Case Study 17B
Leading in the Middle: A Tale of Prosocial Education Reform in Two Principals and Two Middle Schools
Marvin W. Berkowitz, Kristen Pelster, and Amy Johnston
There are no leader-proof schools. Great leaders will improve schools, and lousy leaders will kill them. That is why we have offered the Sanford N. McDonnell Leadership Academy in Character Education (LACE) for the past thirteen years. LACE evolved from the work of CHARACTERplus as an advocacy and professional development resource in the St. Louis region. After about a decade of such work, its founder, Sandy McDonnell, and its executive director, Linda McKay, realized that their efforts would benefit from two additions: (1) a resident scholar with expertise in character development and education and (2) a more direct and impactful focus on principals. So the Sanford N. McDonnell Professorship in Character Education was created at the University of Missouri–St. Louis, and Marvin W. Berkowitz was hired to fill that slot. In parallel, LACE was created and was established as a core responsibility of the McDonnell Professor.
From its origins, LACE was designed as a yearlong cohort experience for principals in a geographic region (in this case, St. Louis) to help them both understand and lead the implementation of quality, effective character education. Funding came from a variety of sources, including the McDonnell endowment and various corporate and foundation gifts. Each year one or two cohorts of approximately thirty school leaders come together in January for a full year of learning and planning around character education in general and as applied specifically to their schools or districts. Throughout its history, LACE has used a once-a-month full-day workshop format for the core of this endeavor. However, there has always been a written assignment component as well, although it has evolved markedly over time and now constitutes a critical component as it has morphed into a collaborative leadership tool and vehicle for mentoring the participants in their professional growth.
The educational philosophy of LACE comprises the following ideas:
The pedagogy of LACE relies on a few key strategies:
Over the past thirteen years, nearly five hundred educators have gone through the LACE year. It is not easy, and we routinely lose 20 to 25 percent of the participants during the LACE year, generally because they were unable to fulfill the LACE obligations for a wide variety of reasons. When school leaders successfully complete LACE, there is no guarantee either that they “got it” or that they will successfully implement “it.” Leading comprehensive school reform is not easy, and even if one does it well, it takes more time than most would want. Enthused LACE graduates frequently move too fast and need to be encouraged to slow down before they burn out their staffs. Nevertheless, when they do it and do it right, and do it long enough, the results can be transformative. In fact, if we start counting after LACE had been in existence for seven years and look at the following time span (i.e., 2005–2011), there have been twenty-three schools and three districts in the St. Louis region that have been named NSOC and are led by LACE graduates. That is approximately one-quarter of all NSOC schools and districts in the entire country during this time span. Let’s take a quick look at just two examples. First we will look in depth at Ridgewood Middle School and then more briefly at Francis Howell Middle School (FHMS), because FHMS is featured in a separate case study in this volume (see case study 6A, “Francis Howell Middle School, Missouri” in this volume).
Ridgewood Middle School (Arnold, MO)
While sharing some key characteristics with Francis Howell Middle School (they both are middle schools, have approximately the same number of students per grade, are National Schools of Character, overlap in key implementation strategies, and have dynamic enlightened leadership), the Ridgewood Middle School (RMS) story is quite different. Whereas FHMS went from good to great, RMS had to go from horrible to great. And FHMS has 850 students from grades six to eight, while RMS has five hundred students in grades seven to eight. FHMS serves a mostly suburban middle- to upper-middle-class population, and RMS serves a mostly rural low-SES population (43 percent eligible for free or reduced-price lunch and the remainder close to eligibility).
