The Maestro of Urban School Reform

Washington recently became the latest major city to turn over control of its public school system to its mayor—a strategy that's drawing new converts as the nation searches for solutions to the troubled state of urban education.

But Boston's schools have been under mayoral control since 1991. Mayor Tom Menino tapped Tom Payzant to be the city's school superintendent in 1995, a job he held for nearly 11 years before moving to the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 2006.

Payzant attended the private Mount Hermon School for Boys andWilliams College, before earning a masters and a doctorate from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. But he spent his career in public education, serving first as a high school and junior high school history teacher and then, beginning at age 28, as a superintendent in Springfield, Pa.; Eugene, Ore.; Oklahoma City; San Diego; and, finally, Boston. The only break in his career as a superintendent was a two-year stint as U.S. Assistant Secretary for Elementary and Secondary Education during President Clinton's first term.

Payzant's tenure in Boston—a city of 145 schools and 57,000 students, 73 percent of whom are in or near poverty and 76 percent of whom are African American or Latino—was unique: he came to the city committed to using student-achievement standards to leverage reform citywide; he had a comprehensive plan for achieving that goal; and he was in Boston long enough to have the plan take root. Thanks in part to his relationship with Mayor Menino, Payzant's longevity was rare by the standards of big-city school systems, where only one in seven superintendents last longer than five years.

A study of Payzant's tenure by a Harvard University research center concluded that the implementation of his reforms had been "uneven," but that the reforms had "a deep impact on the performance and culture of the [Boston] system."

The result has been significant gains in student achievement. In awarding Boston its annual Broad Prize for Urban Education, theEli and Edythe Broad Foundation in 2006 noted that the city's reading and math scores had improved at a faster rate than those of other large American cities, and faster than the national average. And it reported that the school system outperformed other urban districts in Massachusetts in reading and math for three years running and closed achievement gaps between white and Hispanic students.

Payzant is thus unique among public school reformers—a leader with a long, successful run at reform inside a major urban school system. Now 66, he spoke recently with Education Sector Co-director Thomas Toch about his work in Boston.

Education Sector: Why is "scale" a school-reform mantra today?

Tom Payzant: We have to think about systems of schools because with 90,000 public schools in America we're not going to make the improvements that are needed to get all students achieving at much higher standards one school at a time. Nor are school districts going to go away, despite a lot of proposals to change them or eliminate them. I spent nearly 11 years inBoston trying to improve a whole system of schools.

ES: What are the core ingredients of school-systemwide reform?

TP: To start, clear expectations about what students should learn, which lead to the development of standards in the various curriculum areas, and a curriculum with rigorous content.

Reform also requires recognition that the most important variable that schools control with regard to student achievement is the quality of instruction. The reality is that 80 percent of a school district's budget is for the salaries and benefits of people. So there has to be a focused approach to providing support for teachers and school leaders in their work—and laserlike attention to instruction.

Then there's data on student achievement and a variety of assessments—both end-of-year tests required by states and the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) that will give you information for school accountability purposes, and formative assessments that give teachers opportunities to check student progress during the school year and help them align their instruction with the curriculum they are teaching, so they can say, "I'm not spending enough time on this, or too much on that." Formative assessments are more difficult to accomplish at scale.

But these are not silos, with expectations over here and the curriculum over here, the professional development over here, this assessment, that assessment. Rather, the key is coherence and constantly having the conversation about how the parts connect. But that is a huge challenge, given the traditional school culture.

ES: In what sense?

TP: In most public schools teachers do most of their work in isolation. In secondary schools, the departmental structure presents enormous challenges to creating time for teachers and school leaders to work together on reform during the regular school day.

ES: You have also broken up some of your large comprehensive high schools into smaller, more personal school settings. And you have targeted struggling high school students with a lot of extra resources.

TP: Boston is one of the first urban school districts in the country to have a systemwide plan for high school reform. The city has three grades seven through 12 schools with competitive admissions, a combined middle-high school with grades six through 12, three alternative programs for at-risk students, and 30 high schools with grades nine through 12. And Boston high school students can apply to any public high school in the city.

