There are no shortage of ideas about how to improve schools. Zac and I wrote a book filled with them. And every year, principals and teachers come together to try to figure out how to make their schools better places – writing school improvement plans, creating sub-committees, spending time trying to make things better. It is the language of our national discussion around education – how do we fix our schools?
But there’s another thing we need to look at – throughout the last twenty or thirty years, whether it is the Gates small schools initiative, the charter movement, or any number of initiatives like the Boston Pilot schools or the New York City iZone – we’ve started thousands of schools in this country… and most of them started with incredible promise and idealism and energy, and not enough of them stayed that way.
There are many reasons for that – budget cuts, superintendency changes, leadership change, mission drift and more – and what that shows is how real regression to the mean is in education. It is the thing that we have to think about as we look to make schools better places — how will we sustain the changes we make? How will we sustain innovative ideas — or even just the best old-fashioned ideas.
A long time ago, when I was starting SLA, someone told me that leaders either had start-up energy or sustaining energy, but most people didn’t have both. I didn’t want to be a short-time founder. I wanted to be at SLA for a long, long time – and I still do. But to do that, we had to think about fragility. How were we going to nurture SLA after we’d built it? How would we keep working to make it the best version of itself while also being careful not to work people too hard, take on ideas and concepts that would pull us away from our core mission, and of course, navigate the changing winds around us. I didn’t realize that we were also going to have to get through one of the worst crises in educational history, too, but there we were.
And SLA is celebrating its ten year anniversary this year. If the ten years of our little school has taught me anything is that we have to think as deeply about sustainability as we do about start-up. We have to recognize that doing something different, something that pushes against the dominant narrative, requires eternal vigilance. There’s never the moment you can relax and think, “Whew… we’ve arrived.” Every year brings a new 9th grade class. Every year brings new challenges. And every year, you have to work to maintain what you’ve built – while always trying to figure out how to make it better too.
Because schools are fragile – no matter how strong we build them, we have to always remember that they will take just as much energy to keep them strong.
Your post made me think about why schools are fragile.
The school where I teach is one of many around the world run by the Brothers of the Sacred Heart, an almost 200 year old Catholic order of teaching brothers. The work they do to maintain the mission and culture of their schools is impressive to me. There are summer workshops of several weeks for school leaders where these people are brought to France from around the world. Our recent faculty retreat was all about the mission of the schools, the history of the community and how it remains relevant. Teaching at a school that lives and breathes “each student is known, valued and treasured” well after its 50th year is a great thing.
Schools and their cultures are fragile but good leadership and hard work keep them going.
Schools are sacred and they do sacred work. They should be nurtured and protected like the treasures that they are (can be).
Lovely post. Thanks. As our school transitions from startup to sustaining, these are particularly relevant thoughts.