The beginning seems to be a good place to start the RMS story (cf., Haynes & Berkowitz, 2007). RMS began its character-education-informed school transformation journey a few years before FHMS. When then superintendent, Diana Bourisaw, came to the district, she discovered a serious mess at RMS. Over the years, her predecessors had allowed it to serve as the repository of bad teachers for the district. When a principal discovered a teacher, often tenured, who was a rotten apple, rather than fighting the system, the principal requested a reassignment to RMS. So a majority of the teachers (but certainly not all of them) did not like children and should not have been teaching. This led to a climate in which the students knew that the staff and school did not care about them and that no one cared about the school. In the words of current principal Kristen Pelster, “The appearance of the school [in 2000] was deplorable; unkempt with every inch of the bathrooms, locker rooms, and bleachers covered with graffiti, profanity, and racial slurs. A police officer had to be stationed at the school because of the daily violence and drug use. No other school in the district, not even the high schools, had a police officer. Attendance was low and standardized test scores were even lower. Only 30% of the students met the NCLB standards in communication arts and only 7% did so in mathematics” (Pelster, 2011). In the first quarter of 2001, a school of five hundred students saw six hundred failing grades posted. Bourisaw promptly brought in a new leadership team to “clean up Dodge City”: Principal Tim Crutchley and Assistant Principal Kristen Pelster. Crutchley had been a middle school assistant principal in another district and Pelster an elementary school assistant principal within the RMS district (Fox School District), and they did not know each other. (As a wonderful coda to this story, they eventually fell in love and later married when Crutchley was promoted to assistant superintendent and Pelster became the RMS principal.)
First they diagnosed the problem: RMS and its staff did not care about the students, and the students knew that. Despite the abysmal academic record, they decided not to focus on the curriculum, pedagogical methods, or other areas of academics. Both of them were graduates of LACE, and so they knew that the key was to improve the school climate. They (often personally) cleaned up the physical plant, which was in utter disrepair due to neglect and abuse. They articulated a vision of a staff that served student social and emotional needs and invested in professional development to support that. They administered a needs assessment and tried to design initiatives tied to the results. However, given the nature of the staff, they experienced significant resistance. Loosely playing good cop (Pelster) and bad cop (Crutchley), they modeled good practice, implored staff to join the journey, and pressured them to change. However, many of the teachers were unable or unwilling to do so. In a critical staff meeting in the second semester of their administration, Crutchley frankly told the staff to get on board or get off the ship. He expected to be fired; but instead he discovered that about one-third of the staff were waiting for such strong leadership and vision and joined him enthusiastically. At the end of the year, about a third of the staff left, and over the next two years, another third left. This was not serendipitous but rather the result of a strategic effort by Crutchley and Pelster to either win staff over or drive them out. The departers were similarly strategically replaced with teachers who shared the vision.
Both Crutchley and Pelster also poured their lives into RMS, engaging in what can only be called supererogatory leadership. They began to call every absent student and routinely went to their homes to get them out of bed and to school. They did laundry for families at school. When they realized that teachers routinely failed students for unsubmitted assignments, they created a ZAP (Zeros Aren’t Permitted) program during lunch—and they personally staffed it themselves for ninety minutes every day. (The original six hundred F grades in their first quarter are currently down to six.) They put in seventy or more hours a week, sometimes sleeping at the school. This was clearly above and beyond the call of duty, but it created near miraculous results.
Other key initiatives included an advisory program led by a leadership team of students (two per advisory). This program has been manualized (Owens & Asher, 2008). They also created a yearlong orientation program for sixth graders who were to become RMS students, largely run by the current students. The school counselor created a truancy program in partnership with the county juvenile judge. Teen Leadership is a program designed by the Flippen Group that teaches basic social and leadership skills to a diverse group of students. When a relatively new language arts teacher (Kacie Heiken-Ploen) proposed a rather daring new course for at-risk girls, Pelster (then the principal) did not balk and instead said, “At RMS it is okay to fail. Let’s try it, and if it doesn’t work we won’t do it again.” Out of Pelster’s enlightened leadership and Heiken-Ploen’s creativity and genuine heart for struggling girls was born Aftershock. A language arts course, its curriculum is focused on the real problems of these girls: eating disorders, suicide, abuse, cutting, and the like. Each month a topic is studied through reading and discussion, and then the students write extensively (journaling, producing a newsletter that goes out to the community to teach them about the problem, and so forth). They bring in guest speakers and engage in service learning. This course has literally saved girls’ lives and clearly given them a new positive sense of self, which has led to reengagement and success in school and life. There is now a boys’ version of the course, entitled ImpACT, led by a male teacher as well. As Pelster explains it, “We routinely take the kids in danger of dropping out, or much worse, and turn them into caring, prosocial leaders who succeed academically” (Pelster, 2011, p. 2).
