The Way We Do Things Around Here.

For some, a golden rule of education is "make no waves," not even a ripple.

Superintendents who have watched their colleagues drown in the rough seas of highly charged educational reform and restructuring understand this rule. They are wary of concerns expressed by teachers, community, and school board members.

One way to calm the waters is to keep teachers and communities occupied with initiatives that appear new but have little impact. The administrator's role focuses more on holding all the pieces together and smoothing the waters of turbulence, rather than on improving what occurs within the classroom. Superintendents often develop a "circle the wagons" mentality to survive.

Cultural Control

If schools are to be improved, order can no longer be the superintendent's major focus. The culture, not the administrator, must provide the control, stability, and alignment needed for educational progress.

Culture, in its most basic form, is an informal understanding of "the way we do things around here." Culture is a powerful yet ill-defined concept within the organization that expresses organizational values, ideas, attitudes, and beliefs. The job of superintendents is to get the culture to focus on the question, "What works best, given the complexity, demographics, history, and needs of children within a school?"

Creative improvements develop as schools move from the ostensible calmness of tight bureaucratic control to the seeming turbulence and chaos that result from sharing responsibility for school improvement. The turbulence of developing and implementing mutually shared visions, not the surface stability of ensuring over-tight control and fixing school problems, is the precondition to major educational breakthroughs within schools.

Superintendents and their communities must learn to be comfortable with turbulence and chaos and see it as a necessary catalyst to improvement. It is difficult to stay with information that is different and disturbing because it challenges existing views of reality. Yet this information ultimately allows organizations to make quantum leaps.

Superintendents are courageous in that they risk the perils of allowing a new order to evolve. Jennifer James, noted cultural anthropologist, observes, "You must plow the fields of your past, so you can plant new seeds."

Capacity Building

When superintendents develop a strong culture within a school district, the turbulence surrounding real improvement no longer seems so frightening. The system is not so quick to short-circuit the complex, messy process of school improvement. Among the key elements of this work culture are:

* schools that focus on improvements that positively influence what happens to students;

* collegiality, trust, integrity, and sufficient time for open, free-flowing communication;

* an explicit mutually shared vision of the ideal school;

* a climate of mutual support, growth, and innovation;

* a three- to seven-year perspective for improvement;

* face-to-face involvement of appropriate stakeholders;

* work with values, interests, and expertise;

* continuous improvement that is incremental and systematic;

* staff development, character, and skill as the essential components to school improvement;

* cooperation among home, school, and community;

* empowerment and encouragement of staff to experiment, innovate, and share success;

* continual monitoring and feedback of results; and

* central administrative support of individual school efforts.

Paradigm Shifts 

Management consultant Margaret Wheatley, author of Leadership and the New Science, states, "We'd better create support for the process of experimentation, and thinking together, and working it out, and making mistakes, and getting it wrong as well as right, and changing all the time."

The superintendent must help the organization deal with the inevitable pain and loss that occurs while developing a concrete, mutually shared vision and making a transition to the vision. Cultural support for shared leadership can provide individuals with the ability and freedom to test ideas and, when successful, to be active in efforts to institutionalize them.

Administrators, practicing cultural leadership, socialize people into the belief that they have the potential to develop needed visions, programs, and results that produce and sustain excellent schools. Extraordinary individual efforts, enthusiasm, and continuous improvement are cultivated by leaders who understand and implement the attributes of a supportive culture.

The golden rule becomes "culture and chaos as catalysts." Once this rule is embraced, school divisions can give individuals within the school the autonomy to really make a difference.