Chapter 1
YOU ARE WHAT YOU DO:
The New Role of Leadership
THINGS ARE CHANGING," says the billboard. Its literal message is directed to the oppressed minorities: redouble your efforts, push now, and you will finally be getting somewhere.
But as I read the sign, I find in it a more general challenge for all of us. Things are changing and what are we going to do about it?
Our culture is in love with change. We even have a special word for it-progress. But when the change goes beyond the development of new things, when it begins to affect the ways in which we are accustomed to getting things done, we often find ourselves angry and resistant. We have little sense of what is to come or how we should behave. In our confusion, we some-times think fondly of the past. We imagine that the problems would disappear if someone would put things back the way they used to be. Many educators seem to feel this way today.
Our classrooms, our schools, our school systems, are often disorganized and chaotic. We are willing, even eager, to do well the tasks we have done in the past, but there are new problems that seem to interfere. One angry and frustrated urban teacher asked, "How can the institution of education-of books and black-boards-be expected to cope with the problems of undernourishment, poor clothing, inadequate housing, and insufficient motivation?" This teacher responded to her own question in the following way: "The answers don't lie with teachers. The answers lie with sociologists, psychologists, psychiatrists, and housing experts."
Her view probably would win the support of many educators, even those in suburban areas where the problems are sometimes not so different; drugs, distractions, decreasing respect for all institutions. It is a position that removes from the teacher the blame for our educational failures.
The trouble with it is that it also robs the educator of the initiative for getting things moving. With things as bad as they are, I don't understand how anyone with a sense of responsibility can be willing to stand around waiting for the social scientists and the politicians to do their things. How can the teacher or the principal say, "Poverty is not my busi-ness" or "Drugs are a medical-social problem" or "Gangs belong to police gang-control programs"?
Besides, what if some of the problems we expect others to solve never get solved? Suppose, after the outside experts get rid of poverty, the students are still disrespectful or unmotivated. Or what if new problems emerge to replace the old ones? Will we always be waiting for things to get better?
The answer is as obvious as it is trite: what we want are not packaged solutions but rather a problem-solving process. And we have to accept the truth that if we ourselves fail to become part of this process, we shall certainly be part of the problem. Already great numbers of teachers are dropping out before making a contribution to our youngsters. Lots more are present each day but only putting in time.
There is an alternative to the buck-passing attitude, but it is not an easy one. The educator can accept the new problems as being part of his domain will try to master these problems the way he might wrestle with new subject matter in his particular discipline
This means, of course, saying good-by to the comfortable old roles that served us well in the past.
Without doubt the new roles will lead us into unexplored and possibly frightening realms. We will feel less secure, wondering at times if what we are king is even "education." In other words, ours is a time that requires leadership, and not just in administration. New ground be broken by teachers, parents, community people, as well as by principals and others up the line.
Fortunately, we can find some excellent examples if this "new leadership" in other realms of endeavor. I am thinking particularly of the clergymen who, in the last two decades, have transformed their roles by extending the power of their faith beyond the church walls. Martin Luther King, Jr., preached love and hope as he marched through Southern towns. Father Groppi led his congregation in Midwest urban centers. These men came to believe that a meaning-ful ministry required them to bring religion to the places it was needed. It went beyond praying. When political action was needed to move the spirit, they engaged in politics. When it was economics, as in the case of Rev. Leon Sullivan, who founded the Opportunities Industrialization Centers, the preaching led to jobs.
The kind of flexibility that characterized these leader-ministers has got to be built into our roles as leader-educators. In my own career I have sometimes played the salesman, the community organizer, the economist, the fund raiser, and the speechmaker. One incident reported in the next chapter describes my role as producer of a guerrilla-theater play.
I am not saying, however, that everyone involved in education has to be a one-man band. What is important is that one comes to accept the diversity of tasks needed to make education work. One has to be open to working with people doing these unexpected things. This obviously is a very different attitude from sitting back while waiting for outsiders to get the job done
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Attitude is the key word. What it all comes down to is that the answers lie in ourselves as doers. But to be free to act requires, not a cookbook, but rather a set of assumptions-serving as a framework-to guide action.
Basically, the rest of this book illustrates how assumptions and perceptions about human nature, interaction, and the teaching-learmng process can govern attempts to improve education For the most part, I have avoided explicit analysis of the frame-work because education isn't neat and explicit when you're really doing it But as you read between the lines, you wont have much trouble uncovering assumptions such as the following.
I. People are always more important than the system. Success is important to the integrity of any group. People tend to rise or fall to the level of their expectations. To move people, start where they are. In any group every member, no matter what as-signed role, can make significant and unexpected contributions to the success and well-being of the group.
The energy that is found in interpersonal conflict should be channeled toward solution of the underlying problems.
Go with what you have. In a conflict situation, all sides usually have legitimate concerns.
The best way to help people is to get them to help themselves. Massive problems are solved little by little.
II. What's accomplished is more important than what's promised. Going along with the last assumption on the list should be one that says: action speaks louder than assumptions. For instance, when I assumed the super-intendency in Oakland, one of the first things I did was to meet with the clerical staff to ask their help in improving the system. The fact that I met with them said more than any announcement I might have made about the value of all staff members.
Many of the assumptions listed sound like clichés, merely because they have been talked about a lot but not acted upon. This is why the bulk of this book deals with what actually happened and not the guiding principles.
Some people, of course, will reject this notion of "leader-educator." There are principals, for instance, who freely admit that hunger and poor clothing were crippling the academic performance of their students. Yet for years they had done nothing about it. "After all," they said, "if the School Board doesn't allocate money to clothe the children, what can I do? I'm having enough problems with my book requisition."
A person operating this way needs to change his job. He ought to be working in a social environment where the pupils come to school well dressed and where it makes sense for the principal not to worry about clothing. My view is that if the child needs clothes, then the first business of the school is to get him clothes, especially if the system does not work to meet this need.
I remember one time we went to all the cleaning establishments in the neighborhood and told them we were willing to take any unclaimed clothing off their hands. We got all we needed. You might call this scavenging, but fundamentally what we were doing was bringing in "materials" that the children needed if they were to learn. We knew, as the social scientists often said, that if a youngster feels unpresentable, he probably will have a hard time learning. This is just what the angry teacher, quoted earlier, was saying. The difference Is: we were willing to intervene directly even if it didn't look like the teacherly thing to do.
A principal must constantly assess the needs of his particular children. If the task boils down to orchestrating the learning process-seeing that the materials are available, demonstrating their use, etc.- fine. If that's what is needed, get it done.
But if the situation calls for something more, if there are home problems or nutritional problems, then the principal and his staff simply have to be-come part social worker, part mediator, part dietician. One time we got the Boeing-Vertol Company to 411adopt" our school as part of a massive vocational development program. I felt like an entrepreneur.
The point is, as inner-city folks, increasingly take control of their schools, they are going to want people In there who get the job done, who get youngsters learning no matter what It takes. They won't be interested in beautiful theories that explain why the task is impossible. The people believe that the job can be done. And they want it done now.
