WEBVTT 00:00:11.046 --> 00:00:12.506 My name is Andy Calkins. 00:00:12.506 --> 00:00:16.676 I am senior vice president at Mass Insight Education and Research Institute. 00:00:17.216 --> 00:00:21.626 ..the four principle resources that a school's leadership team has 00:00:21.626 --> 00:00:24.486 to spend in organizing the school's work. 00:00:24.956 --> 00:00:32.006 Those resource bases are people, time, money, and programming. 00:00:32.526 --> 00:00:36.786 The research base for all this work came out of The Turnaround Challenge, 00:00:36.786 --> 00:00:43.036 which was a report that our non-profit group issued last year after two years of research. 00:00:47.506 --> 00:00:49.966 The first category is people. 00:00:50.706 --> 00:00:55.806 Think of people as the core asset base in any school. 00:00:56.306 --> 00:01:02.776 And as in almost any organization, there is a sort of 20-60-20 rule that applies. 00:01:03.296 --> 00:01:07.716 There are 20 percent over-performers and 20 percent under-performers 00:01:07.716 --> 00:01:09.496 and 60 percent who are somewhere in the middle. 00:01:10.506 --> 00:01:16.966 Any principal charged with putting his or her school through a turnaround process 00:01:16.966 --> 00:01:26.406 and emerging victorious at the other end has got to insist and must have enough authority 00:01:26.406 --> 00:01:30.956 over who works in the building to be able to address the problem represented 00:01:30.956 --> 00:01:33.556 by those 20 percent of under-performers. 00:01:34.956 --> 00:01:40.486 There are a number of other steps that principals need to take to work successfully 00:01:40.486 --> 00:01:45.476 with a staff in a turnaround mode. 00:01:45.476 --> 00:01:49.386 They all involve transparency and enlistment: 00:01:50.106 --> 00:01:54.426 making sure that the goals of the turnaround effort are clear, 00:01:54.826 --> 00:01:59.006 making sure that everyone shares in the vision for where the school is going to go, 00:01:59.516 --> 00:02:03.186 making sure that they have played a role in helping to shape that vision, 00:02:03.766 --> 00:02:09.746 and perhaps counterintuitively, making sure that the loudest voices, 00:02:09.746 --> 00:02:15.316 including those who are potential opponents, are brought inside of the change. 00:02:20.396 --> 00:02:26.246 Principals have got to have some authority over both how time is divided 00:02:26.246 --> 00:02:28.706 up during the school day and, if possible, 00:02:29.206 --> 00:02:32.456 how much time there is in the school day and in the school year. 00:02:32.926 --> 00:02:37.216 Most of the high-performing, high-poverty schools out there have figured out a way 00:02:37.746 --> 00:02:42.646 to get past the 180-day school year and to extend either the length 00:02:42.646 --> 00:02:45.216 of the school day or the school calendar or both. 00:02:45.506 --> 00:02:51.946 In a turnaround situation, a principal and a staff that have devised a clear strategy 00:02:51.946 --> 00:02:58.766 for change need to be able to organize the time that they spend together in vertical 00:02:58.766 --> 00:03:06.046 and horizontal teams specifically around the principle goals of that change process. 00:03:10.526 --> 00:03:15.326 Most schools don't have much discretionary money at all. 00:03:15.386 --> 00:03:21.326 All of those decisions are made at the district level, but the principal and the leadership team 00:03:21.326 --> 00:03:27.956 in charge of a school needs to be able to have authority over some discretionary funding. 00:03:28.546 --> 00:03:34.206 A good turnaround principal will do a survey or use some other method to find 00:03:34.206 --> 00:03:39.646 out right away what the most important issues are among the faculty, 00:03:39.646 --> 00:03:45.136 and some of those will be in the category of fairly easily addressable. 00:03:45.676 --> 00:03:52.796 And the principal needs to be able to have some kind of a budget at hand to allow him 00:03:52.796 --> 00:03:59.066 or her to be able to signal a change process by addressing those needs right away. 00:04:03.946 --> 00:04:08.786 Schools and school reform in general have focused mostly on what we call "readiness 00:04:08.886 --> 00:04:14.696 to teach" strategies, which all have to do with the factors that shape how the adults work 00:04:14.696 --> 00:04:19.375 in the building: the standards, the curriculum, the formative assessments, 00:04:19.426 --> 00:04:21.896 the instructional strategies, the professional development. 00:04:22.286 --> 00:04:23.506 All that's really important. 00:04:23.786 --> 00:04:26.896 It has to be there, and there has been a lot of good work done in that area. 00:04:27.586 --> 00:04:32.486 But these schools, the underperforming schools, are serving largely disadvantaged, 00:04:32.486 --> 00:04:37.616 high-poverty student enrollments, and we have not by-and-large done a good job of figuring 00:04:37.616 --> 00:04:41.586 out how to serve those kinds of enrollments at any kind of scale. 00:04:42.126 --> 00:04:43.886 That's what we call "readiness to learn." 00:04:44.336 --> 00:04:50.966 So the schools that are serving those populations well have put as much emphasis 00:04:50.966 --> 00:04:58.366 on understanding what they have to do to serve those kids and meet them halfway as they have 00:04:58.366 --> 00:05:01.766 on the more traditional aspects of what schools do. 00:05:02.786 --> 00:05:14.776 They understand that what works, say, out in suburban Wellesley has to be present in the work 00:05:14.776 --> 00:05:19.226 that they are doing in downtown Boston, but if they try to do exactly the same thing 00:05:19.226 --> 00:05:25.386 with these kids who don't have the same kind of supports at home, it's just not going to work. 00:05:25.386 --> 00:05:32.766 Any principal being charged with the responsibility of undertaking turnaround needs not 00:05:32.806 --> 00:05:39.436 to give short shrift to the challenge at hand and to be able to stand up to his 00:05:39.436 --> 00:05:43.576 or her superintendent, to fellow principals and to say, "Look, 00:05:44.316 --> 00:05:50.476 here are the things I need in order to have a crack at success here. 00:05:50.686 --> 00:05:56.286 I need more control over the staff that I am working with in my building. 00:05:56.706 --> 00:05:59.186 I need more control over how time is used. 00:05:59.596 --> 00:06:05.176 I need more control over my budget, and I need control over the programming choices 00:06:05.176 --> 00:06:07.646 that we make at the school level." 00:06:07.876 --> 00:06:13.626 Any principal who goes into a turnaround situation without those kinds 00:06:13.626 --> 00:06:18.936 of accountabilities is giving up the ship before the ship even starts to sail.