[00:01] SPEAKER_00:
Welcome to Principal Center Radio, bringing you the best in professional practice.
[00:06] Announcer:
Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center and Champion of High Performance Instructional Leadership, Justin Bader. Welcome everyone to Principal Center Radio.
[00:15] SPEAKER_02:
I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to have as my guest today, David Kirp. Dr. Kirp is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of Improbable Scholars, the Rebirth of a Great American School System and a Strategy for America's Schools, which recently received the American Educational Research Association's Award for Outstanding Book of the year. And Professor Kirp also served on the Obama administration's transition team working on education policy. And having read Improbable Scholars, I knew that I had to have Professor Kirp on the show because this is, I think, a tremendously important book.
[00:58] Announcer:
And now, our feature presentation.
[01:01] SPEAKER_02:
So David, thank you so much for joining us on Principal Center Radio.
[01:04] SPEAKER_01:
Justin, it's a pleasure to be here.
[01:05] SPEAKER_02:
Now, Improbable Scholars really is at its heart a story. And I wonder if you could start by taking us through the beginning part of that story and how you came to not only know about the schools in Union City, New Jersey, but to actually become a part of telling that story. And I wonder if you could share a little bit about what it is that's going on in Union City, New Jersey that we can learn from.
[01:30] SPEAKER_01:
Well, I came to Union City because... If you looked at the statistics, the kids are doing a whole lot better than you might anticipate. Union City is a very poor, predominantly Latino immigrant community with 90 plus percent of the kids on free and reduced price lunches. It's the most crowded city in America and that's not because there are skyscrapers or big buildings, it's because you've got three and four families clustered in a single apartment living behind a locked bedroom door with a shelf in the refrigerator.
[01:59]
This is classically the kind of district that doesn't do well by its students. And here was Union City with phenomenally good reading and math test scores. And I wanted to spend the time finding out what was happening. And the short answer to what's happening is that Union City has over time implemented a series of strategies that are familiar to any educator with a pulse, beginning with early education and very good preschool and carrying on through supporting teachers and students all the way through high school with a good deal in between. Union City has done what people have wanted to do, know they should be doing, but have often been diverted by faddishness into forgetting what they need to do.
[02:43] SPEAKER_02:
Now, David, I think when we come across a story like Union City, I think our natural kind of reaction to hearing outstanding stories of success is to try to find what's unique and not replicable about that situation. Can you take that notion away from us? Is there anything that is not replicable or that would prevent us from really drawing lessons from Union City?
[03:08] SPEAKER_01:
You're absolutely right in raising this concern about is this a one-off story? And unfortunately, I think educators are particularly prone to saying, it wasn't made here, didn't happen here, doesn't work here. And so I tell a story about a district that is. pretty rich, not huge, and is predominantly Latino in population. And so people would say, well, what happens when you have a district that's got half as much money? Union City spends about $17,000.
[03:38]
What about a district that spends $8,000? What about a district that doesn't have all Latino kids? who somehow in this analysis become the model minority, something that Latino families would find very amusing, and is bigger or littler. And so I went looking around the country for other school districts that have done well on the test scores, surprisingly well on the test scores, with poor students, African-American students, poor white students, immigrant kids, big districts, little districts, unionized, non-unionized, elected school boards, appointed school boards. I looked at all the factors that somebody might say, gosh, this really is a lovely story. We enjoyed reading it, but, and what I found to my, um, frankly, I had no idea what I'd find.
[04:27]
What I found was that all of those districts are doing in the broadest sense, the same thing. Um, they're sticking to a system of supports, good preschool support for teachers, assessment used to improve teaching and learning. Those are the kinds of things, collaboration among teachers. These are the kinds of things that are familiar stuff. There's nothing fancy in university, and I think that's the good news in this story. There's no new trick of the trade that people have to learn.
[05:05]
But the other side of that coin is that it's hard work to make this happen, and hard work to keep making this happen, to keep those parts of the system working, to build a system that really is a system of schools going in the same direction, but out of a world in which schools and, for that matter, teachers are accustomed to largely setting their own path. And Union City has done that brilliantly, and so too a place like Aldine, Texas, which is one of those places that has half the money to spend. It's a poor... poor school district.
