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Creating a Climate for Change: Essential Schools in Louisville

Sidebars:
Jefferson County's Profile
Figure 1: The Infrastructure of Innovation: Jefferson County's Staff Development Academy
Figure 2: Starting Over from Scratch: Kentucky's Education Reform of 1990
Figure 3: Cross-Disciplinary Teaming and Active Learning: The Middle School Model
Figure 4: One School's First Step: Changing the Schedule to Get the Numbers Down

Classroom change can't happen across a district unless its leaders lay the goundwork, by setting up structures that support teachers in trying out new ways. In Louisville, a superintendent with Essential School ideas has been doing just that, and schools are poised for the even harder task ahead.

The scene: an athletics awards banquet at Fairdale High School in Jefferson County, Kentucky, about a year ago. Principal Marilyn Hohmann is sitting next to the district superintendent, Donald W. Ingwerson. She is a scrappy, compact, red-headed dynamo with fire in her blue eyes; he is serene, white-haired, a kindly, almost ministerial countenance belying the bulldog tenacity that lies beneath. He turns to her mildly. "If in ten years I can come into this high school and not recognize most of its administrative or teaching practices," he says, "I will consider our work to be a success."

Fifteen years ago this Louisville school district was in a crisis of the worst order. The decline of factory work had left the region with tremendous unemployment. Louisville's schools, with mostly black students, were run separately from those of surrounding Jefferson County, whose students were mostly white, and the systems were under court order to merge and desegregate. Overloaded with administrators, the bureaucracy of the merged system sagged to the breaking point. Anger and alienation ran high in the community.

Today, the same district has created conditions and incentives many point to as a nationwide model for school reform. In his ten years as superintendent, Don Ingwerson's ultimate goal has been children's classroom success, but he sees classrooms as only one link in a chain of success that involves the entire community. To turn Jefferson County into what he calls "a learning community," Ingwerson's administration made structural changes that laid the groundwork for change across the district. When in 1990 Kentucky legislators radically rewrote the laws governing its entire educational system, Jefferson County was where they turned for advice. And yet even now, forward-looking educators in this district consider that the most important reforms--those that take place between student and teacher in the classroom--still wait to be made.

The vocabulary of reform in Jefferson County is familiar--it speaks of restructuring schools; of participatory, site-based management; of professional development for teachers, business-school partnerships, and parental choice. But it is particularly striking how thoroughly this school district has made its own the articulated goals of the Coalition of Essential Schools. Don Ingwerson passionately shares Theodore Sizer's conviction that all children can learn; one hears that phrase everywhere, from central office budget discussions and school board meetings to athletic banquets and job apprenticeships. The metaphor of "student as worker" forms the theme of a district-wide staff development effort. Performance-based assessments that ask students to demonstrate competence are increasingly required in all schools. Little wonder that of Jefferson County's 20 high schools, six have been members of the Coalition of Essential Schools since 1986, and five more have recently joined. And although each of these schools differs considerably in just how and how far it reflects Essential School principles, together they form a valuable picture of the practical and political process of "going Essential" across a district.

The Ground Rules of Change

An outsider exploring Louisville's schools for evidence of important classroom- level change will find only scattered examples of Essential School principles in fully articulated form. But administrators like Debbie Riggs, who coordinates the Coalition's efforts in the district, see no cause for discouragement in this. Perhaps the most effective way to get schools to explore Essential School principles, she notes, is very simple: let them do it their way. Teachers and principals should see the Coalition not as a program but as a process, she argues, not as a monolithic model but as a framework for discussion.

At the same time, Don Ingwerson's administration began early in his term to put in place several key practices that prepared the ground for substantive change at the classroom level. First, he "flattened the pyramid" of administrative bureaucracy so that school principals report directly to him, and gave them far greater autonomy in how they run their schools. Second, he regularly got teachers out of the classroom and into situations where they might observe and discuss new ways of teaching. Third, he leaned heavily on Louisville's business community to put money, equipment, and expertise directly into the schools. And finally, he gave schools wide freedom to try new things, often as magnet or "learning choice" schools specializing in a particular area, and he let parents and students choose to attend schools out of their neighborhood as long as a proper racial balance was maintained.

