Graduate School of Education

Since the enactment of the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001, states and public school districts have been held to increasingly higher accountability standards. This has led to more high-stakes assessments for students, and more focused attention on the achievement results data from those assessments. While the pressure to produce successful student outcomes continues to rise, two other factors have affected school districts’ ability to deliver. On the financial front, the past few years have seen greater budget constraints for public schools caused by the struggling American economy. Meanwhile, the rapidly increasing racial and ethnic diversification of the United States is outpacing school districts’ ability to adapt. Chesterfield County Public Schools, a large, suburban district in central Virginia, is experiencing each of these dynamics: increased accountability, a changing student population, and financial challenges. Although Chesterfield has traditionally been a high-performing school district, its overall student performance has declined in recent years. In an effort to sustain excellence, Chesterfield has increased its curriculum offerings and supports while maximizing its operational efficiency. However, those efforts have not turned the tide of declining test scores, particularly for its growing population of children of color. Education research has indicated that student achievement rises when teachers collaborate and use student data to plan and inform their instructional practice. The central question of this capstone is, how can student achievement data be used more effectively by teachers and administrators to drive instructional decision making in Chesterfield County’s schools? Chesterfield adopted the professional learning communities (PLC) model several years before the start of this project in 2013. However, the level of implementation of PLCs has been sporadic throughout the district. This capstone reviews the research on data use in education and the effectiveness of PLCs. It presents findings from the current state of data use in several schools based on interviews, focus groups, and observations, followed by an analysis of how Chesterfield can improve its data use for driving instruction. The capstone concludes with the study’s implications for myself, for Chesterfield, and for the education sector.

Despite efforts over the past twenty-five years at the federal, state and local level to create formal teacher leadership roles, the responsibilities of teachers in the public school system have remained stubbornly persistent. With few aberrations, the role of a teacher on his/her first day is likely to be very similar to her/his last (Donaldson et al., 2008). Recently, there are signs that this stability may be disrupted; new and diverse teacher leadership roles and career opportunities may be emerging in the sector. One prominent example of teachers taking significant leadership roles is Teach Plus’ Teacher Turnaround Team Initiative (T3). This program recruits, trains, and supports a cohort of effective and experienced teachers to play formal leadership roles within a turnaround school. T3 has a track record of results and is rapidly expanding to cities across the country. Designed as a three-year program, the initial cohort of schools in the first partner district is now ending the formal initiative and Teach Plus is faced with the important question of what type of support, if any, the organization should provide these schools post T3. My strategic project focused on creating a menu of options, in a fee for service model, in which the principals of schools exiting T3 could purchase is they desired to continue a level of partnership after the three year formal initiative ended. This Capstone Paper reviews the knowledge base surrounding teacher leadership with a particular focus on second stage teachers (70% of T3 Teacher Leaders have between 3-10 years experience). I then explain the strategic project in detail and offer an analysis with special attention to three different dimensions: 1) The impact on the specific project to the organization and the reasons for it’s success or failure. 2) The challenge of sustainability to the overall initiative. 3) The technical and adaptive challenges of expanding teacher leadership at scale in the education sector. Reviewing the lessons learned in research and through the project, I suggest that three main components would help shift T3 from a successful entrepreneurial start up to a sustainable approach to reform: 1) Identifying a permanent source of funding. 2) Incorporating principal leadership development into the program design. 3) Developing capacity at the district level to build an on-going system of support. I will also suggest that the T3 initiative has implications on the education sector at large. I argue that the T3 Initiative proves that with the proper support, teacher leadership has the potential to build the collective capacity for school turnarounds; that principal leadership matters and must be intentionally developed; and that scaling T3 requires districts to integrate innovative approaches to developing teacher leadership into the overall strategic human capital management of the district. Finally, I reflect on personal lessons learned and explain how the T3 Initiative reaffirmed my belief that ambitious reform initiatives require comprehensive support, collective ownership, and a plan for sustainability.

