Resource Center

• by Abelardo Villarreal , Ph.D. • IDRA Newsletter • January 2006 • 

In the November-December 2005 issue of the IDRA Newsletter, Dr. María “Cuca” Robledo Montecel, IDRA executive director, presented a model for assessing school conditions and outcomes, identifying leverage points for improvement, and informing action (2005). This Quality Schools Action Framework is based on experience and empirical evidence that emerges from existing theories of change. The framework and related definitions are available on the IDRA web site (http://www.idra.org/resource-center/a-quality-schools-action-framework/). This article examines ways to strengthen school capacity.

The human body is equipped with an immune system that protects it from outside biological influences. A school is like a human body. It has an “immune system” that equips it with the capacity to fend off internal and external influences that hinder its ability to successfully educate all children. For purposes of this article, capacity refers to a school’s immune system that, when activated, has an extraordinary ability to fight hurtful influences. Just like the biological immune system, schools have a first line of defense to continuously ward off damaging influences and a capacity to strengthen this line of defense through external intervention and assistance.

Understanding and banking on this capacity for self-renewal is basic to finding effective remedies to many education problems. This article demonstrates how this immune system can ensure that all of a school’s interacting parts can be aligned to create a healthy school by: (1) describing what constitutes a healthy school, (2) briefly discussing two major woes that threaten a healthy school’s existence and functionality, and (3) outlining ways to build up a school’s immune system.

What is a Healthy School?

A healthy school may be described in two interdependent ways: (1) consistency and quality of outcomes as defined through success of all students regardless of ethnicity, race or socioeconomic status, and (2) access to strong and decisive governance and leadership, teaching quality, and a world class curriculum.

A healthy school has great accomplishments in student academic performance, a strong student holding power ability, no achievement gaps among student subgroups, high graduation rates, high college preparation rates as demonstrated through high college entrance examination scores, high college enrollment and graduation rates, and strong community and parent support for the school.

Also, a healthy school is filled with student excitement, engagement and inquiring minds that thirst for knowledge by questioning, hypothesizing and discovering. A healthy school draws strength from its leaders, teachers, community and parents. Its leaders are committed to excellence and equity for all students, its teachers are qualified and ensure that all students have access to knowledge, its community fully supports the school’s efforts, and its parents are the unquestionable and best partners in education. With today’s demands for excellence, healthy schools must be in a constant state of improvement.

Threats to School Health

Unfortunately, a healthy school is a much-sought after luxury in many communities. Mediocrity and a dismal failure to teach students from diverse backgrounds and of low socioeconomic status are the two major illnesses that threaten the viability of our schools.

Mediocrity is defined as a paralysis of an educational institution that maintains the status quo regardless of its effectiveness, is content with its limited capacity to produce excellence, believes that improvement is out of its reach, and masquerades mediocrity as excellence. A school should look for signs of mediocrity and take immediate action. Some signs of mediocrity in schools are the following.

Misplaced and discouraged innovation.

Mediocre schools make changes that fail to target critical areas of need. They fake change, are overly cautious, and do not promote innovativeness. Their leaders fail to share and promote leadership among staff. No risks are taken.

Blame the students and community.

It is not uncommon for a mediocre school to exonerate itself of all blame for ineffectiveness. Mediocre administrators and teachers firmly believe that student performance in their school can never reach the level of excellence that other schools reach supposedly because their students are not capable and because parents and community are uncooperative.

The “now” is the limit.

Mediocre schools grow sour in their student performance because they feel that the limit has been met given the students they have and the community that those students come from. Because of that circumstance, their school cannot expect and should not expect more than what it is accomplishing.

Systemic deception

is the rule rather than the exception. Mediocre administrators and teachers circumvent policies and best practices because they have little hope and low expectations of their students and have no faith in the community served by the school. Pretexts abound for unfinished or unacceptable teaching. Dishonesty and keeping quiet about fraudulent behavior are common systemic regularities.

Unqualified staff.

In mediocre schools, teachers are non-degreed, and many are teaching out of field. Administrators lack the leadership and management skills to guide a school through tough times. Teachers lack the desire and commitment to grow professionally and make a difference in the lives of students. For many, teaching is just a job, and these teachers have few accomplishments to show for their time. They lack self-efficacy and hold low expectations for themselves. They institutionalize low expectations across the school, having a negative impact on students, parents and community as a whole.

Under-funded schools and classrooms.

Appropriate funding to provide the necessary opportunities to learn in a safe environment usually is missing in mediocre schools. Administrators and teachers use this lack of funding as grounds for their lack of accomplishment or their inefficiency in teaching students from diverse backgrounds.