"The result has been a lot of 'little tries'--niches of innovation that lead to bigger changes," says Pat Todd, a 20-year teaching veteran who is now Director of School Restructuring for the district. "I like to call it a 'centralized decentralized' reform agenda." Todd works out of the Jefferson County Public Schools Gheens Academy, a stylishly remodeled brick elementary school building that is the center of the system's professional development efforts. (See separate story, page 3.) Begun in 1983 with a $600,000 grant from Louisville's Gheens Foundation, the Academy appears to be at once catalyst, conceptual center, and communications hub for much of Jefferson County's school change. "Our job is to start things," says Terry Brooks, its director. "We get them going and give them away." He grins. "We comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable."

What this means in practice is that Jefferson County teachers have a place to go to talk, listen, and try out new things. "We're aiming for nothing less than an internal transformation of every school and every individual in our system," says Pat Todd with no trace of irony.

Just what that transformation consists of, however, can prove a delicate question for teachers determined not to be the dupes of yet another scheme for quick-fix school reform. "The biggest hurdle we face with respect to the Coalition of Essential Schools," Todd says, "is to get people to realize it isn't a kit you can adopt, but a philosophy of how kids learn, how adults and kids interact." That philosophy can influence the way teachers explore any of the newer ideas that present themselves to educators, whether or not they emanate from Essential School principles. So on a typical day at Gheens Academy, a group of ninth-grade English teachers meet to discuss writing across the curriculum; another team is developing exercises for cooperative learning; individual teachers use the Curriculum Resource Center to prepare classroom materials; and beginning teachers meet with their mentor teachers to hash out problems in their classes. A "student as worker" study group, continually shifting in its membership, is planning a special summer school session in which new interdisciplinary curricula and exhibitions of mastery can be tried out in classroom practice with the help of seasoned Essential School people.

One Leader, or Many?

How much is Jefferson County's spirit of change due to the influence of a single leader? Virtually everyone in this system credits Donald Ingwerson with the dramatic differences this district has seen in the decade since he took the superintendent's office. Taken alone, the extraordinary length of his tenure has provided a stability crucial to the district's progress. But a closer look reveals just how Ingwerson has operated--not through charisma or high-decibel demands, but through a quiet, persistent refusal to give up, and the seeming ability to make individual people feel personally responsible for the schools' success.

The first challenge Ingwerson faced was a polarized and suspicious school board, weary from years of strife and saddled with a complex and top-heavy bureaucracy. "I spent my first year listening, forging relationships with the staff, and streamlining the bureaucracy," he says. But the bigger job was even more fundamental: the teachers and the administration did not share the same vocabulary or the same motivations. "Teachers were concerned with students and with union issues; principals were concerned with management," Ingwerson says. "We began a five-year plan to create a common vision, centered around how to help children be successful."

At the same time, the superin-tendent got out into the community, speaking to church and business groups of his conviction that every child can learn. "That was a new idea to many of them," he comments. "They hadn't experienced it in their own lives, perhaps." During his first year, he went "toe-to-toe" with the business community, he says: "I embarrassed them into appointing me to their committees. Then I took every opportunity to ask them point-blank what THEY were doing to help our children." Whether the answer was to donate used furniture or equipment to schools, to form job internships for students, or to donate money for special causes, the strategy has clearly worked; over 700 business-school partnerships on every scale now exist in Jefferson County schools.

"Don is a master at bringing people along," says Fairdale's Marilyn Hohmann. "He won't take no for an answer from the school board, but he never forces an issue. He'll go back a dozen times if he has to, discussing ideas for change until people feel comfortable with the concepts." In fact, Ingwerson's style reflects an abiding, almost religious faith that no limits can block progress if sufficient will is there. "I go to meetings where the problems are so huge that you could easily cry doom and gloom," he says serenely. "I just ask, 'What would you do if you had no limits, if you could wipe the slate clean? Could you get the job done if you had a billion dollars?' Very often, the answers are right in front of you. The limits are illusory--it's the motivation that's missing. The longer you're in a job, the more narrow your scope of what's acceptable tends to get. We need to take off those blinders to really get hold of our problems."

