Opening Forum

In order to develop educational systems that can effectively address the unique needs of students living in poverty, the Pennsylvania Department of Education (PDE) is implementing a series of programs that fall under the “Secretary’s Poverty and Student Achievement Initiative.” This initiative engages educators in the work of improving achievement where significant numbers of students in urban and rural areas face the challenges of poverty.

Within this initiative, an initial focus will be placed on establishing structures and supports for ensuring equitable access to quality educators for all students. The initiative will align with and support Pennsylvania’s State Plan for Ensuring Equitable Access to Excellent Educators for All Students. To this end, it becomes imperative for educational leaders to develop systems that ensure students have access to high quality educators possessing the essential knowledge, skills, and resources to drive performance for all students, regardless of demographics, on rigorous measures of college and career readiness.

A key component of the Secretary’s Initiative is the Superintendent’s Academy, which is designed to provide cohorts of school superintendents an opportunity to engage in focused, research-based, executive level professional development that addresses how to establish and lead educational organizations that raise the bar for all students to make them college and career ready in a 21st century global context while narrowing the achievement gap. Within this Academy, superintendents also will examine their role as ethical leaders in making decisions that establish policies and systems based on equity. Throughout a typical school superintendent’s day, pressures of managing a school district, including the need to address standards-based reforms and new accountability requirements, make it challenging to find time to think deeply about an educational vision, including the structures and supports necessary to effectively implement that vision. The Academy will provide participants opportunities to explore strategies and tactics for leading organizations where equitable access to opportunities for learning (including equitable access to excellent educators) is built into the system, as opposed to requiring a separate focus.

Since 1989, the National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE) and its Center on International Education Benchmarking (CIEB) have studied countries that significantly outperform the United States on efficacy, equity, and efficiency, based on the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)[1]. NCEE studies countries where average measured student achievement is exceptionally high (efficacy); differences in results within schools, among schools, and between average students and minority and low-income students are low (equity); and in which taxpayers are getting good value for their money (efficiency). Those metrics define the system outcomes NCEE examines so that it can fully understand those countries’ education systems as an integrated whole, each part reinforcing and supporting the functioning of the other parts, and all of them together contributing in a positive way to the outcomes for which the system was designed. The aim has been to provide research that individual states can use to match the results of the top-performing countries in the world. The 9 Building Blocks for a World-Class Education System represents a composite picture, drawn from the NCEE’s research, to present an image of what a high-performing system might look like if it were based on the best that NCEE has studied over the past 25 years, put together in a coherent, internally consistent system, drawing on a consistent set of principles that inform all of the building blocks.

[1] PISA data has been used since 2000. Prior data came from the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) as well as other sources.

Since 2000 (with the publication of The Principal Challenge), NCEE has benchmarked leadership development in the best-known business schools and corporate universities, as well as professional military education, and embedded those in all NISL offerings, including its signature Executive Development Program (EDP). In 2014, NISL renewed this benchmarking effort and revitalized the dimensions of leadership that underscored the original program. As a result of this recent effort, NISL has defined the following eight Dimensions of Leadership needed to create a high performing education system:

1. Student of Learning—Educational leaders will not be able to develop students who are good learners unless they understand the most current research about how people learn, and they must model the behavior they expect of the school staff and its students.
2. Strategic Thinker—Great ideas have impact only by connecting a shared vision to strategic decisions and actions for enacting them so educational leaders must understand the differences between strategy and tactics and have a framework within which to approach decisions in a strategic way.
3. Advocate for Change—Great ideas will not make any difference if a leader cannot get others to “buy in” and follow the lead. They must be able to convince stakeholders that the vision is worth striving for.
4. Builder of Teams—No one can do it alone. Educational leaders need to build an effective cohort of team leaders within their organizations that have a meaningful say in the decisions that will be made.
5. Creator of Learning Culture—Leaders need to work to build a culture specifically organized to get the results they want. They need a team committed to continuous improvement to succeed.
6. Ethical Decision Maker—Building a successful school is not just a job for technicians. Moral leadership is indispensable.
7. Communicator—An educational leader cannot expect others to follow if he or she cannot communicate. A leader must be an effective communicator with all stakeholders.
8. Driver for Equitable Results—Great school leaders know that “all means all”—all students can achieve at high levels with the right supports—and do whatever it takes to get results that benefit all students.

