What is School Reform?

The term “School Reform” has been around for a while. And, like many terms in any industry, they became buzz words that everyone wanted to use. It made you feel smart and on top of things to talk about school reform.

But what really is school reform and what does successful school reform look like?

The answer is…Whatever you want it to look like. That is the best part. There is not one model that will make a school successful. If there were, then all the schools would look alike and we would push kids out the door with a diploma just like a car factory. That would be great for education, but bad for kids. Not every kid is made alike to start with and they should not be alike when we get done with them.

A few years ago I took a group of teachers, administrators, counselors and parents to Washington DC to visit schools that had been turned from failure to success. The visits with the schools was great. There was much learned there that is still being used at my kids’ high school today.

One evening, one of the teachers asked me why I did what I did at the school. At that time I was a self-employed consultant with lots of time on my hands. So, I spent between 15-20 hours per week at the school. My answer to this teacher was, “Because my kids get treated better. And if my kids get treated better, so do other kids get treated better.”

By my kids getting treated better, they did not get better grades or favors from the teachers. But they were recognized by teachers and the teachers knew that the family was involved in educating everyone. What really happened was that my kids got taught better because of what my wife and I did for the school. (My wife was the PTSA president.)

That trip brought school reform to our school. What I mean by that is that we started to look at what we were doing at the school and seeing where the gaps were from where we were and where we wanted to be.

Once we recognized the gaps it was very easy to put solutions into place. And once we had a few solutions in place we started to get support from the faculty. That support resulted in a great deal of trust being created between all the stakeholders at the school. It was no longer “their problem” it was “our problem.” And it became “our solution.”

But trust is very fragile. You have to continue to work at it and nurture it so it will grow.  You do that through communication. The more you communicate the more trust you build. People just want to be kept informed. They wanted to know what was going on.

One of the interesting things that came out of this whole experience was that people really didn’t care if you were an expert in something. That is not where the credibility came from. The credibility came from them knowing how much you cared about something.

That came to the front a few years later after a change in school leadership. That change was a real test for the school to see how they would stick together through what would become a tough time. The school was faced with some situations that were created by outside forces. Happy to say, the trust was still there and people were able to pull it back together. The school took some hits, but there were people that could be counted on to fight to get back on track. And new people at the school learned that there was a positive culture to make things happen led by people who really cared.

What does all this mean about school reform? The reform is not so much in the processes and systems. The reform is in the minds of the people. When changes are based only on the processes and systems you don’t have what you need to sustain the changes over the long haul. When the reform is in the minds of the people you can change anything you want. The trust will get you through.