Included in the last group are "pilot schools," which have many of the same autonomies as charter schools. Also included are former large comprehensive high schools that now house autonomous small schools or, in other cases, what we call small learning communities. The autonomous schools have their own leaders and share space in the former comprehensive buildings. The small learning communities operate under a single principal but are divided into groups of grade nine through 12 students who spend 85 percent of their day with a team of teachers in core courses and the rest of the day in electives that are offered buildingwide.

Small is not beautiful unless it is used to accomplish what big prohibits, such as improving adult-student relationships, providing teachers with smaller student loads, preventing dropouts, offering student advisories [a group of students that meets regularly with a teacher outside of a regular classroom setting to discuss a range of academic and non-academic issues], and creating cultures of collaboration among teachers.Boston Public Schools started this reform work six years ago and is beginning to see positive results with improved student achievement, college-going rates, and better attendance.

In Massachusetts, high school students must pass the state assessments (MCAS) in English language arts and mathematics in order to graduate. The class of 2003 was the first to face this requirement. They took the tests as sophomores in 2001, and those who did not pass had several opportunities to do so as juniors and seniors. Only 40 percent passed the test as 10th graders in 2001. The commonwealth (state) budgeted $50 million (Boston received about $5 million) each year for about three years to help school districts provide extra help to those who had not passed. The money was used to create double blocks of English language arts and math classes and after-school and summer programs, and it made a difference. By June of 2003, 80 percent of the Boston Public Schools' class of 2003 had passed the test and graduated on time. By the fall of 2003, several hundred additional students did so.

External Pressure and National Standards

ES: What role did pressure from outside the school system play in your reform work in Boston?

TP: NCLB [the federal No Child Left Behind Act] got states to establish standards and assessments and use them. And by requiring the reporting of scores by subgroups of students, it has put a spotlight on what's going on with racial groups, but also with low-income students and special education children and those who are English language learners. It has started and accelerated conversations about these students, about the urgency of teaching them to high standards.

The problem is that the law's mechanics are not right. There's no way you are going to get 100 percent of children achieving state proficiency standards by a fixed date (2014), as the law requires. As a result, states are under a lot of pressure to lower their standards in order to make the results look better. And that's not very helpful when the goal is for students to have the skills they need when they graduate from high school.

ES: Is the solution national standards?

TP: Theoretically. But the political realities in this country are such that that could be very hard to accomplish. I'm also interested in the idea of using international assessments like theTrends in International Mathematics and Science Study to get a sense of where we are academically and to make the argument that it's no longer good enough just to compare ourselves to other states, that we really need to be looking at international benchmarks.

ES: Some in the school-reform community are skeptical that external pressure is the right path to improvement.

TP: I spent my career as a superintendent in five different districts trying to get the balance right between top-down/bottom-up, outside-in/inside-out reform. I don't think the answer is all one or all the other. There are not a lot of examples where inside-out and bottom-up efforts have led to major policy shifts, things such as changes in civil rights, financial equity, or high standards. You can't take those sorts of changes to scale one classroom at a time, one school at a time, one district at a time.

Schools also vary widely in their capacity to carry out reform. So in Boston we sought a middle ground. When we set out to improve reading instruction, for example, I gave schools autonomy within a narrow range to select the literacy program they would use. We went from everybody doing their own thing to, "Here are three or four programs to pick from," even though there was a wide range of capacity across the schools with respect to knowing what their kids needed and being able to make good choices.

ES: What about the top-down pressure big-city superintendents have to manage from school boards and, increasingly, from mayors? Mayor Menino, who appointed you superintendent, has led Boston since 1993.

TP: Governance is extremely important. Continuity on the governance side of the house allows for continuity on the executive side of the house. If there's churn on either side, or even worse, on both sides, it's very difficult for people who are doing the work in schools. It doesn't work when there's a new agenda every year or two or three. That said, I'm not a purist with respect to elected versus appointed school boards. I've had the good fortune to have had long runs with an elected board in San Diego and with an appointed school committee in Boston. Shared goals, continuous attention to collaboration and communication, and reciprocal accountability can lead to continuity of leadership, which is necessary to realize and sustain improvement.

ES: Yet perhaps as much as any superintendent in the country in a district of any size, you invested in building capacity from the ground up in the schools. NCLB is a top-down reform.

