In my junior year of college, under the Physical Therapy major, my schedule was loaded with classes such as Athletic Injuries, Death and Dying, Anatomy and Physiology and the like. In one of my more hands-on classes, I was taught how to treat an open wound.
1. Apply pressure to the wound (to stop any bleeding)
2. Clean the wound (with some sort of wound cleaner which includes step 3)
3. Apply antibiotic to prevent infection
4. Cover the wound with a bandage
5. Watch the wound for infection
Notice there were some critical steps prior to covering the wound, including the primary need to apply pressure. Our schools (typically our urban ones with years of low performance), I would suggest, are suffering from open wounds. Some of which are personified in hiring practices, high turnover, behavioral issues that hinder the learning environment and untrained or new certified staff. But the greatest problem, I've found, has been the practice of jumping to step 4 in the treatment process (covering the wound). Squeezimg out of qualified staff (for no just reason) to hire newly certified staff under biased pretenses; extreme push-in of specific supports in hopes to quickly raise numerical scores, even manipulation of personnel to quickly cover hot spots are just a few of the bandages that cover these hemmoraging wounds to no avail.
I often ask myself, where is the pressure being applied? Who is cleaning the wound? What antibiotic has been applied? Can we just stop and take a good look at the wound for a second?
Setting: Your typical urban school (more specifically at the primary level).
Apply pressure to the wound.
Allow me to paint a picture, if you will. Walking the halls of said urban school, one might predominantely find kids of the Hispanic and/or African American persuasion marching single file with bubbles and duck tails in a line beside a teacher who may or may not look like those students. You might discover that the majority of the students look various hues of brown and are either dressed in their street attire or perhaps more assuredly in uniform fashion. Depending on the leadership of the school, you may see students who understand and abide by high levels of expectations or from a lack of leadership, you might witness a building on the hinges of chaos.
One thing I've witnessed from an Instructional Specialist standpoint (being a part of the leadership team yet not so involved as to assist in making cultural decisions for the school) is the type of influence a leader can make on a schools' culture. The culture of a school is its "persona, comprised of its set of norms, values and beliefs, rituals and ceremonies, symbols and stories", as defined by Dr. Kent Peterson (professor of Education at University of Wisconsin-Madison).
When a school is full of students with behaviors and dispositions driven by significant cultural influences, it is imperative that those who serve such students are
willing to relate to them. Notice, I used the word 'willing' rather than 'naturally capable of'. A schools culture can have nothing and everything to do with whether the students and staff have similar cultural ideologies. Again, this doesn't imply that every staff member of an urban school be of Hispanic or African American orientation either. To build culture therefore norms, one must understand what is, in fact, normal or standard for those with such strong cultural influences. What social behaviors are typical for those with, say, a strong Hispanic-American background? How might the social background of Hispanic or African American students influence their responses under stress, behaviors and interations with peers. Can I set a norm for an African-American student and he/she not know how to identify with that norm because it isn't norm-al for them any other time of day or night? Of course I can. But that norm would need to be adequately defined and modeled in order to "relate" to students.
When a school is inundated with one culture of students and yet another culture of staff, the bridging of those cultures is of immense necessity. My values and beliefs (or culture) must co-exist with the values and beliefs of those I serve, not blend with or manipulate, not override nor trump either...but co-exist. For that balance to occur, again, staff must be willing to level with the students they share the building with 175 days of the year. Administration must recognize and own this gap & invest in the proper training to close this gap. When a principal predominantly hires a staff of a particular background (whether that background is consistent with that of the students or not), he/she doesn't understand the persona of culture nor how to build it. More importantly, when a principal fails to invest in the necessary processes of bridging the cultural gaps between their staff and their students, he/she also fails to build proper culture necessary for the success of their school.
Such an investment can be time consuming when other professional developments loom and press for their importance. Such an investment can seem uncomfortable especially when perhaps the fear of racial tension is at stake. Such an investment can be deemed unnecessary if the leadership is unaware, themselves, of the cultural gap. Being overly optimistic of what the school can achieve or too busy hiring personnel late in the game because high turnover is prevalent can be just a few of the barriers that hinder leaders from placing vested interest in fitly meeting the need of the school culture.
Clean the wound!
My suggestion (as an outsider) is that leaders must be able to step out of the four walls of their offices enough to observe the true culture that occurs everyday under their leadership. Sit in classes, not to observe the teacher nor the learning...but just the culture. How do students interact with staff? From the cafeteria workers to the custodians. How do they observe expectations when they think no one is looking? How do staff speak to and interact with their students when they think no one is around to critique their voice level or emotional words? How do staff members interact with each other during lunch or after school meetings? These observations are relevant data and should be analyzed and discussed. Not with a leaders' leadership team (where biases occur and people get offended or take sides), but with consultants & stakeholders who have no biased opinions.
Apply Antibiotic ointment!
Beyond dodging the temptations of hiding behind desks, scheduling back to back meetings and off-campus appointments a leader would find surveying numerical data advantageous. Of their staff, what ratio are of similar ethnic background of the students to those who are not? From those numbers, what percentage of the staff have remained in the urban school setting for a number of years (say 3-5 or more for schools with high turnover or low performance) versus the percentage that has found some reason to leave and take a position "closer to home"? I bring up this critical piece because in my stint, I've noticed that in schools with high turnover, often the hiring procedures include bargaining to a certain degree. Between all of the money being doled out for loan-repayment programs, teachers with shoddy backgrounds looking for a place to restore their employment and new teachers freshly graduating from Alternative Certification programs, urban schools with low performance seem to be the breeding grounds drawing such crowds. But when you take a closer look at staff, typically the staff that find themselves settled, are those with long histories in other urban schools and/or who match the ethnic background of the students they serve. Burnout for them rarely exists because the day to day behaviors of students aren't overwhelming for them. They tend to have better classroom management because relationship building isn't something taught to them by their teaching programs nor in professional development sessions, its something that comes natural to them. Both their relation to the students is natural and the culture shock for the students is lower thus providing a natural ability for students to engage with their teacher. Again, one cannot embrace this phenomenon by sitting in an office daily. One cannot agree with this line of thinking with a jaded vantage point- perhaps too optimistic thus shutting out reality. Yes, all kids can learn. But the learning environment is predicated on the culture established in the building. And that culture is designed and maintained by the choices primarily, of the leader.
Now, if you've read this far, hopefully you've not assumed I believe that only African-American staff should work in predominantly African-American populated schools. But that I believe a huge responsibility lies on the leader of a school to understand the culture of his/her school so as to prevent both that scenario from happening as well as bridge the cultural gaps that incur when the opposite scenario is true. A suburban grown staff can service a group of urban students with a very diverse and different background (and vice versa), with the proper cultural sensitivity training. Without such investments, however, a leader leaves his/her school open to growing cultural gaps, which turn into staff-student abuse, high staff burn-out (which leads to turnover) and eventually lowered learning environments coupled with high behavior problems. Ultimately these hemorrhaging wounds try to get bandaged with simple band-aids while the root of the ailment unfortunately goes unnoticed and fails to be scrutinized. Districts, consultants and leadership teams should not expect to see sustainable success in such triage-type areas. Addressing the cultural issues from an honest, hard perspective would be the place to begin. But i'm just an outsider, looking in.
