Adamowski

        Dr. Steven Adamowski, superintendent of Cincinnati Public Schools for the past four years, is leaving the job next month to pursue research and teaching in educational leadership. He will head a Research Center for Education Reform at the University of Missouri. With a national reputation as a change leader, he recently served on the National Advisory Board for the Wallace/Reader's Digest Funds' “Leaders Count” project. Dr. Adamowski talked with The Enquirer editorial board this week about education change and leadership. Here are excerpts.

        Q. There's much talk about a “crisis” in public education leadership or a shortage of strong school leaders, particularly superintendents and principals. Good leaders have always been in demand, so why a crisis NOW?

        A. Looking five years out, we have an attrition rate of current principals and superintendents of 50 percent.

        Add to that the fact we have fewer people in the pipeline becoming these leaders than we've had historically. A third factor revolves around something I call “the conditions for leadership,” which people theorize relates directly to the pipeline issue. Given the increase in teacher salaries, given the difficu lties involved in governing and all you have to go through, the conditions for leadership are not substantially designed for the success of leaders. So you have fewer people getting into the leadership jobs and staying shorter times because of the conditions.

        The three combine to give this problem a big dimension. There are significant concerns whether there will be enough leaders, what will be the quality of those leaders and if their preparation at all will match their challengesIn a Public Agenda poll, that was a scientific, random survey of administrators, principals and superintendents all over the country, 78 percent said there was a mismatch between their level of graduate preparation (training) and the demands of the job. Only 2 out of 10 thought they were prepared to do the job they were given to do. That has tremendous implications for the current education system which is still certification based. Every state has certification laws, then you have the whole infrastructure of universities that are preparing people according to these certification requirements, when in fact, most of them (requirements) are obsolete all over the country.

        Q. How is the superintendent's job today different from the past?

        A. The changes are very much rooted in the fact that we're now in a standards-based, results-driven system of education. But if you look back in our industry, we've measured education quality by process and inputs. Now we're in a transition between process/inputs - the way educators have been trained based on certification requirements - to results. For the first time in our industry, educators are having to produce measurable results. This is because in the new global economy, virtually every student has to reach high standards. Since the early 1900s, when our education system was initiated, it has been okay for some students to reach high standards and others not; it was okay that some dropped out along the way because we had lots of jobs for people who didn't reach high standards. But those industrial jobs now have largely migrated to lower-wage markets in the global economy. This has given rise to the accountability movement that's linked with standards. So we have a whole different outcomes and skill set than what we've been doing before in education. I think this accounts for the (leadership) disconnect.

        Q. Do we know how to train school leaders to fit the new model?

        A. There are some promising ideas that have yet to be appliedMy own theory is that as difficult as it is to change school districts, it's even more difficult and slower to change higher education (where education training is based). So there will be a lag. But there's some talk about devising a standards-based model for preparation of administrators that would match the model in schools. If you did that, you wouldn't take people through distinct courses measured by seat time in Carnegie units (as now done), giving everybody the same thing. Instead, you would have a set of standards that essentially constituted the exit criteria and a way to assess it.

        I'm attracted to this because it solves one of the basic dilemmas around alternative certification and bringing people into education from outside education. Another promising idea revolves around concepts of leadership including so-called “adaptive leadership.”

        Most of our leadership theory is based upon heroic leadership and the actions of the person at the top. For example, one of the things that has guided me the most here in Cincinnati schools has been the work of John Kotter at Harvard Business School, who wrote Leading Change. He determined there were about eight specific variables and that if you worked on these things, you had a very high chance of effecting change and institutionalizing it. These are things such as building a sense of urgency, formulating the vision, and celebrating short-term successes. This was helpful to me in my work here.

        Most of these theories are based upon something the leader does to the organization, as opposed to setting a set of structural conditions under which people can first realize there's a problem and then find solutions to it. There are promising ideas out there, but we (in education) haven't yet organized our preparation programs to use them.

        Q. In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court's favorable voucher decision, how do you expect the growing school choice movement to impact public schools in the next 5 to 10 years?

        A. This is what I would describe as a “tipping point” issue. The Supreme Court decision in this case may be the tipping point (for choice). When you really look at what a voucher is, in Cincinnati we have a system of student-based budgeting which is basically a process of funding the child and the family rather than the school. The child and the family determine which school they're going to, but in this case it's limited to the public schools (in the district) and the funding follows the child there. If we were brave enough to use the “V” word in Cincinnati, this is an internal voucher system.