TP: And that's the real issue: How do you build capacity? You have got to invest in people in schools. They do the work. So I don't think we can bring about sustained reform without a very intentional focus on how to develop and support both teachers and principals.

It's no longer enough as a principal to be a manager and good politically and sophisticated on operational issues. You've got to know the work; you've got to take on the instructional leadership role.

In Boston, we worked with teachers and principals already in schools. And we addressed the pipeline problem with a grow-your-own strategy. Urban school districts struggle to recruit both principals and teachers. The Boston suburbs try to pick up the best principals in the city by paying them more.

To signal the importance of the new roles we wanted principals to play, I did something that was more symbolic than sensible in my first year: I cut out the middle level of staff that was supervising principals, and the system's 125 schools reported directly to me. Then I hired a deputy, Janice Jackson, and for the first 18 months or so we worked directly with principals. We spent a lot of time in schools and set up professional development. I felt that without providing both a strong message to and strong support for principals, we couldn't implement standards-based reform.

At the end of my first year we did not renew the contracts of six principals. Under Massachusetts' 1993 school reform law superintendents have control of personnel, and principals were taken out of collective bargaining. Having that flexibility on school leadership was huge.

Change in the Classroom

ES: How did you create sufficient capacity for change in classrooms, where, ultimately, it matters most?

TP: Again, the biggest challenge was going to scale. It doesn't happen quickly.

The first challenge is getting real clarity on what the expectations are. That requires resources to help people both understand expectations and to carry them out.

We began with the literacy work. If children can't read and write, they are going to have problems in just about every area. We didn't have enough resources to do math and reading together, and it would have been very difficult to get buy-in from teachers to do two major curriculum initiatives at the same time anyway.

The first piece was setting citywide learning standards in the core subjects. Then we did training around the standards—how you approach teaching when you have standards to drive your work.

Next was the curriculum piece. We decided to go with a "balanced literacy" curriculum [one that combined attention to reading mechanics with extensive exposure to good books]. Then we gave schools some choices as to the specific programs they would use.

At the same time, we decided to go districtwide with an instructional strategy called Readers' and Writers' Workshop [that combines direct teacher instruction of phonics with more literature-oriented features such as teacher "read-alouds," classroom libraries for students with a range of reading skills, oral and silent student reading, discussion groups, vocabulary building, writing and revising, and student collaboration in both reading and writing]. That was very intentional because although it was grounded in the literacy work, it had the potential to be used in other subjects as well.

We put coaches in schools to help teachers with the new system. At first, the coaches worked mostly with entire school faculties. To get teachers as invested as possible in the process, we moved to a more collaborative model, with groups of teachers working together on teaching strategies and curriculum issues during common planning time that we worked into school schedules.

We also trained principals in the new literacy strategies. Some of it was generic for all principals K–12, and there were some things that were specific to elementary, middle, and high schools.

ES: You didn't exactly pull one reform lever at a time.

TP: Reform doesn't happen that way. You have to do a lot of things at the same time. Another important part of our agenda was training both principals and teachers to use student achievement data. How you think about it; how you use it. Over time, we developed Boston's own Intranet portal that became "My BPS," where all of the data from different kinds of assessments were available to teachers, who could manipulate it in different ways to gain insights into their students' strengths and weaknesses and what was or was not working with their teaching.

ES: What was the source of the technology initiative?

TP: The mayor used E-rate [a federally funded initiative to bring technology to schools and libraries] to get the city's schools wired [to the Internet]. We did not have enough money to train all of the city's teachers in technology at once, and teachers were already having a lot thrown at them with the literacy work. So we used an incentive model. Teachers who met various standards for using technology for instructional and operational purposes got computers first, and they then got stipends to support other teachers. I was a bit skeptical whether the strategy would work. Yet in the first two or three years a very high percentage of teachers took technology training, and we got up into the 75 to 80 percent range. Of course, with turnover you have to keep working at training.

Training Teachers and Principals

ES: You mentioned that you trained not just current teachers and principals but new ones.