While insisting that every person in the district take active part in the reform process, Ingwerson also made it easier for them to do so. He eliminated an entire level of middle management jobs--regional superintendents, directors of instruction, coordinators of supply services--placing many of those people into jobs opened by attrition, but saving a million dollars to use for other purposes. He concentrated all staff development activities in the new Gheens Academy. He identified certain people as system-wide "lightning rods" to trouble-shoot problems in areas such as supplies and maintenance, then gave principals carte blanche to call him if they didn't get results in 24 hours. And in every school whose faculty so voted, he authorized decision making by participatory management, involving faculty and parents in key decisions concerning virtually every aspect of schooling. Of the county's 160 schools, 130 already have voted to govern themselves this way, and the rest appear to be lining up to join them.

Principals and teachers both are warm in their praise for the moves. "The best job in Jefferson County right now is to be a principal," says Jim Sexton, whose position as executive director of high school principals was eliminated, and who now heads Eastern High School. "You know you're responsible for making things better, and it's enjoyable." He particularly cites the wide latitude principals have in making management decisions within their schools. In his first year as principal, for example, Sexton's teachers told him tardiness was their single biggest complaint; without delay he instituted a strict "zero tolerance" policy for lateness to class, and has reduced the problem by 60 percent.

"The only mortal sin in this district is not to be collegial," Marilyn Hohmann says. "The more you share decision making with teachers, the more they act that way with kids in the classroom. It's a lot easier to tell people what to do and then pretend they do it." Jim Sexton agrees; the more responsibility he passes on, he says, the more effective his school is. "Next we're going to try arena scheduling," he says, "where the kids will design their own schedules around the particular teachers they want. It's a way of involving kids in their own destinies, and puts pressure on teachers to improve their classes if they want to attract students." Though such tactics do not in themselves reflect Essential School ideas, they can open schools to the notion that students are active and questioning workers, not passive recipients of whatever is fed them.

When principals are resistant to innovation, Ingwerson has a reputation for swift action. "He doesn't fire people," Hohmann says. "He moves them to less demanding jobs." Principals are evaluated, Jim Sexton notes, by peer groups of three or four, and encouraged to develop new skills through Gheens Academy's leadership programs for current and aspiring principals.

The district also works hard to coach teachers, and to prepare them for positions of leadership within and outside the school. Those teachers who attend workshops at Gheens Academy, for example, will often later lead their colleagues in staff workshops on the same subjects. The teacher evaluation process exerts another steady pressure to try new ideas. "Teachers are required to make an individual growth plan for themselves," says Kathryn Hopper, who is principal of Waggener High School. "When I evaluate them, we confer first on what their goals are, then after the observation we confer again, and write a narrative evaluation. Every principal and assistant principal in the district is trained in this kind of clinical supervision." Teachers like the evaluation process, they say, because it honors their own perceptions and personal style. "It's a system that's built on respect," says Conway Middle School teacher Barbara Staples. (See separate story, Figure 3)

Who Tries It, and How?

"Districtwide, most teachers still see the Coalition as somebody else's program, not something that has to do with them," says Kathryn Hopper. At Waggener, which is known for its programs for gifted students, some teachers think the Coalition's ideas work only for the most able students. But when Hopper was assistant principal at Fairdale, she says, "we came to the Coalition because its ideas work for at-risk kids." Earlier, when she taught at Seneca High School, Hopper helped develop a ninth-grade Essential School team specifically for problem students; she now feels that a heterogeneous group works better.

The fact is that almost every Coalition member school in Jefferson County is going about things in its own fashion and at its own pace. Fairdale High is a beehive of individual and team innovations, from a ninth-grade team of seven teachers and 130 students to an interdisciplinary American studies program for juniors, organized around "essential questions." At Eastern High, Jim Sexton searches out teachers certified in several fields as a tool to get the number of students a teacher sees in a day down to a manageable level. The school, a county magnet for math, business, and technology, was just selected to receive a major IBM grant through the Coalition, aimed at developing a curriculum based on graduation exhibitions. Iroquois High School has some team teaching now, but next year it will inaugurate a new longer-block schedule that invites much more. (See separate story, Figure 4) Students at Seneca High, the county's liberal arts magnet school, take three interdisciplinary, thematic, team-taught courses each year as well as their regular math and language courses. And at Waggener, individual teachers are beginning to come up with imaginative interdisciplinary performance-based projects and share them with others throughout the district.

