The Superintendent Who Listens, part eight:
Searching For A North Star
In 1996, 30,000 Oregonians took to the streets in support of their beleaguered schools. In the state’s largest public demonstration ever, parents, teachers, kids, and other school backers marched through Portland carrying a powerful message to those in charge of parceling out public dollars. That message: The education of children is our top priority. Don’t shortchange our kids.
The group that organized the march, the Portland Public Schools Foundation, is now spearheading a less public, but potentially more powerful, process for change. Recognizing that even with plenty of money, a district will stumble without a clear direction, the foundation began asking Portland Public Schools to come up with a plan — a "North Star" — to guide it, says foundation Director Cynthia Guyer.
"We began to see that although there are many things to be proud of in Portland, there are deep, systemic challenges facing individual schools, and indeed the whole school system," Guyer says. "We started asking for a more coherent, comprehensive road map from the district leadership so that we could target our resources and our time and energy most effectively."
The spur to action was an audit of the district’s performance, funded by the city.
"Everyone was shocked by the audit, because they thought it was going to be on maintenance and janitors and business functions," says Guyer. "But what auditor KPMG Peat Marwick said is, those aren’t your biggest issues. Your biggest issue is that people are flailing around with no sense of where you’re going, how you’re going to get there, what are the best practices, what’s your theory of change."
Meanwhile, new leaders had taken the helm of the troubled district. Superintendent Ben Canada and School Board Chairman Ron Saxton were hungry for change.
"At that point," Guyer says, "I think Ben and Ron decided that doing such an initiative alone as a district — the cabinet or the school board going on a retreat with the superintendent — was not going to meet the challenge, even if they came up with something brilliant. So they said, ‘We’ll do it with the Portland Public Schools Foundation as a partnership.’"
After hiring Steve Barone of Transformation Systems to facilitate the strategic planning process and holding a series of public "speak-out sessions," the foundation invited people from every segment of Portland society to create a first draft. Along with teachers, parents, students, and administrators, there were government officials and ministers, business executives and union leaders, community activists and school support staff. The 32-member core team met for three grueling, sometimes gut-wrenching, 16-hour days.
"The worst critics of the district were invited to that room," Guyer reports. "There were some ultimate meltdowns. Republican businessmen, knee-jerk on diversity, knee-jerk on affirmative action, knee-jerk on welfare, knee-jerk on the public sector being mediocre. And then you have the perspective of someone who works in the minority community who sees lots of schools fail and lots of children hurt by that failure and who has a lot of anger. You get a lot of really honest discussion about why people are leaving Portland schools, what’s wrong with the culture."
The draft plan, which lays out the district’s mission, core values, objectives, and strategies, is now undergoing community scrutiny and refinement. At its heart is an uncompromising commitment to excellence. The plan calls for no less than 100 percent of Portland students to meet or exceed rigorous academic standards by 2005.
Guyer expresses guarded optimism about the district’s chances for renewal. "Slowly," she says, "concentric circles of some of the toughest critics in the minority community, in business, within our ranks of principals, some teachers, the teachers’ union, are coming to the table and feeling like there’s a glimmer of hope and energy being unleashed. I’m not Pollyanna. I don’t think we’ll wake up next September and it’ll all be done and be a new day. But I think we are building trust and a new way of working. And people are feeling heard."
In 1996, 30,000 Oregonians took to the streets in support of their beleaguered schools. In the state’s largest public demonstration ever, parents, teachers, kids, and other school backers marched through Portland carrying a powerful message to those in charge of parceling out public dollars. That message: The education of children is our top priority. Don’t shortchange our kids.
