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Powerful Schools
by Rebecca Sadinsky and Greg Tuke
Introduction
Twelve years ago when Powerful Schools was an idea rather than a fully formed, successful educational organization, the vision for our work was school change through community involvement. As the years progressed our vision refined and while school change and community leadership were key strategies, our focus became outcomes for students, all students. Our programs developed from that focus as did our grounding values and mission.Both Greg Tuke and I, Rebecca Sadinsky, wrote the article that follows. Greg and I met twelve years ago when we were both volunteers hatching the Powerful Schools idea along with many other school and community leaders. Greg became the founding Executive Director in 1992, expertly guiding Powerful Schools for 11 years. At the beginning of 2003 I became the Executive Director of this unique organization. In June 2003 Greg wrote the piece which follows, the executive summary of a longer article describing the lessons learned from Powerful Schools experience working with a community building model which aims to make real change in the lives of students in challenged schools. I penned the addendum describing how Powerful Schools will take these lessons and apply them so that more students will benefit from Powerful Schools.
Powerful Schools as a Model for Sustainable Reform
During the past twenty-five years, a profound and radical shift has occurred in education. For the first time in U.S. history a public consensus is demanding that every child get a good education. With the new state standards in nearly every state, ensuring a good education to every child is now public policy. To achieve this exceptional goal will require a very different public education system from the one we have today.Although we lament the shape of our public school system today, it is important to recognize how dramatically the education landscape and expectations have changed, in three major ways, just in our lifetime. First, we now expect everyone at the education track meet to successfully jump over the high-jump bar. Second, we have raised the bar substantially from where it used to be. And third, the participants are a very different group from what we used to have, with many more entering the race without the essential preparation.
We need strategies that can move us toward the far-sighted goal of a great education for every child. The elements that contribute to a great learning environment where all children can learn are not an undiscovered secret. We know what great schools look like. Many well-documented examples of such schools exist around the country, even in the poorest of communities. What we have not yet been able to achieve is a strategy for changing school systems from mediocre to high-performance. We believe the Powerful Schools model offers that change strategy.
Powerful Schools began its work in southeast Seattle, a community of 50,000 that represents one of the most racially and economically diverse parts of the city. More than 60% of the students in our four participating schools are poor and eligible for free and reduced lunch. More than 24 languages are spoken in the homes of families in our four schools.
Today, our four schools are very different learning environments from those we started with 12 years ago. Instead of teachers teaching alone in their classrooms, we now have some of the finest artists and published authors in the city coming into our school communities and working side by side with our teachers in long-term residencies. We also have highly skilled teachers coaching other teachers throughout the year, not just in auditoriums far from their schools, but right in their own classrooms.
When once we had scores of students heading into second grade with very poor reading skills, we now get nearly every student up to or beyond first grade reading levels by the end of their first year in school.
This past year, two of our four schools were in the top five percent of rapidly improving schools, based on test scores.We have clearly demonstrated an effective model for rapidly disseminating effective programs from one school to the next, especially when they are part of a Powerful Schools cluster.
Strategies for change
We have learned a number of very important lessons during the past 12 years regarding how to help schools change.Initiate the change with the believers first. It is appealing to try to get the needed change immediately throughout a school, but organizational resistance thwarts most change efforts.
Organizational change takes years. Too many citizens, funders, and politicians believe that with the right incentives, schools can be dramatically improved within a year. We have found that making the necessary changes last takes generally three to five years.
Work comprehensively in schools. Working on one program or one element at a time is insufficient. Change theorists state that changing many things at once provides the needed energy and imbalance necessary to overcome inertia.
Work with existing schools; do not create new ones. To get systemic change at an affordable price, we need to concentrate on strategies to change existing schools, not try to recreate entirely new systems.
Work with clusters of schools and community organizations, not one school at a time. This combination of schools and community groups provides the support and external stimulation to achieve substantial change and maintain it when resistance arises.
