Taking Full Advantage of the Freedom that ESSA Provides

          In this Phi Delta Kappan article, former superintendent Joshua Starr says that most current district leaders cut their teeth under No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, with compliance a big part of the job. The passage of the 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) should have freed leaders to be more creative and daring, but Starr fears the habits of the last 20 years are proving difficult to unlearn. Here are the “mental models” he believes need to be tossed out if we are to maximize ESSA’s liberating potential:

            • Unlearn #1: Command and control – The previous era had the central office imposing procedures, regulations, and paperwork on schools, collecting data, monitoring progress, and dispensing rewards and punishments. Instead, district leaders must be dedicated to helping front-line educators do their best work and holding themselves accountable to the community they serve.

            • Unlearn #2: Top-down leadership – Newly appointed superintendents often replaced the previous agenda with their own, focusing mostly on raising test scores. The post-NCLB era “doesn’t need Lone Rangers and slash-and-burn leaders,” says Starr. “Unless superintendents secure real involvement and commitment from a critical mass of supporters – including district staff, teachers, parents, and others – then all their great ideas and plans will disappear with them the day they get chased out of office and run out of town.”

            • Unlearn #3: Off-the-shelf programs implemented with fidelity – “Sure, it’s sometimes helpful to purchase a new curriculum,” says Starr, “but if you really want to improve teaching and learning, then you have to do the slow, complex work of recruiting, onboarding, and developing great teachers and principals; supporting them over time; building healthier school cultures; making good use of performance data, and so on.”

            • Unlearn #4: Outdated community engagement – Perfunctory, compliance-driven parent involvement consisted mostly of one-way communication that seldom resulted in really listening to the public, says Starr: “Families and community members will want to know what school and district leaders believe and why they make the decisions they do. And stakeholders will expect a real back and forth, not a sales pitch.”

            • Unlearn #5: Data-driven equity – Test scores, graduation rates, attendance data, and climate surveys don’t tell the full story of achievement gaps, he says: “School leaders ought to take a much broader perspective on the ways our public schools privilege some students and underserve others, looking not just at numerical data but also at the assumptions educators make about children from differing backgrounds, the differing ways in which rewards and punishments are handed out to those children, and all the subtle ways implicit biases enter the classroom.”

“Unlearning NCLB” by Joshua Starr in Phi Delta Kappan, October 2019 (Vol. 101, #2, pp. 58-59), no e-link available

(Please Note: The summary above is reprinted with permission from issue #807 of 
The Marshall Memo, an excellent resource for educators.)