Because the benchmarking focus of NCEE is on systems that combine efficacy, equity, and efficiency, the 9 Building Blocks inherently describe an educational system that focuses on raising the bar for all students—preparing them to be college and career ready in the 21st century within a global context—while narrowing the achievement gap between the lowest and highest performing groups of students. To accomplish this, equitable access to opportunities for learning (including equitable access to excellent educators) is built into the system as opposed to requiring any separate focus.

What does this mean? Look at this example: The 9 Building Blocks define a system that starts with “strong supports for children and their families before students enter school,” so that students come to school healthy, eager to learn, and ready to profit from the instruction (Building Block 1, which aligns to the P3 framework used in Pennsylvania). The 9 Building Blocks continue to describe a K–12 trajectory that results in qualification for college and careers for all students through clearly defined gateways with no dead ends that require all students to meet high performance standards. “Clearly defined gateways” means that all students, even those who are designated as at-risk and needing additional supports, are expected to meet those same high standards. The capability to promote at-risk students who haven’t met these standards through the system (typically due to biases of low expectations) has no place in world-class education systems. Instead, these systems are constructed to provide at-risk students the additional resources and supports they need to succeed at the first sign of them falling behind, when the problems are still manageable. Because if your goal is to get all students to high standards, you cannot afford to let any student fall significantly behind. This translates to many more students needing smaller supports throughout their careers, which also helps remove the stigma of needing support. The 9 Building Blocks is explicit that ensuring equal opportunities for learning does not mean providing equal resources. In fact, Building Block 2 (”Provide more resources for at-risk students than for others”) explicitly states that:

• Top-performing countries have made explicit decisions to create systems in which all students are educated to standards formerly reserved only for their elites.
• Policymakers in these countries know that, if less advantaged students are going to achieve at league-leading levels, they will have to have access to more resources than students who come to school with greater advantages.
• Most of these top-performing countries are providing more teachers to harder-to-educate students. Some are even providing strong incentives to their best teachers to work in classes and schools serving students from low-income and minority families.

These same themes are then reinforced in Building Block 3 (“Develop world-class, highly coherent instructional systems”) and Building Block 5 (“Assure an abundant supply of highly qualified teachers”), which posits that it is impossible for systems to deliver to all students the “kind and quality of education formerly reserved for the elites unless they are able to put a very highly qualified teacher in front of all students.” This is more than just a slogan. The whole system needs to be designed to get such an outcome. The 9 Building Blocks is a blueprint for achieving that outcome.

Additionally, the NISL Leadership Dimensions of Ethical Decision-Maker and Driver for Equitable Results create the context for NISL participants to examine their roles as ethical leaders in their organizations with a focus on equity, defined as providing equal opportunity for learning to all students. Day-to-day pressures of being an administrator, of standards-based reforms, and of new accountability requirements are fundamental conditions of the leader’s job. In many situations, educational system leaders are so pressured by operational demands that they lack time to think deeply about their decisions’ ethical assumptions and implications. NISL participants consider the moral principles of a just, fair, and caring organization and equal opportunities for all students, and use these principles to guide their decision-making.

As a result of the initial 2-day session, participants will be able to

• Articulate the rationale behind the sense of urgency for applying the 9 Building Blocks
• Demonstrate an initial understanding of the 9 Building Blocks for a World-Class Education System, enabling discussion with colleagues and sharing relevant research
• Analyze two jurisdictions in order to characterize the extent to which indicators of the 9 Building Blocks are present in a given system
• Apply inquiry tools to highlight strengths, gaps, challenges, and opportunities in their own district context
• Communicate the characteristics and requirements of the action learning associated with the Academy to their district teams

The Superintendent’s Academy consists of 12 sessions across two years plus 24 hours of self-study and pre-work:

Year 1

• Two-day “kick off” colloquium focused on the 9 Building Blocks with case illustrations
• Introduction to the Action Learning project
• Core curriculum that examines the 9 Building Blocks through three lenses:
  • Core Lens 1: Students who graduate from the K–12 system college and/or career ready with no need for remediation
  • Core Lens 2: High-quality teachers and teaching
  • Core Lens 3: District and school leadership (high-performance organization and management)
• Three 2-day workshops around topics relevant to Action Learning and NISL’s Conceptual Framework for Strategic Thinking