School clusters promote rapid dissemination. When schools work closely together, ideas can be piloted and refined in one school, then disseminated and accepted quickly in the partner schools because of the pre-existing relationships among the schools' leadership.
The fuel for organizational change is trusting relationships. There are plenty of good programs around, but not plenty of trusting relationships. And the relationships provide the fuel for change and the ability to take risks with confidence and less fear.
Redesign and create new relationships. Strengthened relationships among principals, teachers, and community members provide a new culture to support the changes.
Build relationships on the home turf. By connecting inside the classroom and the schoolhouse, new strategies can be tested in a real environment, and approaches can be tailored to the exact environment a teacher is working in.
Use strengths to address weaknesses. Every school community has an abundance of strengths that can be used to address the school's weaknesses. Focusing on strengths creates a positive rather than negative atmosphere and promotes change rather than resistance.
Drive the change with a leadership team of both insiders and outsiders. This balance of insiders and outsiders provides the two necessary ingredients: the insiders' skillful analysis of the real problems schools face and the outsiders' new perspective and lack of entrenchment
Getting started
Involve the community in the schools. It is imperative that schools open up their doors to the community. Two simple strategies, in particular, do this well. The first is keeping the schools open after 3 pm for after-school and evening use by for the whole community. The second is encouraging community members throughout the year to tour the schools and get first-hand experiences of school classrooms.Start with a strong, diverse board. Finding the right mix of grassroots leaders and citywide leaders with an ability to connect the organization to new resource links is important. Work to develop a board of 18 to 24 members, making sure one-third of the members are at-large leaders with good citywide connections.
Communicate to the public what is already working well. The communications and public relations function of the coalition is a crucial component to creating a closer connection to the community. When done well, the public relations function is the vehicle for attracting new resources (skilled volunteers, money, and equipment) and helping the public better understand the education system and the schools in the community.
Develop rich performance measures. There is great pressure on teachers and principals to get better results on the standardized tests. The strategy we have taken at Powerful Schools is to develop programs that tie directly to the new performance standards and to develop additional measures that are richer and more complex and provide more on-going assessments for students, parents, and teachers to help students grow.
Develop a diverse funding base from the onset of the organization. In schools today, we know of hundreds of programs that work for all students. And we keep starting and stopping them in reckless abandon because of the disastrous financing strategies most school systems face. Unless we find a better way to maintain financing for effective programs, we will never get the schools we want.
Financing the Powerful Schools strategies
Today, our operating budget is just under $1 million. Another organization that serves teachers uses Powerful Schools as its fiscal agent, adding an additional $200,000 to the budget.
Much of the growth in our financial resources has been made possible by the growth of our individual donor base. We request donations from some people individually at some point along the cultivation highway, but we ask the vast majority of them at our free annual breakfast. This 90-minute event is now in its seventh year, and at this year's breakfast (2003) we raised $150,000 in general operating support from the more than 400 people who attended this high-energy event.
Expansion
The results of our attempts to expand the Powerful Schools model into new clusters of schools have been mixed. By 2003 we had helped start four coalitions, each with four to seven schools. Only two of the coalitions continue to operate as of summer 2003. In analyzing the four coalitions, we have found three ingredients critical for success:1. The core leadership team must be stable.
2. A highly skilled, full-time director must be selected to staff the effort.
3. Funding for first year's budget must be secured before hiring staff.Remaining challenges for the future
We have made enormous progress with our original four Powerful Schools, but we have not yet created deep, lasting change that results in every child graduating from these elementary school with a great education. And we have certainly not expanded the model in a way that transforms entire school districts. To move to this next level will require addressing the following four major issues.1. Shaping the overall school transformation process and fully integrating the Powerful Schools initiatives with the rest of the school improvement process.
