It starts by understanding that investments in schools and teachers focused on furthering excellence and equity will only take districts so far if their district's central office remains unchanged. DL2’s research makes these discrepancies clear and shines new light on what central offices do when they advance educational equity. The DL2 team partners with individual districts and district networks to help them use the research as jumping off points to transform their central offices into engines of educational equity. As district leaders come up with newer and better approaches, DL2 studies those and provides new knowledge for the field. Since 2014, Highline Public Schools (HPS) has been a main partner.
Leading Differently
For Susanne Jerde, chief academic officer for HPS who has worked with DL2 since the beginning of the partnership, the roots of the HPS-DL2 relationship stem from common commitments to systemic change for equity. Those commitments start with a focus on ensuring an excellent education for every student, especially students historically underserved in public schools. That education requires high-quality, culturally responsive teaching in every classroom and every school principal operating as an excellent instructional leader. For principals to perform as excellent instructional leaders, they need a central office wired to help them be successful, from strategies and resources to planning and implementation that promote continual improvement toward that goal.
"Part of breaking central offices out of their status quo is showing leaders and staff the mismatch between the systems they have and the systems they need to realize educational equity," says Honig. "We help leaders confront the mismatch relentlessly, until they are so dissatisfied, they decide they can’t let it go on another day."
For example, DL2’s research showed that central offices advance equity when they help school leaders engage in rigorous school improvement planning — starting with creating an ambitious vision for high-quality teaching and planning to support adult and student learning to realize results. But in HPS, like in most other districts across the country, school improvement planning was a required set of forms that schools filled out, not an actual process of partnering with their central office to learn and grow excellent schools together.
As Jerde explained, "For decades, principals would complete a school improvement planning template that was compliant in nature. While it was intended to go with collaborative conversations, many times it did not.” Jerde said she realized that no amount of tweaking with the current process would make it more authentic and she disbanded it.
Jerde and Honig then jointly led an 18-month design process involving central office staff, school principals, and teachers to reinvent school improvement planning. "Now we're on a path for teachers to be engaged in learning," says Jerde. "Our principals are owning their learning at a much deeper level. Through the school improvement planning redesign process as well as other work with DL2, partnerships with school supervisors look very different than a decade ago. We still have work to do in curriculum and instruction, but we're so much better than we used to be."
Jerde points to the partnership with DL2 as an important contributor to those improvements as well as bottom-line results such as the increase in student graduation rates from 60% to 80% in the past seven years.
While the central office change has been much slower than Jerde would like, she's learned to respect the process. This includes giving people time to understand and provide input. While at first, it seemed like they were less productive, they were operating effectively, collaborating and supporting one another versus continuing to work at cross purposes.