The education research and practice communities are in agreement; principals matter, they are of central importance in our nation’s effort to improve schools for all students. Yet, the principalship is misunderstood. There are mixed views on what makes a principal effective, competing demands, and inordinate expectations placed on the role. Over the past fifty years as its education policy has grown in influence, and especially since the passing of NCLB, the federal government has made the situation for principals even more complicated and tenuous as it has neglected to get to know these important practitioners. Aware that something needed to be done but not sure how to proceed, the United States Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, and his leadership team, in the Spring of 2012, sought to create a principal and instructional leader strategy. I was hired a year later to spearhead this work. Before such a strategy could be created, though, it was important to build a relationship between principals and federal policymakers. Using a design thinking framework, this capstone represents my effort to better understand the role of principals, the role of federal education policy in our nation’s schools, and the convergence of the two. In it I describe the development of a feedback loop between principals and policymakers that can serve as a model for future policy development. Through an analysis of data gathered from a review of literature, roundtable discussions, and a survey, the feedback loop process uncovers and calls into question an underlying assumption by the Department about principal leadership and its association to instructional leadership. In the end, implications for both the Department and Education and the sector as a whole are considered.

How can a community of practice comprised of diverse teacher preparation leaders from across the country collaborate to disrupt the teacher preparation field? The single most important school-based factor in a child’s education is the quality of his or her teachers--so important, in fact, that a series of good teachers can overcome the effects of poverty. Yet our schools of education are struggling to prepare teachers for today’s classrooms, even as Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has called for a “sea change” in the way we train new teachers. This capstone focuses on how the NewSchools Venture Fund (NewSchools), a nonprofit venture philanthropy firm focused on transforming the preparation of beginning teachers in America, uses convening as a tool for fostering innovation and enabling disruption in the teacher preparation market. The scope of the capstone project involved planning and executing on two convenings of diverse leaders from institutes of higher education, teacher preparation programs, school operators, and critical support providers. My paper subsequently analyzes the effectiveness of NewSchools’ efforts to design teaming opportunities, referred to as “Design Teams,” for leaders to work together in piloting new solutions for ongoing problems of practice that impact the teacher preparation field. Finally, I consider what the potential impact of the Design Teams could be, beyond NewSchools, as a means of accelerating new research and generating novel ideas across the education sector as a whole. These considerations raise implications for how NewSchools’ new model for collaboration could lend insight to the field as to how to bring people together from different perspectives to work on issues of strategic importance such as teacher preparation.

All students must have opportunities to explore their strengths and interests. Every student is entitled to and ought to receive strong, personalized supports to bolster his/her academic, behavioral, and social emotional learning and success. It is the responsibility of school systems to prepare and coach their staff to provide this rich and constructive learning environment to all students. Simultaneously, school systems must develop deep partnerships and relationships with families and communities so that our students and communities thrive. This capstone explores how one district, Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS), Maryland, has prioritized interventions as a key focus area and subsequently planned to implement an integrated system of supports, such that every student will thrive. As MCPS has focused on issues of equity and excellence for decades, this prioritization of interventions and support for struggling learners provides focus to the system for completely eradicating the achievement gap. With an understanding that high expectations, excellent instruction, and committed staff are essential for all learners, MCPS is beginning its implementation of this integrated system of supports focusing on schools and students that are most underperforming. The design of this integrated system culminates from research on Response to Interventions--both literature and state and district implementation, convening a staff workgroup, and engaging with various stakeholders across MCPS to build on the struggles and the successes in the district’s history. Within this capstone, literature is examined related to interventions, and the project work that occurred between July 2012 and April 2013 is described and analyzed. The analysis emphasizes the need to consider change management theory and to create space for both technical and adaptive work, namely creating strong structures and processes that are deeply connected to culture and practice. This capstone concludes with reflections on potential implications for the author, MCPS, and the education sector.

