District of Columbia Public Schools : a learning organization in the making

Abstract

The District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) has engaged in ambitious urban school reform since Michelle Rhee began exercising leadership as the district’s chancellor six years ago. Rhee launched efforts to terminate ineffective teachers, build a comprehensive performance management system, and hire principals who promised to deliver radically improved student outcomes. Although Rhee’s tenure was short-lived, her successor has engaged in equally transformative reform efforts, while exercising a more collaborative leadership style. With attention having been focused on building teachers’ instructional capacity, a shift is taking place in DCPS--one that increasingly recognizes the role of school leader as a key lever to whole school improvement. Amidst the slew of principals released by Rhee, DCPS looked externally to select principals with proven track records to take over its failing schools. However, in the last two years a central office Principal Effectiveness (PE) team was created to grow principals from within. This small team was charged to build an internal leadership development program to prepare DCPS employees for the principalship. As a former high school principal and Harvard Graduate School of Education student agreeing to complete her residency with DCPS, I was tasked to bring this vision to life. While the work of stakeholder engagement, recruitment and selection, program and lesson design, and launch and implementation, was plentiful, time-consuming, and often stressful--it was mostly technical in nature. What became increasingly clear is that the more difficult, adaptive work of shifting organizational culture was direly needed. In this capstone, I assert that DCPS’s organizational culture is not yet organized to facilitate adult learning and capacity building. While our small team successfully reached a critical milestone in launching DCPS’s aspiring principals program (called the Mary Jane Patterson Fellowship), we recognized a critical need to work more strategically and methodically to address a looming adaptive challenge: If we help the system’s aspiring principals evolve into highly effective school leaders who will transform teaching and learning in DCPS schools, we must also help the system evolve in its capacity to believe in and concretely support its leaders as adult learners. As a way of exploring this adaptive challenge, I will describe a gap between the organization’s espoused belief system and the behaviors of its senior leaders, and how this gap has critical implications for the learner orientation of the district as a system. Across the sector, there are individuals and small programs that are positioned as key levers to shift the organizational culture of their surrounding systems. In the case of DCPS, the Patterson Fellowship is an ideal lever for system change. What this requires is a creative strategy to build a synergistic relationship between key players of the Patterson Fellowship team and district leaders who can envision new possibilities for organizational learning. Simply put, DCPS must increase its orientation toward adult learning and development in order to engage in whole system transformation. With student learning at stake, the learning of adults is of critical importance. Becoming a learning organization for key adults in the system is DCPS’s greatest current challenge.