A former music teacher and an eternally impassioned optimist, Pelster starts each school year with a theme for the year (this year it is “Stars of Character”) and aligns the first day of school with it as a near carnival (e.g., one year, with a western theme, students were greeted by Pelster on horseback dressed in cowboy attire whooping it up). The philosophy is that students should go home the first day of school thinking, “Wow, this is a great place. I can’t wait to come back.”
Once again, the proof is in the data. From 2000 to 2010, yearly discipline referrals steadily dropped from three thousand to approximately three hundred, and the school police officer is gone. Attendance increased from 89 percent to over 95 percent. The percentage of students meeting state standards on the Missouri state student achievement test (MAP) has risen from 30 percent to 68 percent in communication arts and from under 7 percent to 71 percent in mathematics. In a nutshell, Pelster concludes,
the clientele of Ridgewood has not changed these past 10 years. Our families still struggle with extreme poverty and a section of our attendance area is still one of the highest crime areas in our county. . . . The difference is these kids, that 10 years ago were destroying the building and each other, now know they are valued and cared about, and now take on the leadership responsibility to create a culture and climate where they value each other, their school, their character, and their academic success. Most importantly, all this was done without ever changing our academic curriculum or our textbooks. . . . What we changed was how we met the social, emotional, and character development needs of our students. (Pelster, 2011, p. 4)
Francis Howell Middle School (St. Charles, MO)
Francis Howell Middle School is different from Ridgewood. It is larger (850 students), and it has three grades (grades 6 through 8). Furthermore, whereas Ridgewood started its journey from the bottom, FHMS has a history of success. Ridgewood began with a new administrative team, and FHMS had a long-standing principal ready to try something different. Lastly, whereas Ridgewood had a low-SES population, FHMS draws from a largely suburban, privileged community. Amy Johnston, who had been an administrator at FHMS for ten years (as principal and assistant principal), recognized that she needed to counteract the sense of complacency and stagnation at the school. Something had to change, but she was not sure what. At this point it was suggested she apply for LACE, something with which she was unfamiliar. Curiosity and a sense of inertia led her to LACE, and inspiration took over her pedagogical and administrative soul (to hear it from her and her staff, see their video at http://fhm.fhsd.k12.mo.us—“Video about Us”).
It is not uncommon that a principal (or other educator) discovers a new vision and becomes so enthused that she shifts into high gear without realizing that those around her do not share that fervor and will not simply start sprinting toward that vision alongside the new “prophet.” Amy was a case in point—she started off like a rocket. Amy is a high-energy person and started following this dead-end path. One afternoon in June about a decade ago, Amy called Marvin Berkowitz, all excited because a district administrator had just offered her twenty thousand dollars of government funding that was about to expire. She wanted to apply this to her nascent character education initiative and had to spend the money in short order, so she made a budget and faxed it for feedback. Berkowitz read it, called her back, and told her to tear it up. It was all about buying “things.” Instead, he told her to spend every dime on her staff; invest in the staff. She did, and it was a turning point for the school. She brought seventeen staff to the five-day Summer Institute in Character Education at the University of Missouri–St. Louis (it remains the largest group from one school to ever attend the institute). They spent five days immersing in character education, becoming a team, and planning for the upcoming school year.
Amy astutely and quickly realized that she needed to slow down, listen to her staff, and slowly build their interest and commitment. For example, she started by proposing to follow the experts. The Character Education Partnership suggests starting by identifying a set of core ethical values around which to build the initiative. When Amy suggested that they adopt ethical values, the staff became very uncomfortable. She suggested they adopt the virtues that Tom Lickona (1991) had identified, but they remained skeptical. So she wisely dropped that and spent more than a year building staff relations, exploring their values, and only then slowly building a school community consensus around values. In her words,
Before we could ask our students to respect one another, we had some work to do as a staff. We had to discuss things like gossip, cliques, and disrespect among the adults in the building before we could lead those conversations with our students; and this is tough stuff! Instead of admitting personal flaws and working to change them, it is much easier to say the plate is too full. All character education begins in the mirror, which is why so many people reject it. (Johnston, case study 6A, this volume, “Francis Howell Middle School, Missouri”)
As she describes it, she and they were daunted by the proposition of “teaching character” because that meant looking in the mirror at their own character. They painstakingly, as a staff and as individuals, grappled with this challenge.