Disconnected youth are under-networked, offering them few of the professional and educational opportunities available to their more privileged peers. There are currently many organizations and services that strive to connect youth to these types of opportunities, but they lack coordination, consistency and scale. The Internet is well positioned to be a revolutionary force in connecting these young people to opportunities they would otherwise not receive, and do so with unprecedented reach and depth. Camellia Network, working specifically with youth aging out of the foster system, is an online platform dedicated to connecting former foster youth with each other, with supporters, and with opportunities. While my work focuses specifically on this population of former foster youth, it is reasonable to extrapolate my findings and analysis to other disconnected youth populations. My Strategic Project was to create an “Opportunity Partnership” department for the organization that would develop and support a system of connecting former foster youth to professional and educational opportunities through the Internet. A new arm of the organization, the project was poised to test my theory that educational and professional opportunities can be made accessible and will be seized with the aid of the Internet. My Strategic Project is a potential proof point for the education sector, acting as an experiment for what can happen when we use the Internet to provide access to opportunity –jobs, trainings, professional development, perks- to disconnected youth. We, as educators, are always looking for the method, platform or program that will achieve transformation at scale. The Internet is an obvious choice for large-scale change. However, my project’s outcomes imply that it takes more than simply making something more accessible in order to affect real transformation. It suggests that achieving this kind of scale is not about making something that works well small, bigger. Instead, scale is about fitting the small, quality pieces together so something new can happen, across a wider range. Scale is about the network. The Internet can help us do that, if we use it correctly: to create a new and empowered community of opportunity.

Despite earnest efforts, most urban school districts have struggled to sustain district-wide racial equity in achievement outcomes. In response to such a plight in the Pittsburgh Public Schools, this capstone details the piloting of an initiative that uses a unique set of approaches at multiple levels and sees learning-focused partnerships between principals and their central office supervisors as a focal lever for district-wide improvement. At the principal level, the initiative involved installing a program of personal mastery and instructional leadership development, as well as assisting in the establishment of a community of practice among school leaders. Simultaneously, this project used informal authority strategically at the district level to challenge a compliance-based culture in the central office, with the goal of turning mindsets there toward becoming more of an adaptive learning organization focused on reflective continuous improvement. Assuming the roles of a principal supervisor, a member of the superintendent’s executive cabinet, and a practice-based researcher, I explored the day-to-day opportunities and challenges of being a boundary-spanner, working across hierarchical levels of district and school leadership. Findings detail ways in which urban central offices can shift their approaches in supporting principals—from top-down, compliance-based models to more of a focus on the adaptive leadership skills needed for principals to learn and lead with greater discretion and empowerment. Simultaneously, principal supervisors can play a critical role in elevating key lessons and ideas from leaders in the field in ways that reciprocally influence policy and organizational structure at the district level. Findings also suggest, however, that to do so sustainably requires shifting the central office culture so that principal supervisors can also operate more freely and instinctively. In this regard, a more formally authoritative positioning is needed to address the stubborn and prohibitive elements of central office culture.

High-quality teachers are critical to transforming the performance of the U.S. K-12 education system. Historically, however, the United States has not taken a systematic and coherent approach to recruiting, training, supporting, and retaining teachers. The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards is one of the country’s premier efforts to realize such a transformation in the teaching profession. While substantial, the progress the National Board has made to date has fallen short of the ambitious expectations that surrounded its birth. The National Board in 2012, led by its new President Ron Thorpe, finds itself--and the education sector--at a crossroads. In this capstone, I share my experience leading the development of the National Board’s five-year strategy with the hope that it proves useful to other practitioners, particularly those concerned with the professionalization of teaching in America. The strategy development work drew on diverse sources of knowledge including: the National Board’s founding and evolution; other countries’ approaches to building the teaching profession; the development of other professions in America, especially medicine; the role of teachers unions and teacher voice in teacher professionalization; the demographics and perspectives of the teacher workforce as it relates to professionalization; and the theory of adaptive leadership and how it applies to the professionalization of teaching. The resulting strategic direction describes the National Board’s new focus on anchoring the teacher career continuum with the National Board’s standards and assessments and on mobilizing National Board Certified Teachers as accomplished practitioners. An analysis of this strategic project reveals three key findings: (1) the context of an ambitious vision and an openness to external critique enabled strategy development; (2) the need for adaptive change at the National Board required the use of adaptive leadership skills; and (3) to make progress in today’s American K-12 education sector, advocates of professionalization must explicitly build political will and adapt to the cultural context. These findings yield implications that will inform my future leadership in education, the National Board and its efforts to undertake the strategy it has developed, and the advance towards professionalization in the education sector as a whole.

