Regular Public And Charter Schools: Is A Different Conversation Possible?
Uplifting Leadership, Andrew Hargreaves’ new book with coauthors Alan Boyle and Alma Harris, is based on a seven-year international study, and illustrates how leaders from diverse organizations were able to lift up their teams by harnessing and balancing qualities that we often view as opposites, such as dreaming and action, creativity and discipline, measurement and meaningfulness, and so on.
Chapter three, Collaboration With Competition, was particularly interesting to me and to our series, “The Social Side of Reform.” In that series, we’ve been emphasizing the value of collaboration and have considered extreme competition to be counterproductive. But, is that always the case? Can collaboration and competition live under the same roof and, in combination, promote systemic improvement? Could, for example, different types of schools serving (or competing for) the same students work in cooperative ways for the greater good of their communities?
Hargreaves and colleagues believe that establishing this environment is difficult but possible, and that it has already happened in some places. In fact, Al Shanker was one of the first proponents of a model that bears some similarity. In this post, I highlight some ideas and illustrations from Uplifting Leadership and tie them to Shanker’s own vision of how charter schools, conceived as idea incubators and, eventually, as innovations within the public school system, could potentially lift all students and the entire system, from the bottom up, one group of teachers at a time.
The London borough of Hackney is one of the most deprived communities in the United Kingdom but, according to Hargreaves and colleagues, it may have a thing or two to teach us about “how to create collaborative relations among schools that compete” (Page 79). In 1999, the district was declared the worst in the country and in 2002 its administration was transferred to a private nonprofit called The Learning Trust. Over the following ten years, Hackney seemed to get better; what did the Trust do that might have facilitated such improvement?
One of the Trust’s more controversial moves was to build five new secondary school academies — similar to US charter schools. Organizing public education on the principles of competitive markets between individual schools, without local control, in a bid for parent customers, has often created cultures that focus on “my child,” “my class” and “my school” with not thought for anyone else’s child, class, or school. So the Hackney Learning Trust insisted that the academies protect and strengthen Hackney’s educational community — not undermine it.
(…) The schools had to be non-selective and a member of the family of Hackney schools. The point was to ensure that people should have an allegiance to Hackney’s community and its children — to a purpose that was bigger than their own self-interest. (…)”
To operationalize the notion of shared responsibility, educators established school-to-school networks or federations. This structure facilitated productive behavior, such as drawing on shared resources to help struggling schools. For example, two principals from high performing schools assumed joint leadership of a third low performing school, Holy Trinity. This meant they could switch teachers to coach their peers at Holy Trinity and that they could bring teachers from Holy Trinity to the other two schools so that they could see examples of good teaching.
But, as Hargreaves notes, examples like this are rare in the United States:
Neighboring public and charter schools are usually in competitions with each other for students and sheer survival. (…) On the benefits of school-to-school
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