She reworked the normal staff meetings to allow smaller-group time with her. She initiated a once-per-week twenty-minute advisory-like class called “Character Connection,” designed after the innovative work at Halifax Middle School in Pennsylvania. Teachers were nervous about how to sit with a mixed age (sixth through eighth graders) and simply have a conversation, so she brought me in to train teachers and her Character Council (approximately sixty students who would co-lead the advisories). Amy also prioritized professional development and parent involvement. She continually supported staff going to workshops, classes, lectures, conferences, and the like. She has sent more staff to both the Berkowitz Summer Institute and to LACE than any other school leader. And she began book studies with both staff and parents. She leads a parent book study group in the evenings in which they read books about teenagers.
Finally, Amy understands that school and classroom climate are the context in which character and learning can flourish or perish. She instituted a procedure whereby the first two days of school were to be curriculum free. When she first proposed this to the staff, they were highly resistant, but she understood how important the initial experience of a school was. Staff essentially argued that they could not cover the entire curriculum as it was and could not give up two instructional days. Amy insisted. When asked what they should do instead, she said “unity builders.” When they asked what that was, she handed them a sheet with suggestions (different ones for each period of the day so that students would not repeat the same activities). The staff respect and love Amy, so they begrudgingly went along with what they felt was an ill-advised policy. Partway through that year, they began to request that they begin every year with two days of unity-building activities. What they were witnessing were classrooms where students were better behaved and harder working, simply because they had invested in relationships and norms during those first two days of school.
Like Ridgewood, FHMS has the data to back up their success, and these are detailed in the FHMS case study in this volume. FHMS is doing something right. According to Amy Johnston, it is character education. In her own words, “If students graduate from here with good character, then we are doing our job.”
Conclusion
Schools and their leaders constantly struggle with how to engage in effective school improvement while both trying to serve the dual masters of academic achievement and prosocial student development and simultaneously being pulled in different directions by the demands and constraints of educational policy; unenlightened leadership (at the federal, state, and local levels); the monomaniacal focus of many teachers’ unions; dwindling material resources; and panicked and demanding parents. All of this occurs in a context of ignorance about effective practice. Therefore, it is refreshing to mentor and witness the genius of leaders like Amy Johnston, Tim Crutchley, and Kristen Pelster. The stories of Francis Howell Middle School, Ridgewood Middle School, and the Leadership Academy in Character Education bear witness to two key lessons. First, it can be done. Schools can be transformed to better serve both academic achievement and prosocial development. Second, good prosocial education is good education. Teaching harder to the test is not a path to robust sustained success (see Corrigan, chapter 23 in this volume). Creating a caring school climate that nurtures social, emotional, and moral competencies and supports the motives and skills necessary for productive work (during and after schooling) instead is the true path to success in school and life.
References
Berkowitz, M. W. (2011). Leading schools of character. In A. M. Blankstein & P. D. Houston (Eds.), Leadership for social justice and democracy in our schools (The Soul of Educational Leadership Series, pp. 93–121). Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.
Haynes, C., & Berkowitz, M. W. (2007, February 20). What can schools do? USA Today, p. 13a.
Lickona, T. (1991). Educating for Character. New York: Bantam.
Owens, B., & Asher, A. (2008). R Character Council: Empower students through character education and service learning. St. Louis, MO: Owens/Asher Publishing.
Pelster, K. (2011). United States Senate briefing on SEL: School climate and character education. Arnold, MO: Ridgewood Middle School, Fox School District. Retrieved December 2, 2011, from http://www.nasponline.org/advocacy/news/2011/may/Kristin_Peltzer_statement.pdf