[05:41]
It's Houston's poor cousin. It's bigger than Boston, bigger than Washington. And there's less that they can do. And it's sad to see the tradeoffs they have to make. But the bottom line is they think in broadly the same terms as Union City does. And that place also has students graduating at rates that exceed the national average and doing better on the state tests than the typical Texas school district.
[06:08] SPEAKER_02:
Now, let's talk about what that looks like in Union City. Now, I was reading on the dust jacket just to refresh my memory, but Union City has a graduation rate that's around 90%. Is that right?
[06:20] SPEAKER_01:
That's right. And that's an astonishment. It's continued to go up over the course of the years as the district has learned and adapted at the margins. And It's continued to improve, even though the background of the families who are coming to Union City is becoming poorer and poorer. These are families, many of them from the countryside in Latin America, many of them parents with very little education, come to pursue what immigrants always pursue, the chance to give their kids a better start in life. But the challenges are greater, and even with those greater challenges, the graduation rate is stunningly about ninety percent
[07:02] SPEAKER_02:
Now I've reviewed papers focusing on other kind of high needs and high performing school districts and reviewed a paper on one in Texas. And I have to say one of the things that struck me about kind of the capacity or the maybe unaccounted for assets and resources of that community was a certain measure of stability and particularly stability in senior leadership. Is that something you saw in Union City?
[07:31] SPEAKER_01:
Absolutely, and thanks for bringing that up. We're a very impatient country, and so there's a tendency for school districts to bring in, as a school leader, a school superintendent, somebody who says, I've got the answer. They're the Pied Piper who's going to solve their problems. And in less than three years, big city school superintendents are gone, either because they found other jobs or often because they're fired by disillusioned school boards. And one thing we know, one thing that all of these districts had in common, was that they had stable leadership at the top, stable leadership in the schools as well. You can't turn around an organization as complex as a school district in two, three, or four years.
[08:13]
I don't care what kind of a genius you are. And in all these places, that kind of stability exists. What's important to note also is that this isn't a forever thing. These districts weren't always models. They all had their crisis moments, Union City, In the late 1980s, it was the second worst school district in New Jersey. The state was an inch away from taking it over.
[08:36]
And that was a moment which the district pulled together in Aldine, Texas, to go back to that example. The crisis moment came when the business leaders of the town said, we can't hire your graduates because they can't write, they can't do math. And the district decided, we've got to do a whole lot better than this. If a school district is lucky, What happens is that it buys into the notion of slow and steady progress. That progress happens, the school district gets more excited, the leadership is trusted more, and a virtual circle exists. Again, all these places, because of the stability that they've enjoyed, had the chance to implement incremental important changes so that they would actually build a system that was based on the skills and talents that we know really are what work in improving the lives of kids.
[09:29] SPEAKER_02:
Well, I appreciate that emphasis on building our capacity to serve students over time, that it's not the result of fads, it's not the result of massive rapid interventions and continuous kind of churn of reforms, but it really is about leadership and about having a vision and about building that capacity within your organization over a long period of time. How long did it take in Union City to turn things around?
[09:54] SPEAKER_01:
Well, it really has been a slow, steady progress. In the late 1980s, as I say, the state was ready to take over Union City, and it had people monitoring that district for several years. But the decision was made to really improve the system from the bottom up. That meant kindergarten and when preschool funds came available in the late 1990s because of a state Supreme Court decision. It meant preschool and then working your way up through the elementary schools and the middle schools. And as everybody in the audience knows, high schools are the toughest nut to crack.
[10:27]
And it really hasn't been until the last few years that the high schools have been, the high school in Union City has been as good, as focused, as effective as high standard setting a place as the rest of the system. And again, the process carries on. The big problem the Union City faces is when teenagers come, they're 13, 14, 15 years old, and they come from Latin America, they don't know English, they really don't know Spanish. They've had maybe a second or third grade education, so that school district has to figure out how to teach them a language, how to bring them up to speed academically, and how to give them a sense of what America is like, all in a matter of four years. And they graduate about half of those students. And if that doesn't sound remarkable, a city like Cleveland or Syracuse has a graduation rate for the entire city-wide population.
