Pedro Noguera, who calls himself a pragmatic optimist when it comes to the reform of urban schools, challenged high school principal to focus on changing the culture of their schools to improve student achievement.
“The culture of a school hasn’t been given a lot of attention, but it can have the biggest impact on school reform,” he said during the opening general session of the Summer Leadership Institute. “Organization and curriculum certainly are important, but they can be irrelevant in a school with a sick culture.”
Noguera cited five signs of a school with a sick culture:
- Teachers that blame students, parents, and others for failure. High performing schools accept responsibility for achieving success for students.
- Stratification by race and class. In sick schools adults predict a student’s success or failure by their background, and there will only be affluent students in AP classes.
- A staff that will not collaborate. Noguera recalled a school where people come out of a staff lounge more depressed than when they go in. He urged school leaders to develop relationships among staff where others will buy in to their vision.
- Relations with parents and students of color are strained and there is little or no involvement by parents of low-performing students. If we expect nothing of parents, he said, we shouldn’t complain when they do nothing.
- School rules and procedures are at odds with educational goals. He pointed out that when students misbehave if the only action schools take is to suspend them, learning will not occur.
He called upon school leaders to create a culture that promotes success at their schools through a number of action steps:
- Develop attitudes and habits that lead to high performance. Build confidence, competence, self-motivation and self-confidence in students and teach all children organizational and study skills.
- Develop strong relationships between students and teachers because kids will work harder for and relate better to adults they respect.
- Develop strategies that will break race and gender stereotypes. All kids need to believe that it’s cool to be smart and that there are no limits if you are poor or of color.
- Help staff members understand the external pressures facing students. If we don’t understand these pressures, we’ll lose our kids to the streets. He pointed out that gangs provide some young people with a sense of belonging and that schools must give that to students unless we want young people to belong to gangs.
- Help students think about the future and to plan their future. If young women think they will go to college, they’ll understand it doesn’t make sense to get pregnant. If they think they have no future, having a baby at 15 may make sense in their 15-year-old minds.
- Teach young people how to respect adults, to dress, to speak standard English.
“None of this is easy, but yours is vital work,” Noguera told the principals. “Your work is vital to our country. It will determine whether our students become contributors to our society or people we fear.”
Noguera can be contacted at [email protected].