2. Matching the most skilled teachers and education leaders with schools that have the greatest challenges.
3. Securing funding for widespread expansion.
4. Balancing narrow test score outcomes with other educational outcomes we value.
Conclusion
We know what a powerful learning environment in a school looks like. We know what programs and school cultures nurture that kind of environment. We have plenty of examples of schools across urban America, in even the most desperate communities, that have created the learning environments we hope for.We now have a model in Powerful Schools for how to engage schools and communities in a transformation process that results in clusters of great schools. We are at the early stages of demonstrating how to apply the Powerful Schools model to whole districts. Our children are depending on us.
Addendum
Twelve years after starting up our Community Schools program as a volunteer, I have come back to Powerful Schools as Executive Director. I am fortunate to be able to benefit from the lessons learned by the founding Executive Director Greg Tuke, other staff, and dozens of effective board members. The foundation stabilizing Powerful Schools is based on years of program, organization, school, and community development, the invaluable relationships formed over those years, innovation, and reputation. This solid foundation provides the opportunity to build our next tier of school improvement efforts. I am pleased to lead Powerful Schools as we move forward—using what we have learned to influence public education beyond our original four partner schools and two community organizations.The strongest piece of the Powerful Schools legacy is our core mission—our set of values and purposes—that distinguishes Powerful Schools and provides its integrity. Powerful Schools is an earnest and effective partner for challenged public elementary schools, helping these schools and their communities to realize their broadest promise, their potential to be centers for learning so students can develop academically, socially, creatively, and emotionally. Our organizational mission statement, developed four years ago, remains our guide: to build powerful learning communities where ALL students achieve their fullest potential.
The key values that form our philosophy and steer our planning are to:
- Empower students through literacy skills, which provide the foundation for learning
- Offer a full-range of educational strategies that address the academic, creative, social, and emotional potential of a student
- Provide caring, consistent adults who serve as critical learning advocates for students
- Hold high expectations for all children and for the education they receive, and foster strong home/school connections
- Build the school/community connections to promote excellent public schools as a key to a healthy community
Each program has its own mission, as well, which reflects our values and puts them into practice.
Powerful Writers strengthens student proficiency and confidence in writing by developing expertise among teachers and by creating a culture of writing in elementary schools.
Powerful Buddies assists children to develop and demonstrate greater self-confidence in academic achievement, relationship building and behavioral management by providing a consistent caring mentor.
Community Schools provides stimulating learning environments outside of classroom hours that ignite passions of students, school families and neighbors and engage parents in their students' education.
Powerful Arts advances best practices in education by promoting project-based learning and creative thinking through integration of the visual and performing arts into core curriculum areas. Artists and teachers collaborate in the design and teaching of curriculum units which spark student interests, critical thinking skills and creativity by tapping into multiple learning styles and forms of expression.
Powerful Readers tutors the students most at risk of reading failure each day, one to one, cultivating a love of reading and the ability to meet the high reading standards expected of their grade level.
Powerful Schools' best practice continues to be self-assessment and revision of our work. Although unwaveringly committed to our core mission, program missions, and values, we are constantly looking for ways to refine and improve our Powerful Schools programs, using the latest research and persistently gauging our work against high expectations. We are looking for better ways to promote confident, capable writers and readers, students who have arts literacy, students who are positive contributors to their classroom and school. Powerful Schools is both a teaching and a learning organization.
However flush we are with the years of success with our partner schools and neighborhoods, the students, families and teachers, we must make some changes in order to reach our goal of greater influence. As we move forward we will focus our efforts in five areas.
We will be strengthening the impact of each program to address and involve all levels of the school community: students, teachers, neighbors and school families. Powerful Schools is highly integrated in the classrooms of our partner schools, working directly with teachers and students. At the same time Powerful Schools is a skilled community based nonprofit bridging the wider community with the more intimate school community. That is Powerful Schools unique edge: applying the wealth of the community to the betterment of schools and helping schools to perform better for students, teachers, families and community. Principals and teachers cannot do this work alone. Families and community members have a huge stake in helping schools be successful. Weaving these interests together through each of our programs makes each of our programs more successful for students and teachers.