TP: Recruiting people to move from other places is very hard in cities, particularly expensive ones. In my tenure there might have been 6 or 7 percent of principals hired from outside the Bostonmetropolitan area. So we started the Aspiring Principals Program.

It started out as a three-hour session once a month for people who thought they might be interested in a principalship. We focused on our expectations for the job, and what the job was like. That evolved four years ago into a significant program for training both principals and teachers. The Boston Teacher Residency Program is an alternative-certification program targeting math, science, and special-education teachers and folks who want to work with English language learners without going to education schools.

We began with 15 or so candidates in the first year with the goal of expanding to 115–120, or about 25 percent of the new teachers that Boston needs each year by 2007–2008.

We designed the curriculum, focusing on a couple of areas that teacher training institutions typically don't do very well. One is helping people understand how to confront, in a positive way, all the challenges that diversity and race and culture bring to urban school districts. A key piece of this is having a significant number of people in the program be people of color.

The other is how you deal with a wide variety of learning styles and needs that students have. Those are the kinds of things that must be focused on in a laserlike way. They tend to be the areas that teachers need the most help with, and they won’t succeed unless they have good background and skills in these areas.

We picked some instructors from Boston teacher training institutions and some from the Boston Public Schools. It is a 12-month program and graduates may apply course credits in the Boston Public Schools programs toward a master's degree at UMass-Boston. Residents take classes in the summer and one day a week during the school year. They also spend four days a week during the school year as an intern with a master teacher [a highly accomplished veteran instructor] in Boston Public Schools. Graduates' $10,000 loans are forgiven if they teach in BPS for three years.

ES: What about the principals program?

TP: The principal model was the same, with one major exception. Good people who already have some experience can't take a year off without getting paid. So the Broad Foundation is funding fellowships. Ten fellows a year go through the program at the same salary level they were at in their previous jobs. They also have a summer program, four-day-a-week internships during the school year with top-notch principals, and one day a week of coursework.

ES: Who funds the teacher side of your program? You're finishing your fourth year.

TP: Strategic Grant Partners, a Boston non-profit funded by individuals who made some significant money in the dot-com bubble. They invested between $2 million and $2.5 million a year. But each year Boston Public Schools has assumed an additional 20 percent of the cost and at the end of five years, next year, the school systems will fully fund it. There's no more important issue confronting public education in America than where we're going to recruit, hire, support, and retain the teachers of tomorrow. And the retention rate of the teachers in the program is incredible: over 90 percent after three years. In contrast, only 55 percent of our new teachers who come through traditional programs are still teaching in BPS after five years.

ES: Boston has a vibrant education market. There's choice within the public school system, district-run pilot schools, a substantial parochial school sector, charter schools. There's a lot of competition. Did that play out in your reform plan?

TP: Schools and the teachers, principals, and parents connected to them understand they've got to convince people that it's worth their while to look at their schools, that there are market forces in play, and if they just sit back and say, "Take us or leave us," they may have more people leaving than taking.

The Boston Teachers Union has become very aware of the growing competition for students in the city. It was one of the incentives for them to partner with the school district around change.

And choice is important to one of the "six essentials" that must be addressed in the school-improvement plan that every BostonPublic School has—family and community engagement. The other essentials overlap with our systemwide reform strategy: quality of instruction, use of data, professional development, instructional leadership teams that give teachers opportunities to develop as leaders, and the alignment of resources with school-improvement priorities.

ES: Why, in the end, is reform so hard?

TP: A lot of places lack continuity of leadership on the governance side and on the executive side. I think that the churn of students in urban districts is a factor. Teachers may have 25 students on their rosters, but they've only taught 15 kids from September to June.

There's a lack of alignment of professional development with educational goals. Instead of encouraging teamwork among teachers, we try to get the best teachers we can, close the classroom door behind them, and hope for the best. Some of these school culture things take a long time to break down.

And then there's the political environment, where elected officials are under enormous pressure to show that complex problems can be solved quickly. So there's a tendency to grab for low hanging fruit to show that progress is being made, and when that doesn't happen, the tendency to change course.

ES: Somehow I don't think you've reached the end of your list.

TP: But there is good news. If you look at the number of urban school districts trying to put the pieces of reform together, the trend is moving in the right direction.

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