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Story posted December 2, 2009

Results:
• District students graduate college at double America's overall graduation rate 
• About 65% of the graduation class has taken an AP exam 

Editor's note: Dr. Jerry Weast has presided over a decade of strong and steady gains in Montgomery County, Maryland. How did his district do it? Not by using any of the cure-all strategies that have captivated the national media.

Weast recently told us the story of his school district's success. Several big themes stand out:

• Stop the blame game and start collaborating. Big fights between administrators and teachers are catnip to reporters, but they don't do much for children.
• Set common goals and figure out how to reach them. In Montgomery County, everyone could agree that students should leave high school ready for college.
• Create a system that helps everyone be successful. It's not enough to let 1000 flowers bloom.
• There's more to equity than equality. Weast describes a "red zone" where most of the county's low-income children live. It's not enough to treat those children and their wealthier "green zone" peers equally. The children in the "red zone" need much more systemic support.

There's much more to Dr. Weast's vision than I can sum up here. Here's the story as he told it to us in a phone conversation last week:

There are some structural issues in the way that we are thinking about American education. You see little Kindergartners come to school, and they believe that they can learn anything. Their parents do too. And so does everybody else who meets them. But a few years later, because of the sorting process and the type of structure that they are in, a lot of that belief is taken away and there are huge achievement gaps.

Then you see beginning teachers. They come in and they feel like they can take on the world and do anything. But within five years about half of them have left the profession.

There is something structurally wrong with a system where about a third of the children in America never make it out and about half of employees can’t survive more than five years. So what we did was sit back and say, “If that is the shape of the bottle—if that is the issue that we have to deal with—what is the new wine we can put in without breaking the bottle?”

Some people would say that's not bold enough. But having been in education now 41 years, 31 as a superintendent, I've had very little luck in changing the calendar or the way systems are organized, even though I might have whined about that like everyone else for a long period of time.

A Look in the Mirror
What we did in 1999 was stop looking out the window and start looking in the mirror. And we asked, what could we do differently?

One of the things we started to do is to really look at our “reactivity.” We’d had a lot of turnover in superintendents. We’d had a lot of new programs put in here, there and yonder. Did we have any coherence in our framework? And we realized we were measuring a lot of things by input, and that our results were very variable. In fact, our results could be predicted based on race and socioeconomics, and almost based on geography.

So we decided that we would control for reactivity. To do that you have to get people to agree on what they want the system to do. And that has to be clear and compelling. Clear in the sense that you have to be able to measure it. And compelling because it's a lot of hard work and all stakeholders have to want to get there.

Every Student College-Ready
We got started in Montgomery County with lots of community meetings and lots of visits with thousands and thousands of teachers. We have about 11,000 teachers. I think I visited with about 8,000 of them.

The thing everybody could agree upon was that they wanted their children to be college-ready and have the option of college, even though they may take that opportunity to the field of work or to other areas. So that was our North Star, where we wanted students to be by twelfth grade.

Rather than have a big committee choose what college-ready was, we simply asked the college. Colleges put a lot of kids in remediation across the country—about 50 to 60% of children. So they have an idea of what college-ready is.

Then we looked for a way that we could predict college-readiness. The best way we found was the AP exam. It was the most correlative academic exam. So we looked at AP math. The college said that in five years from 1999 we were probably going to be staring at precalculus. So we made a value chain around that all the way back to preschool. We took AP English and did the same thing for literacy.

We also brought in different organizations such as Achieve and Phi Delta Kappa, which have curriculum expertise. We looked at international standards and the PISA test. We looked at the SAT and the ACT. What the ACT tells you is that only about 25% of kids who graduate from high school are college-ready. So we took our value chain all the way back down to pre-Kindergarten. It’s important to go back that far, because time is one of the issues that you always face—can you get it done in the twelve to thirteen years?

Examining Blind Spots
This process caused us to reorganize our curriculum and go to a different level. In this new level we really had to take a look at all of the conditions—the blind spots, if you will—that are causing these issues. Most people look superficially at their problems, but we really worked hard to get to the roots of our problems and identify those issues that were causing our teacher turnover, our student turnover and our variability of performance.

