Leadership for Not Leaving Behind the “Whole Child”: Facilitating district learning through a No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Waiver

Abstract

The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) policy, in aspiring to narrow the achievement gap, has had the unintended effect of driving educators, schools, and districts to focus on academic achievement based on standardized tests, largely neglecting the social emotional needs of children. Given this polarization, NCLB would need to be restructured to enable educators to re-integrate these two domains. As a doctoral resident serving as Interim Director of Strategic Initiatives at Sand City Unified School District (SCUSD), I assumed responsibility to manage its NCLB Waiver, recognizing the opportunity of a lifetime to create more holistic district systems and structures to support the whole child. In this capstone, I will share my experience and lessons-learned in seeking to guide district leadership to implement the NCLB Waiver, a transformational initiative requiring organization learning and a shift in mindset. I focused this capstone to answer the following main and sub-guiding questions: What does it take for an organization to implement a transformational initiative that requires collective learning and mindset shifts? What can a change agent do to lead and foster learning? How does a distressed organization respond to change? I will share my experience practicing advanced leadership strategies to convince, guide, and support district leadership to learn about, collaborate around, and execute new developments as part of the federal requirements to implement the NCLB Waiver--and the organization’s response to my prompts to operate differently. In order to understand early indicators of district learning, my data is based on the fidelity of implementation of five different Waiver work streams across the district that required significant district investment of time and energy. These results are analyzed based on the concepts and frameworks of “positive deviance” (Cameron, 2013) and “adaptive leadership” (Heifetz, 1994) to identify key findings for my main guiding question. My analysis reveals five key findings: (1) an organization’s context--historical and social-emotional--impacts its members’ capacity to learn; (2) trust and a positive “holding environment” conducive for learning need to be developed to create the space for learning; (3) role models need to be available to model a new norm; (4) meaningful elements and outcomes of organizational work need to be made explicit as motivation for individuals to learn; and (5) persistence and skill in regulating the level of organizational distress within a productive range is required to create room for learning.