers—whether real or imagined. In Baltimore, a principal was able to
purchase and operate a bus to take students from school to internships after he
found out that the district's policies barred school-owned buses from providing
transportation from school to home, but not from school to internships.
The
researchers place the onus on principals for doing their homework and
communicating with others in their district and beyond to find out how they
have dealt with specific challenges.
But they also cited a list of state and district policies that should be
removed because they restrict autonomy and hamper improvement. Real change cannot occur without
explicit or aggressive changes in state, federal, and local policies that stand
in the way of innovation, they said.
Among
their recommendations for changes:
On
the state level:
* Allocate funding based on
students instead of programs, staff positions, or school days
* Increase charter school
autonomy by freeing charter schools from forced placements in order to comply
with state-certification requirements
* Develop "innovative
districts," like in Colorado and Indiana, which allow schools to operate
without the restrictions of some state rules and regulations
On
the district level:
* Eliminate forced teacher
placements
* Make it easier to remove
poor-performing teachers
* Allocate a bigger portion
of the school's budget to the school and do so on a per-student basis
* Review policies to remove
barriers and make it less cumbersome for principals to do their jobs
They
also recommend assistance for principals in the following areas:
* Encouraging networking
among principals
* Helping principals
understand teacher contracts
* Training principals in
the budgeting process
* Using budget simulations
to get better results from school and district resources
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