One of them is culture—the culture of low performance and low expectations. Another is sorting mechanisms—how we sort children at so many ages into so many categories that reinforce low expectations. Another is an accountability system versus a monitoring system. You have to have accountability--you have to measure--but monitoring helps you actually change what you are doing. Still another was how we looked at our processes. We had never done process mapping in 1999. We had processes all over the map, and they were not leading to our destination of getting a child college-ready. And one more was the whole issue of equity. We had thought that equality--being equal to all children--was the way to go. In fact, we found that it was the most unequal thing that we could do. So we started to think about this whole concept of differentiation.

A big blind spot that we uncovered is that when we put all of our students on a map of our county--we are about a million strong in the county and about 141,000 students--we found that there was a defined territory where 80% of our students on free and reduced lunch and about 75% of our minority children lived. It comprised an area with about 67,000-70,000 students, which would make it one of the top size school systems in America if it were stand-alone system.

When we looked at the buildings in that area, we found that they were larger and had more children in them. Class size was the same, even though there were unequal results. And in that area there was a great deal of mobility. Yet we found that the choice of textbooks and similar kinds of issues in the most mobile area of the county were actually more diverse than elsewhere. We had approximately 14 different reading series in use. So when children moved around, they not only changed location, which has an impact on a child, they got a whole different instructional approach.

Taking a Collaborative Approach
When we put all those blind spots on the table, we actually found out that we were not working very closely with our teachers and their organized union. We were many times at odds, even though we all claimed to be working on the same team. I think we spent so much time blaming each other that we overlooked the fact that is obvious to everybody: The organization does not work either for the child or for the employee. And what we have done is create an organization that works both for the child and the employee.

When you play the blame game, all you do is increase employee dissatisfaction and cause employees to organize in very tight knit units, because they feel threatened. And I don't blame them. The gotcha mentality never cured anything. So we started a whole process of intraspace bargaining. We asked, “What are the problems we are trying to solve?” and we reframed the concerns that we had.

We had to put race on the table. That was a very difficult conversation, and how you go about doing that and how you build the capacity of people to deal with that is a whole other story. We got involved in with working with Harvard University and their PELP—Public Education Leadership Project. We got involved in working with the APQC—American Productivity and Quality Center—trying to figure out how to process map and get to the bottom of things. We worked with Achieve, the Council for Basic Education, Phi Delta Kappa, many different organizations.

But more importantly, we became what I call a level IV organization. At this level, we started to see that teams are better at uncovering and solving problems than any individual is. So we started to blur the lines of leadership and see that leaders can come from all areas of our school system. We started to blur the lines of authority, and put authority and responsibility together.

When we started to do that, we began to understand that if you built different systems and structures and went about it in a different way, you actually could drive a new type of culture. That new culture would have higher expectations and a changed belief system. It would be oriented to results and not afraid of accountability, because accountability would be monitoring, much as a doctor has to monitor a patient. The more severe the issue, the more monitoring. The monitoring is not to play gotcha, but actually is to cure the patient.

What we are doing on this journey is constantly reassessing on a continuous improvement model what to do differently. We stopped a lot of the knee-jerk things that schools do. We stopped working against each other, and we started to honestly address the problems.

And when you involve all of the participants--the students themselves and the people who work in the buildings—and when what you want to do is clear, compelling and congruent with what they want to do, it is amazing what you can get done. You have to unshackle the bureaucratic system and keep it from just reacting.

I think it is possible. I think that is what has been proven here. I had 24 years of superintending before I came here. I really did think it was important to stay somewhere 10 years and see if it was possible to unleash the potential of the people in the organization.

Our Results
We have gone to better results every year, to a point that we now have 7,000 children taking AP exams, for example. We give 28,000 AP exams now, and about 65% of the graduating class has taken an AP exam.

We have double the college graduation rate that America has of our high school graduates. We keep track of them by buying data from the college clearinghouse on where they go to college, whether they finish within six years, what their degree is in and those kinds of issues.

Our African-American population is graduating from college at a rate similar to the nation’s graduation rate for all students. And our African-American population is exceeding the national outcomes on AP exams both in volume taken and scores received. In fact, there is no other system in America except New York City that has more African-American students’ exams that score a three than Montgomery County. And we have only 10% of the African-American high school population in Maryland, but we have 38% of the African-American population who can score a college-ready score on an AP exam.

Our Latino population graduates from college at twice the rate that the Latino population in America does and almost at a rate close to America’s overall graduation rate.

