The Alberta Teachers’ Association

The Canadian Principal and Assessing School Performance

Before he was murdered by one of ancient Rome’s most horrific tyrants, Nero, the Stoic philosopher Seneca coined a dictum which has been passed down through the ages: Non vitae sed scholae discimus, or “Learn not for school, but for life.” It’s a timeless quote, especially for anyone trying to understand the labyrinthine realities of today’s schools. Its relevance endures because, in spite of an apparently endless tsunami of reforms sweeping schools around the world, we continue to ignore Seneca.

We continue to organize our schools such that students are compelled to learn only what governments decree and instead of learning for life. Because of this, school leaders are implicated in the increasingly untenable work of helping teachers do the wrong things better. This is one of the underlying themes emerging in the national study The Future of the Principalship in Canada to be published early in the coming year.¹

While critical thinking and problem solving, framed as “21st-century skills,” are touted by many policy makers, the torqued-up rhetoric of competition distracts us from long-term improvement. Much of the slick and gimmicky diet of “21st-century skills” simply embodies what Hannah Arendt (1954) called “the pathos of the new.” Arendt observed just how popular and fashionable is the idea that simply by declaring that one has a novel idea it must inherently be better than older, more time-tested virtues.

Globally, the distortion of true learning is evident everywhere: in crammed schools in East Asia that pound facts into the minds of bewildered students until late at night on schooldays and on weekends; in parental obsessions in North America to place children in the most expensive private schools that will push their children’s test scores ever higher; in the simmering competition, visible just below the carefully sustained taciturn surface, of Nordic professionals who are keen to place their sons and daughters in their city’s most prestigious secondary schools. In Singapore it is called kiasu, “the fear of being left behind.”

As illustrated in Changing Landscapes in Co-Creating a Learning Canada,² school leaders are not immune in this country. One-third of Canadian parents have hired a tutor for their child while, typically, the child is already an honours student. Further, 88 per cent of parents expect their children to attend a postsecondary institution and 57 per cent expect university attendance. This almost obsessive focus on achievement over learning for life drives parents to rank their children’s schools with one another even when ministries of education discourage this practice. There is little doubt that Canadian principals struggle to sustain the kind of teaching and learning our society needs the most at the beginning of this fragile and vulnerable new millennium.

There may be some benefits to all of this hyperventilating competitive energy. It works in sports, business and entertainment—why not in schools? The short answer is that excessively achievement-oriented cultures breed systemic distortions that distract us from the deeper and more rewarding parts of the human condition and perpetuate social and political divisions. Among peer countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), Canada ranks 17th out of 20 in terms of income inequality. Across Canada, school leaders are compelled to mitigate the negative impacts of income inequality.

School Goals Gone Wild

One of the best ways to apprehend these negative aspects of competitive energy gone awry is to read a counterintuitive study published by Harvard Business School entitled Goals Gone Wild (Ordóñez et al., 2009) Challenging a core tenet of modern management—that the setting of ambitious goals and relentlessly pursuing them is imperative for organizational success—the authors have compiled research showing that an excessive focus on achievement leads to a narrowing of focus that can blind individuals to unethical dimensions of their work and to necessary modifications that need to be made en route to achieving goals.

In the US, the most spectacular example of “goals gone wild” in education surfaced when the award-winning superintendent of Atlanta’s public schools, Beverly Hall, was found guilty (along with 34 colleagues) of massive cheating to reach goals established by the federal government’s No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. While we might consider this simply an example of American excess, one needs to look only to the growing questions regarding the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) testing program that has tilted education programs of the OECD countries towards a focus on short-term gains in a narrow band of educational goals. Further, a growing body of researchers is drawing into question the integrity of entire PISA program— not only in terms of its problematic sampling processes but also the tendency of participating countries to attempt to “game” the outcomes.³