Mission-driven organizations that want to remain innovative and continue to grow their share in the education sector need to embrace change, seize opportunities for improvement, and commit themselves to consistent and continual learning and growth. Such a commitment to improvement and to consistent and continual learning relies on the development of coherent, unified systems to collect, analyze, use, and respond to data coming from multiple facets of the organization. This capstone explores how one organization, Expeditionary Learning (EL), desiring to become a more data-driven organization, sought to strengthen its data collection and analysis mechanisms, specifically focusing on feedback and satisfaction data from its clients. Expeditionary Learning is experiencing a period of tremendous growth and change marked by new opportunities to pursue and refine mission-aligned business. With this growth, comes a need to systematize and organize many aspects of the organization, including structures and processes for collecting, analyzing, and responding to data regarding client experiences and client satisfaction. As the majority of EL’s work is client facing, gathering data from these clients with regards to their experiences with EL is crucial to ensuring needs of clients are met and ultimate outcomes of impacting teacher practice and student achievement are reached. This capstone begins with a historical and contextual background of Expeditionary Learning and places this particular strategic project within that context. Next, literature is examined related to improvement processes, customer satisfaction, and implementing organizational change, providing a rich research base from which the project and its implementation was conceptualized. The project work that occurred between July 2013 and April 2104 is described and analyzed. The analysis emphasizes the need to consider the technical and adaptive aspects of implementing organizational change. Finally, the capstone concludes with reflections on the research and the implementation of the project. These reflections also provide potential implications for the author, for Expeditionary Learning, and for the education sector.

Our current U.S. K-12 education system is constructed on an outdated nineteenth-century model that is no longer equipped to prepare students for success in the twenty-first-century knowledge-based world (Mehta, Schwartz & Hess, 2012). As such, the field needs innovation that improves the quality of and access to learning. This capstone explores how to foster innovation in a school district, and the enabling conditions and barriers to success. I came to Denver Public Schools (DPS) charged with designing and launching DPS’s Innovation Lab. The goal for the lab is to stimulate conditions for innovation across DPS by developing a systematic process through which stakeholders--students, educators, families, community, and central office staff--foster solutions to critical challenges, with the most promising ideas nurtured from concept to scale. A long-term aspiration for the lab is to catalyze a shift in the existing institutional power structures to spur bottom-up innovation. Key findings surfaced through an analysis of my project results. First, the external education landscape, especially accountability pressures, significantly influences innovation within DPS. Second, DPS can improve conditions that better support innovation, but the district faces institutional resistance. This second finding is supported by four contributing discoveries: (a) demand exists for the lab’s goals, but there is a lag between demand and changed behavior; (b) capacity for creativity and innovative problem solving can be built through the design thinking process, but persistence is required; (c) it is possible to prototype elements of the lab model, but competing priorities present obstacles to translating prototypes into a coherent model; and (d) distributing decision-making to empower members across the community requires a shared vision and trust across the system. Finally, laying a foundation for adaptive change is slow going, uncertain, and requires persistent adaptive leadership. These findings suggest implications for DPS and the broader sector: (1) develop a strategy to promote conditions that foster innovation, (2) recruit and build the innovative capacity of adults in the system, and (3) structure the Innovation Lab model to promote sustaining innovation and space for external disruptors.