• Two-day mid-program colloquium focused on presentation of Action Learning plans for feedback in order to further refine the design of the plans and to build engagement around the ideas

• Site visits to selected participant districts for peer review of Action Learning implementation
• Final colloquium for formal presentation of Action Learning portfolios

As they complete the core Superintendent Academy curriculum in the first year, participants define an Action Learning project that focuses on one of the three sub-systems that would be studied and implemented during year two. Action Learning projects are encouraged to be multi-district projects to help PDE better understand and refine the implementation of sub-systems of the larger system that PDE intends to use across the state.

The Superintendent Academy starts with a two-day residential forum in November 2019. This opening forum is designed to introduce the big ideas that will be explored across the entire program as well as to create a learning community among the members of the cohort, who will work together throughout.

The forum is designed as follows:

1. Set the context for the entire program
2. Build a shared sense of urgency around the following key themes:
   • College and Career Readiness
     • Global trends driving changes to what this really means
     • Measures used internationally and nationally
   • Equitable Opportunities for Learning
     • A coherent, aligned educational system as a strategy to help reduce the challenges of poverty and promote broadly shared prosperity

3. Build a common understanding of systems thinking and its application to education:
   • Systems thinking in principle
   • Systems thinking in education
     • Looking at the system we (the United States) have now and how we got here
     • Looking at systems that are used by the highest performing countries (efficacy, efficiency, equity)
4. Explore CIEB benchmarking efforts and the characteristics of top performers
5. Review the principles (9 Building Blocks) resulting from CIEB’s benchmarking efforts and its analysis of those characteristics
6. Analyze the 9 Building Blocks through two cases (one international and one domestic) with a specific focus on

   • the impacts of the 9 Building Blocks (as an integrated system) on efficacy (high student performance), equity, and efficiency
   • the role of three critical subsystems:
     • High-quality aligned instructional systems
     • High-quality teachers and teaching
     • High-performance organization and management

7. Consider the implications of the 9 Building Blocks for district systems and strategic planning:
   • Review the key indicators from NCEE’s case study analyses
   • Design the questions, survey, and other data needs that are needed to begin to map existing district assets to the 9 Building Blocks
   • Explore the role of the Action Learning Project
8. Explore the leadership behaviors that are needed to support this work:
   • NISL’s Dimensions of Leadership

The pre-work—about two hours of work in total—is designed to introduce participants to the fundamental changes to the global economy as the key context and driver of education policy, with implications for American school leaders, and ask the participants to reflect on their own personal style of leadership relative to the educational context.

• Read 9 Building Blocks for a World-Class Education System.
• Read Singapore and Massachusetts–through the Lens of the 9 Building Blocks (Analytical Note)
• Read the Executive Summary to What Does It Really Mean to be College and Work Ready?

Francis Barnes began his path in education 45 years ago as a teacher and coach in an urban high school in the poverty-stricken east end of the Pittsburgh Public School District. Later, while serving as assistant principal in a middle school on the north side of Pittsburgh, he wrote his Pennsylvania focused dissertation “The Politics of Educational Reform,” using Michael Fullan and Richard Elmore as the pillars of his literature review and theoretical framework. He accepted his first superintendent role in 1994 and served 19 years as superintendent of three different school districts: Hopewell Area in western PA, Huntingdon Area in central PA, and Palisades in eastern PA. In 2004, while serving in his last district, he was placed on “Superintendent on Special Assignment” in Harrisburg and then was selected by Governor Rendell to be confirmed as Secretary of Education for Pennsylvania, where he served for a year before returning to his last district. In 2008, he became a national facilitator for NISL, leading cohorts of principals in NISL’s Executive Development Program. He retired from public school service in 2011, but continued as a national facilitator. In 2014, Pennsylvania Secretary of Education, Carolyn Dumaresq, recruited him as Chief Recovery Officer in a Severely Distressed School District that had been placed into Receivership; in 2015, he was appointed the Receiver for that school district by the new Pennsylvania Secretary of Education, Pedro Rivera.

