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Illinois School Board Journal
September/October 2002

IASB poses questions for new state superintendent

Being a (state) superintendent is like any (local) superintendent; you are hired by a board to implement an agenda and to professionally advise a board on an agenda. For most of my assignments since becoming a high school principal, to becoming a local superintendent in New Jersey and all the way through the state level, I've had a specific agenda that a board had laid out. More often than not the organizations I took over were in a state of transition. It was my duty to implement the board's established agenda, or by contract, they defined for me a certain time frame to come forward to them with a change agenda. So it was just a matter of either the agenda was established, or as a condition of my employment, I was to create the change agenda. Like any other superintendent, the best I can do is either to follow the board's agenda and implement it or work for the board in terms of advancing their particular goals and objectives. In Baltimore, I was brought in by the governor and the legislature to take over that school system and to create an independent school system separate from that of the mayor. The legislation clearly identified 20, 30 different things that I was required to do -- all of which was change -- and to create the master plan, the strategic plan, and to renegotiate all the contracts and so forth, and so that was a defined agenda.

Oh, yes. That was one of the critical things that this state board and I talked about as part of my contract: the specific areas that this state board is looking to have accomplished and for me to be able to implement their agenda. It's not that I am in a position at this point to create something new. The state board has a pretty defined agenda in a variety of different areas for us to advance and to implement and (for me) to provide my best professional advice along the way of any modifications we have to make. I'm inheriting, or I should say I'm taking on, an agenda that the board has defined and that I've agreed to, that we've worked out that now moves the overall board agenda forward for the state.

I think there are a lot of obstacles that we are going to have to overcome, clearly, but I think that each of those obstacles are challenges that someone is going to have to address. It turns out that I am the person. Clearly, running state departments in other states and running school districts, I've sandwiched my state experience around school systems. I'm hoping that I'm going to be able to bring that better blend of what a local superintendent and local school board members need and see what the state can do to deliver on those needs and agendas.

Anything that I've learned and that I can bring here is that I don't need on-the-job training. I know what a state superintendent's job is. I know how to run the state agency, and more importantly, how to ask the right questions with regard to how we interface with the needs of local districts, and how does it play at the school level. I just came back from a two-hour visit to an elementary school in Springfield this morning. The most important thing to me is how we, at the state level, support the efforts of the local boards, principals and teachers in their schools. It doesn't matter what kind of effort we have; unless it's translated into something happening there in the classroom that those superintendents and those board members and those principals and teachers can benefit from, then we're wasting our time. Most importantly of what I've learned is how to do that, how to filter through and how to always keep my eye on the ball in terms of what does it mean to the teacher as it affects the student, as it affects poor achievement and effectiveness.

I think the biggest obstacle that I will have right now is just simply learning the territory. The job is the same. The tasks are the same. I just may not have the linkages as yet established and that's what we're quickly building on right now, the linkages with the school boards association, thank you for being here. I'm reaching out now to the legislators, getting letters back from them and meeting with the ROEs, meeting with the superintendents groups, and we're working on that real hard over the next couple of weeks so that we can move, hopefully, together as a group, as an alliance, as committed individuals coming from a lot of different vantage points.

I've always come from outside the organization to the top slot. I've never been, so to speak, promoted from within. My training at Wharton and Penn was organizational leadership -- it's how to take over organizations in mid-stream. The obstacle that I see mostly is that it's a vast state with a lot of diverse needs and a lot of diverse interests and how we can bring that together into a common agenda to bring about improvement, particularly in troubled economic times.

Well, obviously the greatest challenge that we face is to what extent we can raise the levels of achievement for all students, closing the gaps. It really does come down to teaching and learning. We're in this business to improve and advance the teaching and the learning. And what we can do in order to assure that the children are learning at levels that are higher than ever before and that the gaps that have existed between and among races and ethnic groups, that we can close those. I think that's number one.

Number two is how we can assure and assist the districts have the workforce they need -- the recruitment, the retention and the professional development. Most of us are getting to that point where as Baby Boomers we could retire, and we know that how many thousands upon thousands of teachers we're going to lose in the next several years. But by the same token, we know that the supply and demand issues are very, very intense. And we know that the greatest attrition rate is in the first three years for new teachers. So what resources can we roll out to help local districts once they are able to identify and hire quality people. What can they do and what help can we provide for them to be able to sustain those individuals in their most challenging years of teaching.

So, I think that first is student achievement levels; second has to be our staffing. Thirdly, it goes without saying, is the extent to which we look hard at the level of resources that are needed by schools, particularly in these difficult economic times: what can be done in order to focus resources where the greatest needs are and the greatest good can be attained.

The last part is a real key initiative and is my role in assuring that this particular agency, on behalf of the school board, is highly effective -- is much more school-district centered and meeting the needs in data management, timeliness, efficiency and knowledge. We are, by definition, highly regulatory, compliance centered. We know that. And to what extent we can provide necessary leadership, particularly at a time with so many changes in federal legislation, so many changes in state legislation. We need to be able to provide the pathways for the school boards and the administrators to be able to better implement that which we are all facing, that we haven't created but that we are recipients of. So I think that's a very important role: how we structure this department to be high performing, responsive and effective at all times.