"I don't put teachers into a program," says Waggener's Kathryn Hopper. "I just let them see a new method of teaching." Her attitude is shared by most of the county's other principals; in fact, to be much more directive would be difficult, given the trend toward participatory management in this district. In addition, Jefferson County's climate of change and choice makes it more attractive for a school to differentiate its program from others, not to imitate another's path.

Given all this, the district's Coalition member schools may seem more a patchwork quilt than part of a formally designed and integrated pattern. As yet, Jefferson County has no fully articulated example of Essential School principles at work. Largely because of the Gheens Academy, however, the underlying ideas behind the Coalition are slowly spreading. Even teachers who speak disdainfully or defensively about "Coalition" may nonetheless be trying out cooperative learning or abandoning lectures in their classrooms, unaware that these ideas are shared by many schools in the Coalition. As the state moves toward required performance-based assessments, teachers are even more likely to adopt ideas like exhibitions when they encounter them in workshops and seminars. Programs offered by CES's home offices at Brown University also add enrichment to the local menu of development opportunities. Next year, for example, eight CES-trained Jefferson County teachers and principals will be working with their peers on Essential School ideas, as Citibank Coalition Faculty and Thompson Fellows.

An important link in the chain of reform is how new teachers are trained in university education programs. Here too, the county is taking major steps that favor Essential schooling; the University of Louisville will conduct a teacher education course at Fairdale High School next year, with Fairdale staff serving as instructors along with professors. "It's unheard of for high schools even to be talking to universities as much as we do, much less helping them redesign their curriculum," says Marilyn Hohmann.

What's Left to Do?

Ten years after its new superintendent arrived, Jefferson County looks and feels like an entirely different school system in some important ways. The district's administrative structure has changed; people are talking in new ways to each other. Teachers and principals feel a new sense of ownership, and businesses are more involved in the schools than they have ever been. A tone prevails of choice, diversity, and innovation.

The district is not without its problems: racial tensions persist; old classroom habits of passivity are slow to change; the elite "advanced" students still follow a separate track of self-fulfilling privilege. A relatively small percentage of teachers actually participate in Gheens workshops on curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment; and schools vary as to how systematically the ideas are shared with other teachers back at school. There is the ever-present resistance of the rank and file to what some regard as an elite vanguard of change. To carry off a more sustained commitment to bringing every teacher along would require expenditures that this county--which spends near the top in a state that falls 39th in the nation's school spending--may not be willing to make.

But a stable infrastructure of support has been devised at the upper levels of this system, without which fundamental changes from the bottom up cannot possibly take place. Don Ingwerson's remark to Marilyn Hohmann at the athletic banquet last year is a sober recognition of just how long it takes to get to the hardest part of school change--what goes on in the classroom between teacher and student. In that realm, this superintendent believes, Jefferson County's task is just beginning.

"We must get to the point where the child is going to school because he wants to learn," he says. "Our job is to motivate that spirit of inquiry, to carry it into the ways we assess student performance." That spirit must be nurtured very carefully, he warns, starting with an absolute commitment to involve parents in what their children are doing, to give them enough choices about their children's schooling that they are invested in the results. "The glue that holds the system together is very sensitive to temperature," he says. "If you get too confident, if you try to launch something when it's too hot, the whole thing will blow up in your face."

What he hopes to see in the next decade, the superintendent says, is more team efforts both in and out of the schools--"parents and children in the classrooms, kids coming and going." He wants "a higher standard of learning, of teaching, of behavior, and more individual standards and ways of working with kids. We need to move to personalize our system, to get the number of students a teacher sees down to 80 in a day. We won't accomplish anything until we know what we want to do with the job--until the fundamental question is what results in better student learning," Ingwerson concludes. "The child is not there for the school; the school has got to be there for the child."

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This resource last updated: May 14, 2002

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