Across Canada we heard many school leaders in the principals’ study focus groups asking for a counter-narrative to the contrived, fear-driven catalysts of social and educational Darwinism. As documented in Changing Landscapes in Co-Creating a Learning Canada, teachers, students, and parents are eager for ways of understanding themselves and the global forces shaping their communities. The paradoxes and promises that principals face in their schools and communities will be explored in the final full report coming out early next year. It will be important to recognize three of the biggest challenges:

• Connectivity does not mean connection. Canadian youth in Grades 6–10 average 7 hours and 25 minutes per day of screen time on weekends and 5 hours and 56 minutes per day on weekdays. (Active Healthy Kids Canada).
• Equity continues to elude us. We are the some of the richest people on the planet, yet Canada is at the bottom of the 25 economically advanced countries with respect to children’s readiness to learn by age six. (UNICEF 2009).
• Increasingly we will need to manage significant economic growth. Viable communities and neighbourhoods must be sustained in the face of the jobless economic recovery that is occurring in many jurisdictions.

Signals Of Hope

The global forces shaping Canadian schools have created important opportunities and challenges that were given voice in focus groups of principals across the country starting in 2012. A recurring challenge echoed by the study’s participants was the complexity of mediating conflicting definitions of student learning through the ephemeral quality called “instructional leadership.”

In the face of these global forces, Canadian principals alongside other educators and students are looking for an alternative approach to improving schools and society that deepens active citizenship and lifelong learning. Many of their aspirations and concerns are captured in two books coauthored with Andy Hargreaves entitled The Fourth Way: The Inspiring Future of Educational Change (2009) and The Global Fourth Way: The Quest for Educational Excellence (2012). These books describe educational reform efforts since World War II through three definitive transformations.

The initial shift that helps to define our current era was characterized by high teacher autonomy and few governmental prescriptions (the First Way). This phase was supplanted by punitive market-driven standard reforms under Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan (the Second Way). This then gave way to a Third Way that still prevails today. It is a combination of pressure and support strategies initiated by Tony Blair in the UK and Bill Clinton in the US in the 1990s, and compelled by technology-driven decision making leading to school rankings and mechanisms of bureaucratic control far removed from classrooms.

Not all nations pursued this same path of the First, Second, and Third Ways of change. Finland, for example, recognized that the First Way did not respond to voters’ aspirations for a just and humane society and went straight to a Fourth Way of innovation and sustainable transformation. Finland, however, is a striking exception to global trends. Overall, the categorization of four different ways of change has proven to have some staying power even in jurisdictions with separate paths because these jurisdictions now increasingly find themselves pulled into the vortex of Second and Third Way policies. International tests, such as PISA of the OECD, are playing a major role here as policy-makers seek to use them to burnish their credentials and to reassure anxious publics that their children will be well prepared for the future. Major educational companies and consultancies, such as McKinsey & Company and Pearson Incorporated, have swept into many jurisdictions to profit from the public’s anxiety with a battery of new assessments and reports. The public has often not been aware of the ways in which the creation of societal fear and the pursuit of corporate profit can be tightly interlaced with one another.

Increasingly, however, activist educators and vigilant parents and community members are coming to see that we do indeed need something different. Fear and sanctions only go so far. Education addresses our deepest longings and aspirations for our children, not just a quick scan of the latest spreadsheet of testing results. The promise of a Fourth Way of change is enticing for those who seek something more and, as a result, we are seeing a major shift of the tectonic plates of educational change under way.

In jurisdictions such as Texas⁴ and Alberta, long known for their high-stakes accountability cultures, testing programs are being dialled down and replaced with more meaningful assessments. Even Singapore, although well known for its hypercompetitive spirit, increasingly counterbalances this individualism with a strong professional ethos by continuously moving educators from a given school to the Ministry of Education and to the National Institute of Education, where teachers and school principals are increasingly supported to focus on empathy and equity. In 2005, the California Teachers’ Association sued former Governor Schwarzenegger and reached a major settlement to fund networks of schools in the state’s poorest and most disenfranchised communities. Much of this work is still being driven by collaborations focused on shifting from intrusive accountability to professional responsibility.