I just came from a meeting on Reading First grants. We've got a ton of money sitting out there that we'll get from the federal government very shortly. And I want to make sure that we're able to roll that money out to the districts in a way that the districts can complete their RFP proposal, get as much technical assistance as we can. More importantly, once we're able to clear it, we don't want a time lag of the time we receive it to the time we can award. From a former local superintendent's perspective, there's nothing more frustrating than to have my staff at the local level turn around an application for funding, tell their local board we've completed it and it's been sent off, and then to have to sit back and wait while it goes through a bureaucratic channel that sometimes may take longer than the application process. That's a no-no.

What I need to make sure of is that we turnkey as rapidly as we can, because it doesn't help a district to get money halfway through a school year, a third into the school year, three-quarters of the school year. The important thing is to help these schools get the resources in a timely fashion, to implement what they decide and to provide the assistance in getting there.

There are 892 school boards in Illinois. There's one state board. But we have a common interest: children, education. ... I think that if we're going to be able to move forward as a state, it's going to mean that more constituents are working in the same direction together. It certainly is not going to be healthy for the Illinois Association of School Boards and ISBE to be working in separate directions.

I would ask that every opportunity be afforded to me and to our board to be able to interface with your executive board, your executive director and local boards in order to best understand the needs of the field and for us to be able to chart the direction in policy for the state.

I think we all realize that we have a ton of unfunded mandates, and that there have been a number of pieces of legislation, at the federal level particularly, that over the years have not been funded appropriately and have placed great burdens on districts. IDEA is perhaps the best example in terms of the responsibility that districts have with IEPs, and with scheduling, room utilization, school utilization and so forth and the staff time. It has never been appropriately funded even to this day. It's a very important piece of legislation. Don't get me wrong. It does the right thing for children, but it places tremendous burden on our schools and our districts and our administrators and our school boards, because it has not been adequately funded to implement all of the requirements.

School boards often are faced with incredible demands on a shrinking pool of resources, adding new dimensions of programs and obligations without the concurrent support. The hardest part is that local taxpayers do not quite understand. So what's always placed on our plate, I think, is to be able to determine and to justify to our constituents that the return that they're getting on their investment is significant. That's the bottom line. If you invest "X" number of dollars into education, we have to be able to determine that each dollar is extremely well used, and that we can demonstrate not only how it was used, but what is the product for it.

What I've always done at the local level is to build a budget by program. To be able to show that 5.8 percent of my budget goes to transportation, 91.8 percent goes to benefits and salaries, etc., etc., so that folks can understand that every dollar is exceptionally earmarked, every dollar is exceptionally dedicated and that for every dollar, then what do we get for it? ... (When) we're able to demonstrate that for this amount of money, this is the service provided, for this amount of money, this is the product. Pretty soon, people can understand, well gosh, you do need that kind of money in order to run your daily utilities. You need that money in order to feed the children the breakfast and the lunch programs. You need this money in order to transport them. And we can visibly see you need this money in order to maintain your facilities. Or we need this money in order to educate the children.

Now what is the net worth? We know when a child is transported from portal to portal. We know when they're fed. We know that they're warm or cool, but how do we know what the return is in the educational environment? That's where we need to be able to most critically demonstrate in ways that the public understands. Sometimes the public understands it in terms of test scores, attendance rates, drop out rates -- the scorecard issues. But the other part of it that the public understands is the care and nurturing of their child in the schools. And that's what is very hard to sometimes quantify. Mom, who has a first grader who goes off to school every day, is as critically concerned about that child getting the basic literacy skills as she is concerned about safety, welfare, the nurturing, caring issues. That's what's hard to quantify as a product, but that's where school districts need to be able to get their customer satisfaction surveys.

So I think in answering this, number one is that all board members and administrators need to be able to clearly quantify the money and how it's being used. Clearly identify how additional burdens have been accepted for which they are not receiving adequate funds in order to implement, but must -- the un-funded mandates. And thirdly, to the extent possible, provide to the public ways in which they can see the products of the investment.

I'm not quite sure that I can talk universally, and this is why: If we're sitting in Cleveland, or Milwaukee, we could talk about specifically what it means to Ohio and Wisconsin, but here it's going to be largely determined by the legislative and judicial bodies of the states. I don't think there's going to be a universal answer to that as much as it's going to have to be tailored to the individual states as it's worked through the legislative and the judicial process. It's too early to tell for Illinois. I think that once it's reviewed and determined and directionally provided by the legislature and adjudicated here legally, that's when we would revisit this to talk about what the impact would be.

The board wouldn't have hired me if they didn't think that, together, we couldn't make a significant difference. But what we're looking at is advancing the board's agenda in whatever length of time it will take -- three years, four years, five years or whatever. For me it's not as time specific as task specific in that we have opportunities to move an agenda forward that, frankly, we have a small, narrow opening of a window to move progressively forward.