Biased governance and leadership.

The absence of leadership in the school board and the mismanagement of a school are also symptoms that contribute to mediocrity. A school board where infighting is common and micromanagement runs rampant is fertile soil to breed discontent, promote mediocrity and endorse inefficiency.

Lack of partnership with communities and parents.

Schools where teachers and administrators feel foreign and have little in common with the community in which they teach become vulnerable to heartless, insensible, indifferent and mediocre teaching.

The second problem that beleaguers a school is its inability to increase the academic performance of all of its students. Many factors contribute to this. These factors are: (1) prevalent mediocrity; (2) inability to teach students from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds; (3) uncaring and mediocre staff; (4) no access to a world class curriculum; (5) low academic expectations, particularly for low-income and minority students; and (6) a community that fails to require educational excellence from its schools. These factors also have a demoralizing and weakening effect on the school’s immune system to protect its viability as a great equalizer.

Building a School’s Immune System

How does one build up a school’s immune system to deal with the two major woes that afflict schools? The first step is to assess the effectiveness of the school’s critical interacting components and determine the health of each component. The box below provides a description of those interacting components of a healthy school.

The second step is to base the priority to act on each component in relationship to academic success and intensity of need as demonstrated through the assessment phase. Address each component starting with the ones that most directly affect student outcomes. Research has yet to establish the degree of interrelationship of the components and student outcomes.

The third step is to recognize that renewal is internal and solutions and remedies to mediocrity and school failure must emerge from the school’s immune system with strong support from external resources. Autoimmune forces (internal forces such as sabotage, disruption and incapacitation) must not stall the school’s immune system. It must create an environment of support and determination to guarantee the success of its remedies.

Excellence is prized; mediocrity and student failure must be out of favor. Schools must recognize that they have an immune system that must be activated and exploited. Solutions to education problems must emerge from within and have support from external agencies to be successful.

All students need to have access to a high-quality education that prepares them not only to go on to college but also lays the groundwork for a life that includes the potential for economic success, full participation as a citizen of a vibrant democracy, and the ability to enrich themselves with ongoing learning experiences.

School’s Interactive Components and Description

Resources

Advocates for Children of New York and the New York Immigration Coalition. Creating a Formula for Success: Why English Language Learner Students are Dropping Out of School, and How to Increase Graduation Rates (New York: Advocates for Children of New York and the New York Immigration Coalition, 2002).

Bell, J.A. “High-Performing, High-Poverty Schools,” Leadership (September-October 2001) 8-11.

Bilby, S. “Community-Driven School Reform: Parents Making a Difference in Education,” Mott Mosaic (2002) 1, (2), 1-8.

Council of Chief State School Officers and The Charles A. Dana Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Expecting Success: A Study of Five High-Performing Elementary Schools (Washington, D.C.: Council of Chief State School Officers, 2002).

Cortez, A., and J.D. Cortez, M. Robledo Montecel. “Dropping Out of School in Arizona: IDRA Conducts New Study,” IDRA Newsletter (San Antonio, Texas: Intercultural Development Research Association, September 2002).

Foley, R.M. “Professional Development Needs of Secondary School Principals of Collaborative-Based Service Delivery Models,” High School Journal (2001) 85 (1), 10-23.

Kroll, J., and R.F. Sexton, B.N. Raimondo, H.D. Corbett, B. Wilson. Setting the Stage for Success: Bringing Parents into Education Reform as Advocates for Higher Student Achievement (Lexington, Ken.: Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence, 2001).

National Dropout Prevention Center/Network [Online]. Effective Strategies Having the Most Positive Effect on Dropout Rates.

Robledo Montecel, M. “A Quality Schools Action Framework – Framing Systems Change for Student Success,” IDRA Newsletter (San Antonio: Intercultural Development Research Association, November-December 2005).

Robledo Montecel, M., and J.D. Cortez. “Successful Bilingual Education Programs: Development and the Dissemination of Criteria to Identify Promising and Exemplary Practices in Bilingual Education at The National Level,” Bilingual Research Journal (2002) 26 (1).

Spencer, S.S., and K.R. Logan. “Bridging the Gap: A School-Based Staff Development Model that Bridges the Gap from Research to Practice,” Teacher Education and Special Education (2003) 26 (1), 51-62.

Abelardo Villarreal, Ph.D., is the director of the IDRA Division of Professional Development. Comments and questions may be directed to him via e-mail at feedback@idra.org

[©2006, IDRA. This article originally appeared in the January 2006 IDRA Newsletter by the Intercultural Development Research Association. Permission to reproduce this article is granted provided the article is reprinted in its entirety and proper credit is given to IDRA and the author.]