[11:25]
That's less than 50%. And they've done this by figuring out step by step what's going to make a difference for these students, what's going to work for these students, how do we do all those things that need to be done and connect these students to the life of the school, to the student activities in that school, to the sports activities, to the extracurricular activities. A year ago, 2013 graduation, three of the top 20 students came from this group. They were among the students who'd come to the U.S. five years before, speaking no English.
[11:59]
And there they are, graduating near the top of their class and, interestingly, running a number of school organizations.
[12:06] SPEAKER_02:
Well, it is an amazing story. And rather than go through too much more, I could talk for hours about the story that you share in Improbable Scholars. I want to jump to some takeaways for school administrators. And because everything you recommend or everything you convey that Union City is doing that's working is so familiar, they are basics like starting early and supporting teachers and using assessment to improve teaching and learning. Because we already know those things, I wonder if you could give us a couple of takeaways for school leaders, but in terms of things that we should not be doing, because as you said earlier, those can divert our attention from focusing on what really matters. So what are some things that school administrators should not do based on your research?
[12:52] SPEAKER_01:
So that's a great question. Let me suggest two. One of them is that school administrators should not succumb to the temptation of going after short-term grants that require them to turn around and do very different things than they've been doing in the past in order to get some money at the margin. Because all that does is confuse everybody and disrupt the kind of continuous improvement that's needed. And the other thing that school superintendents, particularly at the top of the pyramid, should resist doing is looking for superstar principals and saying, okay, principal, you go your own way. Every one of these districts, in the large districts or the small districts, almost all of the schools were following a common curriculum across schools.
[13:40]
And what the leaders had done was to take a system of schools, each of them going their own way, and build a real school system. And the reason why that's important is pretty simple. Poor kids move. And so if they're in one wonderful school that has curriculum A and then they move across town and another wonderful school that has a totally different curriculum, they're going to get lost. And that's a very pragmatic reason to say, okay, we're going to develop a model that works and we're going to apply it across the board. And let me actually add a third, which is you want to trust your teachers.
[14:16]
You don't want to bring in outsiders to develop a curriculum and then dump it in teachers' laps. What Union City did and what other places have done is to turn to their own teachers to review what's being taught, to look for the best materials out there. And that really encourages buy-in on the part of teachers and administrators in the schools.
[14:36] SPEAKER_02:
Well, there are a million other lessons to draw from Improbable Scholars and I would highly encourage any school leader or anyone who cares about the future of public education and wants to get a better handle on what we can do to improve our school systems on behalf of students to pick up Improbable Scholars and spend the time to read that story and immerse yourself in that story. It is not a list of quick tips, but it is a real story of a real school district that is getting the job done in circumstances under which many other systems are not doing nearly so well. So Professor Kirk, thank you so much for joining us for Principal Center Radio and sharing your thoughts on what we can do as school leaders to produce better results for students and to fulfill our obligation to give them every opportunity in life.
[15:27] SPEAKER_01:
It's been a pleasure to be here. Thank you so much for inviting me.
[15:30] SPEAKER_00:
And now, Justin Bader on high-performance instructional leadership.
[15:35] SPEAKER_02:
So high-performance instructional leaders, what can we take away from Professor Kirp's insights from Union City School District? One clear message is that we need to focus on the fundamentals and giving ourselves enough time to reap the rewards and see the results from investments in basic things like high-quality early childhood education. And we need to have the patience to not jump onto the next fad or the next reform if we know that we need to get those fundamentals right first. Another key takeaway is that we don't create a system of excellence by hiring great people and then letting them go their own way. The only way to create a system is to make it work as a system and to focus on those fundamentals and make sure that everyone is implementing them well. That's how you create results for all of your students.
[16:23]
That's how you create equity. That's how you create excellence.
[16:29] Announcer:
Thanks for listening to Principal Center Radio. For more great episodes, subscribe on our website at principalcenter.com slash radio.