One of the reasons the board chose to make an appointment, whether it was me or someone else at this time, is that they did not believe, and I would concur, that any day could be wasted or any day could be delayed, because you would be looking at another school year off or a second school year. I'd work without a contract. The contract doesn't mean anything to me as much as what it means to me to do what is in the best interest of children and to advance this board's agenda.

Three years is a long time in terms of being able to help shape and improve education. There's no doubt in my mind that most turn-arounds have to be done within a three-year period of time to be fully effective, to set the stage for long-term growth. We do have this window of opportunity with the new federal legislation, with a new governor, possibly a new legislature. We have a lot of converging issues, a lot of things coming together, which really leaves this door wide open to really move aggressively forward.

I'm a student of organizational change and if you look at it, things run in 10-year cycles. You usually have a two- to three-year window after the cycle begins to get it in place for it to play out for those remaining years. And we're at the beginning of that cycle again, right now. For Illinois, I think we're going to look back in years to come, historically, and say that 2002 was a very pivotal year. Remember that movie "A Perfect Storm"? Where you had all of these unlikely, natural forces occurring simultaneously? Well that's what I look at with Illinois right now.

You have a lot of forces, issues, matters occurring, serendipitously coming together at the same time: this board making a determination to go aggressively forward; the elections coming up in the fall; the federal legislation; the change of the economy, of what we're facing. All of these issues right now are creating a catalyst for improvement, certainly a challenge to the status quo. If we don't see this as a mega-trend, then we're missing something that's very, very clear. I happen to think that we're at the vortex of a major transition that will set the stage for at least 10 years to come. That's why this particular tenure for me is not time specific, it's task specific.

We've put together a task force that's looking at our state's assessment program, and one of the first questions I asked the principal I visited with today is to what extent the ISAT and the data that's received is used, how effective it is, the extent to which it is reliable and valid and is it a useful tool and a timely tool to improve teaching and learning.

Clearly, again, driven by the No Child Left Behind legislation, we have to take a look at assessment, and we have to take a look at what is the purpose of the assessment. Is the data that we generate, and is the knowledge that we gain from the assessment, going to be helpful in the classroom? Is it going to be helpful to the public? That's our challenge right now: to take a look at the test as it is currently constructed and determine and assure ourselves that it is, indeed, accomplishing all that we want it to accomplish. That it is a fair measurement of the standards and that we are getting the data in such a way and such a format out to the schools, that they can use it to inform instruction, monitor and adjust their instruction.

The principal was telling me today that they were looking at their data and that's how they drive their school improvement plans. They're focusing on where they're strong, where they have their shortcomings, and that's how the data should be used: instructionally. The second part of that assessment program is for public reporting. It's like we're going to a baseball game. If you enjoy baseball, you can sit there and watch nine innings, watch the ebb and flow of how the process plays out. But for some reason or another, there's this thing called a scorecard, a scoreboard that has hits, runs and errors. And somewhere in our society, the runs total up and we look toward that.

We're into a time in our society, where people are looking for validation of what has occurred. In our business, there are not a lot of indicators that are looked to and understood readily. (If) the first part is how we can use data to inform teaching and learning and diagnostic purposes, the second part of the assessment is how we have to use (data) to report to the federal government, to parents, to the person who asked the question here about the public who accuses us of squandering money. So there are several purposes for assessment. From what I've been able to gauge and read of the ISAT, I think it's a valuable tool. Now we need to make sure it's validated and to what extent our districts are getting the best benefit out of it.

One of the things that we did in the '90s in Michigan, was really raise the bar of standards and expectations. That was something that my board and I and the governor all believed we had to do. What you generally find is that people and organizations respond very aggressively to the higher demands that are placed upon them. So, one of the things that we were very proud of, of course, is we set these standards and benchmarks and accreditations and all the things that Michigan needed to do in the early '90s. And, I think they still stand the test of time today, in terms of high standards. The flip side of it, given the new federal (legislation), is you may not have everybody reach that high bar.

I remember reading an analysis once where critics were comparing Faulkner with Hemingway, and where they would call Faulkner a failure. He set such a high standard for literary experimentation that he had to fail, but what he was attempting was so beyond what anyone else had done. Is it better to have that high level of expectation and fall short of that, but yet clearly exceed someone who may have worked only within their boundaries and never know what their great potential is? I, for one, think that in this great land that we're in, this great state that we're in, that capacity is enormous and it's better to have that higher level of capacity and expectation. I would rather reach for the stars along that line, than to satisfy ourselves by having just small, little kinds of gains.

I believe in the absolute value of public education and the teaching/ learning process, that what we have to value the most are the stewardship of our schools and our institutions and our children. What I'm endeavoring to do here is always to put the best interests of children first. Every decision that I can advise the board on here is going to be always from the vantage point of what is in the best interest of children. Our legacy and our future is going to be what we have done for the children of these schools in Illinois.