Top-down control dooms our public schools

By Wellford W. Wilms

In 2003, UCLA's School Management Program teamed up with a new principal at Baldwin Park High School to create a teacher-led reform aimed at lifting the troubled school out of its academic doldrums. According to the superintendent, the school had the lowest possible statewide ranking on student test scores. "Its numbers were in the dumps," he said. "It was the worst of the worst."

I joined the team to provide research data on teachers' perceptions and how they changed over time so the school could make mid-course corrections. At the end of the project, I wrote about what I had seen to add to the debate about how to sustain successful reforms. Here is what I found.

Remarkably, in the three years between 2003 and 2006, the teachers and the principal accomplished a stunning success. By every important academic measure, the school made impressive gains. The campus was cleaned up, the number of disciplinary cases fell, student absenteeism declined and test scores improved dramatically. Not surprisingly, the teachers felt more positive about the administrators and less isolated from one another. Their job satisfaction increased.

Then, in 2006, in an equally astonishing turn of events, the board of education and the superintendent removed the principal, replacing her with a new principal who began to reverse the bold steps that had produced the turnaround.

Why would the board and superintendent undo the actions that had produced such remarkable results? Because they failed to understand what had been accomplished. They were prisoners of a single idea, blinded by their conviction that administrative top-down control is the only way to run schools.

What they could not see was that the management pyramid had been turned on its head. As the teachers took control, the professional authority that began to emerge among them translated into new norms for the school. Instead of blaming everyone but themselves for the students' failure, the teachers took on collective responsibility for the students' success. But nearly as fast as this bottom-up turnaround began, it ended.

Collaborative models of leadership seem to be everywhere but the schools. Pick up any book on innovation in companies and you will find teamwork at the center. For decades, companies like Hewlett-Packard have been experimenting with self-managing teams, and New United Motor Manufacturing (a General Motors–Toyota joint venture) implemented the now-famous Toyota Production System, which in the 1990s led to a revolution in the design of productive organizations.

Even when teacher-led teamwork does emerge in a school, it invariably falls victim to the dominant belief that "those at the top rule." Each of us — citizens and educators alike — is going to have to break our obedience to centralized control or doom our public schools to Sisyphus-style reforms, repeating the same mistakes because the reforms never last. No progress can be made as long as we remain blind to the suffocating effects of centralized power.

Wilms is a professor at the Graduate School of Education & Information Studies. This op-ed is based on a paper titled "Liberating the Schoolhouse: Breaking the Grip of Centralized Power," which can be found here. It will be published May 30 by Triarchy Press in Britain.