Jason Dougal is the executive vice president of The National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE) and former CEO of the National Institute for School Leadership (NISL). Mr. Dougal oversees the operations of the entire organization. He also served as the lead facilitator in NISL Superintendent Academies in three states (Pennsylvania, Kentucky, and Mississippi). Under Mr. Dougal’s leadership, NISL has won multiple grants from the U.S. Department of Education totaling more than $20 million and been the subject of multiple third-party evaluations showing statistically significant improvement in student performance conducted by The RAND Corporation, American Institutes of Research, Johns Hopkins University, and Old Dominion University.  Prior to his role at NISL, he was the Executive Director of Excellence for All, a program aimed at restructuring high schools that yielded statistically significant gains for students on state accountability exams. Prior to that, he was the General Counsel and oversaw operations at America’s Choice, Inc., the country’s leading provider of comprehensive school reform services. Mr. Dougal has over 15 years of experience in senior leadership of leading K–12 not-for-profits. Before joining NCEE, Jason was a corporate associate at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP, a preeminent international law firm.

Anthony Mackay became the CEO and President of the National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE) on January 1, 2019. Mackay has advised organizations, governments, and school systems on every continent and is a leading voice in global education research and development. He has served as Senior Advisor to Marc Tucker and NCEE for three years. He was the first Chair of the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership (AITSL), and first Deputy Chair of the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA). He is Chair of the Australian Council for Education Research (ACER), Deputy Chancellor of Swinburne University, Melbourne, and Deputy Chair of the Education Council, New Zealand. For many years, Mackay has been CEO of the Centre for Strategic Education in Australia. Mackay is Co-Chair of the Global Education Leaders Partnership (GELP) and Foundation Chair and Director of the Innovation Unit Ltd, England. He is an Expert Advisor to OECD/CERI and Facilitator of key OECD education conferences and ministerial meetings. He is Consultant Advisor to the Asia Society’s Global Cities Education Network and to IBE UNESCO. He is Past President of the International Congress for School Effectiveness and Improvement (ICSEI) and a founding member of the Governing Council of the National College for School Leadership in England. Mackay chairs the annual International Summit on the Teaching Profession and has facilitated the Global Education Industry Summit and Key Debates at the annual World Innovation Summit on Education (WISE). His policy advice, consultancy, and facilitation work focuses on education strategy for government departments, agencies, think tanks, and leadership teams internationally.

Amy Morton leads NISL’s efforts to continually improve the performance of school and district leaders in Pennsylvania, including serving as the principal liaison between NISL and the Pennsylvania Department of Education (PDE), supporting statewide implementation of the NISL Executive Development Program (including the federal SEED project to develop an advanced credentialing system for principals), and co-facilitating the Secretary’s PA Superintendent Academy. Previously, she served as Capital Area IU’s Executive Director and Central Susquehanna IU’s Chief Academic Officer. At the PDE, she has fulfilled the roles of Deputy Secretary for Elementary and Secondary Education and Executive Deputy Secretary. She is a 1983 graduate of Dickinson College, has earned a Master’s degree in Education Administration at McDaniel College, and holds the Superintendent/Executive Director Letter of Eligibility from Shippensburg University. She has received several statewide leadership awards from Pennsylvania education associations based on her capacity to improve academic services to students.

• Superintendent’s Academy Participant Handbook, Session One: Opening Forum
• Laptop or tablet with wireless Internet capabilities

• What Does It Really Mean to be College and Work Ready? Executive Summary (NCEE 2013)
• 9 Building Blocks for a World-Class Education System (NCEE 2016)
• Singapore and Massachusetts—through the Lens of the 9 Building Blocks
• “Best Practices in Leadership Development: Lessons from the Best Business Schools and Corporate Universities” (Eiter 2002)
• Marc Tucker’s Blogs
• Top Performing Countries (CIEB)

• NISL portal and mobile app (requires User ID and password for access)

