As leaders, it has never been more important to address the culture of our schools. The past two years have highlighted the role that a safe, consistent and welcoming culture can have on our teachers and our students.

Culture, however, can be beneficial or it can be toxic. Our first two blogs of this series named this proverbial elephant in the room. This piece hits squarely on a leadership challenge: What is the leader’s contribution to building a healthy culture or allowing a toxic culture to persist?

As those of us in education know, a crisis was already brewing prior to the pandemic. Nationwide, total enrollment in teacher preparation programs has declined by more than a third since 2010. “Educators today are expected to cure society's ills, prepare young adults for life in a complex, technological society and accomplish both of these for salaries not commensurate with their education,” states a 1986 article in Educational Research Quarterly, “Educator Burnout: Sources and Consequences,” by Richard L. Schwab, Susan E. Jackson and Randall S. Schuler. Thirty-five years later, the consequences of educator burnout have become clear.

Despite the structures put in place to foster success, schools who have it all (ample resources, accomplished leaders, skilled teachers and support from families and the community) can still fail as a system. The reason is this; a culture of isolation at the classroom level exists. To combat this, The Center for Educational Effectiveness (CEE) staff surveys measures what we call the “I vs. They” gap. This gap represents the difference in what a person believes about themselves (positive for most individual teachers) and what they perceive about their colleagues’ behavior (less positive). We judge ourselves by our intent and others by their behavior.

Inherently, educators set student achievement goals. We put structures in place to monitor academic data attempting to meet those targets (policy driven) and end up distancing ourselves from the vital school conditions that lead us to significant changes in student achievement. This may explain why school improvement policy efforts in the United States have failed over the past two decades.

It seems across all sectors, and education is no different, too often we do not have consensus around how to improve the current reality. When we do not know what our next critical work is as an organization, we can expend precious resources (time and money) applying solutions to problems that do not exist.

In my last piece as a guest contributor, we covered the critical need to have actionable data to help our systems navigate through and beyond the COVID 19 pandemic. The title, To Set Your Course, You Must First Know Where You Are, applies to the following four data domains that we work in as professional educators: demographic, perceptual, contextual, achievement.

In my first two pieces as guest contributor, we focused on the urgency of what some refer to as the “twin pandemics,” social unrest and COVID 19, causing us to need access to high quality data to ensure we are framing the issues unique to each school system during these tumultuous times. In addition to having high quality data to frame clear problems of practice, it is essential each school organization consistently measure and build high-quality culture, as absent high-quality culture, little work benefitting children gets done.

Most schools are good, defined as providing the expected opportunities leading to expected achievement for children. The opportunity gap is created by factors either outside of a school’s control or at the maximum, factors schools can influence but cannot control. The question then becomes, what happens inside of those very few exceptional schools where we see student achievement at levels the school’s demographic would not predict?

In this five-part blog series I have questioned policy and practice, over reliant on standardized test scores and indirectly the standardized movement, against the stark reality of few schools providing transformative opportunities for students inside of their school systems.