Changing the Culture of Urban Education

A great speech by Joel Klein entitled Changing the Culture of Urban Education (www.tilsonfunds.com/Personal/ChangingCulture.pdf).  Here's an excerpt:

When you get right down to it, in many ways we have tried to reform just about everything but the essence, or the culture, of the system itself.

 

And it hasn’t worked. Despite all this reform, today, throughout our nation, Latino and African American high school students are four years behind their white and Asian peers, in my city, only one in four of our African American and Latino students receive a Regents Diploma, the only diploma endorsed by our state, and American students overall, including our highest performing students, rank far below many of their international peers in math and reading.

 

We need a different approach.

 

If we really want the new floor to matter for our students, we obviously need to protect it by fixing the leaky roof. Fixing the roof in the context of education reform involves changing a culture that has inhabited our school systems for decades. It is a culture that claims to be in the business of educating children but puts schools, and the people who work in them, at the bottom of the organizational chart. It is a culture that stifles innovation. It is a culture that seeks to preserve the existing arrangements for the adults who work in the system, and, all too often, it does so at the expense of the kids who most need our schools to work for them.

 

In my view, we must reverse these self-defeating approaches. In short, if school reform is to succeed, we’ll need to go through three major cultural shifts. We will have to evolve from a culture of excuses to a culture of accountability, from a culture of compliance to a culture of performance, and from a culture of uniformity to a culture of differentiation.

 

Before I turn to the specifics, let me make a broader point that places my remarks in a context that I hope will resonate in an audience like this: What we are doing in New York is about more than a test of whether we can reform our schools. It’s a test of our ability to make government work. Most Americans, whatever their political party, will tell you that government has a limited but important role in securing our liberties. Government is responsible for giving every child a decent shot through education, but also protecting people's lives and helping those who are unable to help themselves. Americans believe in a role for government—but they also believe that government too often wastes their money, puts special interests ahead of their interests, and just doesn’t do its job well.

 

I can tell you—having now spent more than a decade in government service—there is much truth to these generalized concerns. But it doesn’t have to be this way. The public sector is full of people working hard to do the right thing. What they need is a structure that brings out their best—that liberates their talents and at the same time creates powerful incentives for excellence and consequences for failure.