• CIEB (Center on International Education Benchmarking). http://www.ncee.org/programs-affiliates/center-on-international-education-benchmarking/
• Eiter, Marie. 2002. “Best Practices in Leadership Development: Lessons from the Best Business Schools and Corporate Universities.” In The Principal Challenge: Leading and Managing Schools in an Era of Accountability, edited by Marc S. Tucker and Judy B. Codding, 99–122. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
• Headquarters, Department of the Army (DOA). 1993. A Leader’s Guide to After-Action Reviews. Washington, DC: Department of the Army.
• NCEE (National Center on Education and the Economy). 2016. 9 Building Blocks for a World-Class Education System. Washington, DC: NCEE.
• NCEE (National Center on Education and the Economy). 2013. What Does It Really Mean to Be College and Work Ready? Washington, DC: NCEE.
• Tucker, Marc, ed. 2011. Surpassing Shanghai: An Agenda for American Education Built on the World’s Leading Systems. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

• Author, David H. Polanyi’s Paradox and the Shape of Employment Growth. Paper prepared for Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas, Jackson Hole Conference, August 22, 2014.
• Bernanke, Benjamin S. “Education and Economic Competitiveness.” Speech at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Education and Workforce Summit, 2007. http://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/bernanke20070924a.htm
• Bryk, Anthony S., Louis M. Gomez, Alicia Grunow, and Paul G. LeMahieu. 2015. Learning to Improve: How America’s Schools Can Get Better at Getting Better. Cambridge: Harvard Education Press.
• Bryk, Anthony S. Penny Bender Sebring, Elaine Allensworth, Stuart Luppescu, and John Q. Easton. 2010. Organizing Schools for Improvement: Lessons from Chicago. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Brynjolfsson, Erik, and Andrew McAfee. 2014. The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
• Collins, Allan. 2009. Rethinking Education in the Age of Technology: The Digital Revolution and Schooling in America. New York: Teachers College Press.
• Darling-Hammond, Linda. 2010. The Flat World and Education: How America’s Commitment to Equity Will Determine Our Future. New York: Teachers College Press.
• Dodgson, Mark, and David Gann. 2010. Innovation: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, Inc.
• Gardner, Howard. 2006. Five Minds For the Future. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.
• Goldin, Claudia, and Lawrence F. Katz. 2008. The Race Between Education and Technology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Hargreaves, Andy, Alan Boyle, and Alma Harris. 2014. Uplifting Leadership: How Organizations, Teams, and Communities Raise Performance. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
• Hirsch, E.D., Jr. 2009. The Making of Americans: Democracy and Our Schools. New Haven: Yale University Press.
• Pink, Daniel. 2006. A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future. New York: Penguin.
• Putnam, Robert D. 2015. Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis. New York: Simon and Schuster.
• Rosen, Larry. 2010. Rewired: Understanding the iGeneration and the Way They Learn. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
• Stegar, Manfred. 2009. Globalization: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, Inc.
• Tough, Paul. 2008. Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada’s Quest to Change Harlem and America. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin.
• Trilling, Bernie, and Charles Fadel. 2009. 21st Century Skills: Learning For Life in Our Times. San Francisco: Jossey Bass.
• Wagner, Tony. 2008. The Global Achievement Gap: Why Even Our Best Schools Don’t Teach the New Survival Skills Our Children Need—And What We Can Do About It. New York: Basic Books.
• Zakaria, Fareed. 2008. The Post-American World. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

• Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD)
  www.ascd.org
• Center on International Education Benchmarking (CIEB)
  http://www.ncee.org/programs-affiliates/center-on-international-education-benchmarking/
• Common Core State Standards Initiative
  www.corestandards.org
• Council of Chief State School Officers Interstate Consortium
  www.ccsso.org
• The Education Trust
  www.edtrust.org
• The Efficacy Institute
  www.efficacy.org
• National Association of Elementary School Principals (NAESP)
  www.naesp.org
• National Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP)
  www.principals.org
• National Center for Education Statistics
  nces.ed.gov
• National Center on Education and the Economy
  www.ncee.org
• Partnership for 21st Century Learning
  www.p21.org
• TED: Ideas Worth Spreading
  www.ted.com
• TED: Ideas Worth Spreading—Ian Goldin: Navigating our global future
  www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/ian_goldin_navigating_our_global_future.html

• To learn more about TIMSS: nces.ed.gov/timss/
• To learn more about PISA: www.pisa.oecd.org/
• To learn more about NAEP: nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/about/