        If you're going to make a voucher system work from the standpoint of good public policy, you'd have to put some boundaries on it. You'd either have to say, as the court did, it's limited to low-income children in low-performing schools or you'd have to say that any school that participated would need to accept as full payment for the education of the child the per-pupil expenditure of the district. Otherwise, if you simply gave everybody their $ 8,000 (per pupil spending) and said go where you want, you'd have the $8,000 schools, but then you'd have the $12,000 schools and the $20,000 schools. You'd simply be supplementing the income of high-income people to get a differentiated education.

        What we've tried to get to in the standards movement is everybody reaching high standards, everybody getting the same high quality education. Saying all that, I continue to believe that charter schools are much more promising from a public policy standpoint because you start off knowing that every school gets the same amount of resources and every school is open to everyone. The (choice) concept is pretty simple. It's free market competition; it's equity. One of the reasons this issue doesn't go away is because it has legs, it has the strength of some fundamental ideas we value.

        Q. One of Cincinnati Public Schools' central goals is to become performance-based. Yet the teachers' union recently voted down the latest attempt. In all candor, do you believe there'll ever be a real system here that truly links teacher's pay and performance?

        A. We've talked about the “tipping point” today. I'd say we haven't reached the tipping point on this issue yet. There are about four, possibly five places in the country that are experimenting with this. But there's not yet enough of a critical mass. In terms of performance-based issues, probably our greatest success at CPS has been our own accountability plan. We're one of a handful of districts that have them and the only one in the nation that has one that actually closes low-performing schools if they don't improve over a three-year period. We've done that nine times so far and we've done it with success.

        On the teacher issue, there's a historical context here not too unlike the standards movement and the type of change we're going through there. If you look at the historical origins of our current salary system and go back to the 1920s and 1930s, it was common p ractice to pay high school teachers more than elementary teachers, pay men more than women and it was a major goal of the National Education Association to equalize salaries. Now, you have a standards-based system that measures by results and it no longer matches. The old system doesn't motivate performance because you pay everybody the same based upon years of service regardless of the results. That's why you're seeing this tension now being generated.

        One of the most gratifying things to me was the study done at CPS last year. We now are able to track individual student performance in our data system. We were able to look at students who were taught by teachers who went through the (training) system and look at how many standards they'd met (everywhere from novice to advanced and accomplished levels), and we were able to go back a year and look at the same students. It showed that teachers at that advanced and accomplished level had higher “gain” scores.

        So the power of this system is that if you can get the standards and the rubrics that measure them right, and you can demonstrate that teachers at a higher level of mastery of those standards get better gain scores than other teachers, then you have a breakthrough system, something that can be transformational. Then you align your professional development, evaluation and compensation in a way that can really produce better student results. We're not at the tipping point of this issue yet but when you get more of a critical mass of people doing it nationwide, we will.

        Q. What role will public demand for higher performance results play?

        A. As with many things, one of the roles of leadership is to provide the public with an avenue toward realizing its aspirations. This is what I've experienced in Cincinnati on the pay-for-performance issue. Whether you're talking to the business community, to parents, or the most conservative element in this city, nobody objects to paying outstanding teacher s more money. But they object to paying everyone the same regardless of performance. This issue is a means for the public to realize its aspirations to have better teachers.

        Q. We've seen many management and operations changes at CPS, but have yet to see significant improvements in test scores. What and how long will it take to make this happen in city schools?

        A. I would take some exception to that based upon the data we have. First, CPS is the only major city district in Ohio that has emerged from “academic emergency” (on the state report card). If you look at our fourth-grade results, the most difficult for us to improve because of the early literacy issue, the last two years, we've moved them. This year, everything went up at the fourth level. I'm not sure you can find another urban school district in Ohio that can compare to that. It's like trench warfare; we're fighting for every inch, but from our perspective, these look like good gains.

        Part of the answer to “when” is what are your points of greatest leverage. That's debatable, but in my view, if you looked at the condition of our school system several years ago, the two greatest points of leverage were early literacy and high schools. The high schools were abysmal. So we asked what couple of things could we do that would make the most impact on student achievement. The answer was doing something about those neighborhood high schools and getting more students reading. Now we have more students reading on grade-level at third grade than we have had in the last 20 years, based upon comparable measures we have.