From the perspective of a Canadian principal, these changes may seem small and remote. The prosaic demands of leading a building full of restless youth and diverse staff are always front and centre in a principal’s life. However, the signals are clear, strong, and irreversible—globally we are seeing a turning of the tide that promises to enhance the instructional leadership role of the principal. Rather than having to continue to engage the contradictory student-centred goals of supporting teacher innovation and creativity while assuaging growing educational bureaucracies and their high-stakes testing programs, principals may soon see greater fidelity in their work as instructional leaders. We are beginning to see evidence that governments committed to working hand in hand with teachers can actually turn the page on the Second and the Third Way and achieve their stated aims of improving education for all.

To move beyond the current orthodoxies of global school reform, we need school leaders—parents, teachers and school principals—to play an educative role in society and develop into lifelong learners who are not afraid to challenge what John Stuart Mill called “the deep slumber of a decided opinion.” We need principals who are educational provocateurs that combine eccentric and iconoclastic views of their diverse and lively students with a steady and persistent dedication to the public good.

In the interim it is up to all of us, and above all Canada’s principals, to model lifelong learning and active citizenship in our homes, our workplaces and our communities. We all need to roll up our sleeves to model active learning in our everyday lives in a way that inspires others. So check out a demanding book from your local library on a topic that intimidates you and work through it chapter by chapter until you’re satisfied that you’ve mastered its contents. Front the essential facts of life by hurtling all that you have against seemingly impermeable systems that assault human dignity in ways big and small. Reread Seneca and ask educators and students if they are teaching and learning for school or for life. Explore with your colleagues the troublesome question posed by the curriculum theorist Madeline Grumet, “Where does the world go when schooling is about schooling and not about life?”⁵

As we look forward to the publication and discussion of the Canadian Association of Principals’ national study—the Future of the Principalship National Report—one hopeful possibility remains compelling: if school leaders can find the courage to improve their craft with patience, integrity and compassion, they can reclaim the life of the mind. They can relearn the electrifying experience of discovering that while the quest for meaning is often elusive, it can be found in thousands of small acts that make up the everyday work lives of Canada’s principals. These are professionals whose aspirations for their students are crystal clear and who persevere with dignity and integrity. We invite you to study the upcoming report carefully so that we all endeavour anew to support the entire united educational profession in giving our students the very best futures we can secure for them.

References

Arendt, H. 1954. Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought. New York: Penguin.

Hargreaves, A., and D Shirley. 2009. The Fourth Way: The Inspiring Future for Educational Change. Thousand Oaks, Calif: Corwin.

———. 2012. The Global Fourth Way: The Quest for Educational Excellence. Thousand Oaks, Calif: Corwin.

Ordóñez, L. D., M. E. Schweitzer, A. D. Galinsky and M. H. Bazerman. 2009. Goals Gone Wild: The Systematic Side Effects of Over-Prescribing Goal Setting. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard Business School

Dennis Shirley is professor of education, Lynch School of Education, Boston College, Boston, Massachusetts.
Dr. J-C Couture is associate coordinator, research, with the Alberta Teachers’ Association.

1    A thorough description of the study involving 615 principals across the country was published in the Fall, 2013, issue of the CAP Journal.

2    See Changing Landscapes in Co-Creating a Learning Canada, an environmental scan developed in collaboration with experts on a variety of key sectors.  The trend data cited in this article are all drawn from this document available at http://bit.ly/1fyB76N 

3    See Pereyra, Miguel A.; Kotthoff, Hans-Georg; Cowen, Robert (Eds.) 2011. PISA Under Examination. Rotterdam: Sense Publishing. Also see Heinz-Dieter Meyer & Aaron Benavot (Eds.) 2012. PISA, Power, and Policy: the emergence of global educational governance. Symposium Books. The recent release of the 2012 PISA results also produced a flurry of similar commentary.

4    The National Resolution on High Stakes Testing, which calls on government officials to reduce standardized testing in schools, has been endorsed by hundreds of organizations and over 13,000 individuals.

5    Grumet, M. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, (Fall 2006) V22 n3; pp-47-53.