Powerful Schools has developed our programs and approaches working closely with four wonderful schools in Southeast Seattle and delivers all five programs in those four schools. But we are learning more about the unique attributes of each school community, even among these four schools within a two-mile radius. In the same way teachers are working to individualize their approach to each student Powerful Schools will need to modify how we work with each school. As we look to sustain our work in four schools and expand into more schools and communities we will customize how we work with each partner school.
Powerful Schools has the capacity to effectively expand to more schools, as it learns more about customizing its work with each partner school. In the past Powerful Schools has employed a strategy of replication, fostering new nonprofits to conduct school change using the Powerful Schools model in a different set of schools. Experience has shown that the business of creating new nonprofit organizations is unreliable and resource intensive. Currently there are two organizations fostered by Powerful Schools, which are still developing into Powerful Schools-like organizations; there are also at least three others that did not succeed after trying for several years. There are many reasons why replication is a hard business, especially within the same local funding community. However, the most immediate goal of replication, reaching more students and school communities can be addressed by expansion in to new communities and schools, particularly schools with similar challenges as those facing the schools Powerful Schools works with now.
Up to now Powerful Schools has worked to refine our model for effectively applying community resources to create real outcomes for students. Our model is refined and available for inspection. In fact we bring many influential people from the broader community, including leaders in educational reform, on tours to see what we are doing. We have extensively promoted our model in order to present it as a real opportunity for others to follow. We have even written a kind of cookbook on starting up a Powerful Schools organization. Many educators and community leaders have lauded our approach. However, we have also noted that having a well documented, transparent and proven model, which delivers results for children, does not seem to influence how a school district operates. Ultimately, Powerful Schools must develop a new strategy for influencing the levels above the local community and school in order to more effectively reach more children and school communities.
Finally, Powerful Schools will modify its board structure in order to retain the best of our grassroots base yet also gain the skills necessary to propel Powerful Schools toward a more influential organization. Currently our board, primarily made up of parents, teachers, principals and neighbors, is looking at ways to insure that Powerful Schools continues to have ways to seek and consider the perspectives of the local community, parents, teachers and principals while building a board which has access to key educational policy and school district leadership as well as wider access to significant funders.
While we are committed to these refinements in our theory of change, there is one other attribute of our upcoming work that, while a continuing endeavor, is a fundamental way in which Powerful Schools will refine its work. Working in increasingly multi-cultural communities and aiming to help all students reach their highest potential in schools, demands that we continuously learn more about multi-cultural education, increase our cultural competency and participate more fully in creating educational communities free of bias.
We are entering a new chapter in the Powerful Schools story, but not the final one. We will keep on honing our wisdom through our experience in classrooms and communities, learning lessons from more fine students and teachers, and sharing what we've learned in the years to come.
Greg Tuke is the founding executive director of Powerful Schools. He has ten years of leadership experience in evaluating and funding grassroots community organizations throughout the Northwest, working with A Territory Resource Foundation, Washington Mutual Foundation, and the Peace Development Fund. In addition, he has directed two community organization projects: The Nuclear Awareness Group of Group Health Cooperative, and the Council for Greater Everett. Mr. Tuke has a Masters in Social Work, specializing in community organization and social policy. He can be reached at gtuke@earthlink.net.
Rebecca Sadinsky, Powerful Schools executive director has over 20 years experience in community development and grassroots organizing. She was the founding manager of the Neighborhood Matching Fund of the City of Seattle's Office of Neighborhoods, a Program Officer for Neighborhood Reinvestment Corporation and the Neighborhood Programs Director of Neighborhood House. She has received numerous awards for her achievements, including the Seattle Management Association Outstanding Management Award in 2001. Ms. Sadinsky was a founding volunteer member of Powerful Schools, playing a leading role in the initial implementation of our first program, Community Schools. She can be reached at rsadinsky@powerfulschools.org.
© December 2003 New Horizons for Learning
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