Do we have a ways to go? Yes. We have about 80% of our Latino and African-American students wanting to go to college. Half of them are ready, and that is twice as much as America is producing. But we have to get the other half ready. We are on a trajectory to get 80% of our kids’ college-ready by 2014. We have got more to do, but we are on a journey that is making a difference in the lives of children. And it has a moral issue to it. We have got to have every child ready, not just some children.

Succeeding in the Face of Challenges
What's really interesting, and what helps destroy myths, is that our teachers and our principals have the support and training that they need to succeed in spite of a 44% increase in poverty during this 10-year period. Last year there was an increase of 3,700 students in poverty, with 70% or more on free lunch, not reduced price. We had an increase of 103% in the number of children who do not speak English as their first language. Mobility has not decreased, and the size of our overall population has gone up 11%.

With all of those factors that most people would use as excuses, we have gotten these amazing results by addressing what we believe are the layers you have got to go through in organizational maturity. Slow down your reactiveness. Quit the blame game. Choose an outcome that is clear and compelling and can be measured over a long period of time on the value chain. Don't succumb to beliefs that you know everything—look at your blind spots and really get down to the problem. Work on new systems and structures that align to your desired outcome. Then move to a level of innovation and monitoring that makes school not only a psychologically safe place for employees and children, but a space that is very productive to achieving these outcomes. If you do that, do it over a period of time without overrunning your capacity, and deal with the equity issues that are going to arise when you start taking a look at your blind spots, you can get some amazing outcomes.

Thoughts on Systemic Reform
I think all of the energy that has been expended on school reform, while it is important, has been enlightening. Around the country, there have been some promising green shoots. But there has been very little system-wide reform, especially at large-scale with a system of many students. I think what we have witnessed in Montgomery County is that if you do work together, you can achieve that.

One of the things we talk about as being the do-all, cure-all for education actually may increase variability, and if you increase variability, you are not making a system. There are 50 million children out there. So some of these wonderful things that everybody talks about are important. For example, people talk about, “We have a new and different kind of unique school, and it really does a wonderful job with children.” There is nothing wrong with that. But if you have 100,000 children to address, you cannot just point out your heroes and sheroes. You have got volume that you have to address.

Here is an issue—the same issue I found in the Red Area. Suppose that I had created in the Red Area 60 independent schools, all of them very unique. And I did not factor in that the children moved. Well, mobility definitely has a detrimental effect on outcomes if you are moving from one independent school to another independent school with a completely different approach. And it is not the kids’ fault that they are moving. The economy is kind of rotten and their parents move because they have to move, not because they want to move.

A system that thinks about that has proven very beneficial to our students. So the idea that we looked at the condition--our blind spot, if you will--that our poverty was pretty well-defined geographically, and that the movement was greater in this area, and that this was the area where we had not addressed teacher stability or proper leadership or some sort of a congruent process that had a coherent curricular framework…I think it was a very beneficial exercise that we went through in 1999.

Today, I can take you to all of our Title I schools, and they have 60% or greater poverty. 80%, 70%. You will find the same things that you saw at Viers Mill Elementary School. It is not an isolated event. It is systemic. It is at Highland Elementary, it is at Broad Acres Elementary.

I think that heroes and sheroes are important to celebrate. But what we have to do is think in a systemic, system-wide way of how we are going to get scalability and volume with quality and cutting down on variability. In order to do that, we have to address time and we have to address isolation.

For More Reading
I am trying to simplify something that is complex in a short interview. A lot of what we did during our transformation was covered by Harvard Education Press when Stacey Childress, Denis Doyle and David Thomas wrote a book about us called Leading for Equity. It is about our 10-year journey. Again, it is hard in a short interview to get all our history, but a main lesson is that it is all about how you think about it and how you reframe the question.

If you want to go deeper, there are about 11 case studies now on the school district. Some are on our website, and each of them goes in depth. They go to depth on an individual school. They go to depth on an individual process, such as our labor relations. They go to depth on how we put race on the table. Some of those types of issues.

I wrote something myself, and it will be published shortly. I think AASA is sending it out to 1,700 counties. In 16 pages what I tried to do is put together an organizational maturation model, kind of like Kübler-Ross’ Stages of Grief, Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs or Jim Collins’ Levels of Leadership. Because we do not have, in education, an organizational maturity model by which to think about how to frame where you are at and what do you do next. And I think what is really interesting this system-wide thinking is that you have got to think of sequencing, volume, scalability, cost and capacity as you are directing it. I hope that it will be helpful.