        I'm not going to make excuses, but it's also important to point out that 65 percent of CPS students live in poverty; so this is a different ballgame in terms of what we, in the city, have to do to raise achievement scores. One of the most gratifying experiences in Cincinnati is that we've been able to demonstrate that achievement can be raised regardless of student income. You can't do it in the same way you can do it in a place like Sycamore or Wyoming.

        There's also a regional dimension of this. I'm not sure in the long term, we can continue to get the kinds of gains we're getting if we keep every student who is living in poverty bottled up in one place.

        I believe part of the long-term solution is breaking down the walls between city and suburb, taking a regional approach. This is not a race issue. It's a class issue. The more economically segregated you stay as a system, the harder it is to accomplish student gains. Or, is you're willing to spend a lot more money to compensate for economic segregation, maybe, just maybe, you could accomplish the same thing.

        Q. Thinking regionally, how can mayors and other civic leaders help fix schools beyond the usual volunteering and donations?

        A. As a governmental issue, one of my most dismal failures has been my inability to persuade the CPS board , or any other school board in this area, to effect open enrollment for students. In Ohio, any school district can pass a resolution declaring open enrollment that allows outside students to come into its district. It's actually very beneficial financially when you collect state aid on those students. The CPS board has not been willing to do that. Three years ago, when I had this idea, I met with superintendents from the 14 school districts that border CPS, and there was not overwhelming interest on anybody's part in doing this.

        But we have within our means now to open up these lines. We have numerous situations where a family living in Cincinnati is actually closer to a school run by another district and vice versa. CPS has programs, like our language programs , that really have a regional basis rather than a local one. We have to ask ourselves, if we were designing school district lines today, would we create one big school district with 42,000 students (like CPS) and 28 little districts of a thousand or two students surrounding it? I don't think we would. I'm not sure the basis for such school districting exists if you carry the (standards) reform movement out to its logical conclusions. That's one thing elected officials could think about.

        The other thing regarding business and community involvement is a paradigm shift we've tried to promote at CPS. It's a shift from promoting programs that are district wide in nature through the central office to intense involvement with a particular school. This is the Cincinnati Bell model (in a CPS high school), where the business sets the exit standards, guarantees employment, provides the resources the school needs, helps manage it. You can have a tremendous impact on schools this way.

        Q. What needs to be done to keep CPS' latest reforms on track a fter you leave?

        A. If there's anything I've tried to accomplish it's establishing some structural conditions that allow schools to be less dependent on district and central office leadership. One of the most dangerous things we have today in education is a leader-is-hero syndrome. You have a bad situation and you hire someone who's going to fix it from the top, which is impossible. That leader rides in on a white horse, does a few things and then rides out just ahead of the posse. Then you flip-flop to another leader.

        One of the strengths with CPS is we had a strategic plan (from the board) already started when I became superintendent. The question for me was does the plan agree with my own philosophy of reform enough that I could take it on without changing the system to someth ing else. The longer you do that, the more ingrained the plan becomes. I served in Delaware under both a Republican and Democratic governors, who held to the same reform strategy for education. I saw the remarkable effect of that and I've seen that in Cincinnati, where we've been able to maintain the reform strategy.

        CPS has things in place now that would be very difficult to change. Nobody's going back to making budget decisions for schools from central office. You'd have a revolution if you did that now. Decentralization is largely in place. Nobody's going to throw out an accountability plan, or the public would be up in arms. The district has been at this long enough to establish a mindset that board members and superintendents will come and go. If they're good, they'll add value and take it further. But it's not going to be this constant flip-flop.

        Q. Money is always an issue. What school financing changes would you like to see?

        A. Nationally, public schools are entering what I describe as the third generation of school finance reform. Ohio is still in its first generation, but there are a number of states whose cases (finance lawsuits) have gone back to court and the cutting edge of school finance reform now is the adequacy issue.

        Ohio's current system and many others is based upon the equalization of property taxes and property wealth. None of those systems recognize the fact that (funding) adequacy is a different proposition for low-income students than for high-income ones. Cincinnati is a property-wealthy, income-poor district. What would be fairer and most beneficial for us would be to balance equalization of property wealth with income considerations, so to have a system that recognizes both in the equation.

        So what is the standard for adequacy? You either have to say you're going to fund certain things specifically because there's research that says they produce a better result, or you have to say we must provide more money for low-income students because it takes more to get them to the same education level as higher income students.

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