100-Day Leaders - Robert Eaker

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Ulysses S. Grant secured the surrender of Robert E. Lee at Appomattox Court House, the Union suffered a series of disastrous military leaders, including George McClellan, who regarded emancipation as an abomination and who warned that Northern troops would desert in droves if slavery were abolished. These soldiers, he claimed, fought for the Union, not for the enslaved. McClellan’s failure to pursue Southern armies more vigorously, Goodwin (2018) notes, nearly cost the Union the war. In brief, Lincoln did not wait for buy-in from politicians and generals, but followed the moral authority that he perceived as an unalterable course. He acted on not what was popular but what was right and just. In his address to Congress on the issue, he said:

      Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history.… The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation.… In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free—honorable alike in what we give and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth. (Goodwin, 2018, pp. 241–242)

      Goodwin (2018) concludes, “It was through the language of his leadership that a moral purpose and meaning was imprinted upon the protracted misery of the Civil War” (p. 242). Lincoln exercised transformational leadership at its best—leadership in pursuit of a moral purpose, not political gain or popularity (Goodwin, 2018).

      In education, leadership based on moral authority is the key to sustaining educational results and organizational health. The title and administrative authority of a leadership role pales in comparison with moral authority, which no title can bestow. Titles are designated; moral authority is earned. This requires leaders who have the will and the courage to lead—to act, and then to persist in the face of adversity and opposition. Whether the leader is a veteran or new to the position, every few months bring new opportunities for beginnings. Every day people get to choose. Hopefully, they will choose to focus on the ultimate moral purpose of schooling—enhancing student learning. The most complex and challenging multiyear objectives, such as building systemwide capacity for technology integration, planning and executing building projects, or overhauling special education services, all begin with moral purpose. Access to technology is an equity issue, bridging the opportunity gap between rich and poor. Planning and executing building projects is not about bricks and mortar, but about providing access and equity for students and creating the most effective educational environment for all students. Architects, masons, welders, bricklayers, plumbers, and carpenters all engage in a school building project with a moral purpose at their core. They are not merely assembling a building, they are creating a learning environment. All of their efforts, ultimately, will have a direct or indirect impact on the quality of education that occurs within a district or school. Their moral purpose today is similar to the craftsmen of medieval times when they were not merely laying bricks, but building a cathedral. Improving special education delivery, whether it involves extending services to students who need them or removing the special education label from wrongly identified students, is an equity issue as well.

      A fantasy view of leadership supposes that as long as you have just cause and clear evidence, change will happen naturally, like how children learn to speak or crawl. But organizational change does not happen that way. Leaders must establish the momentum and critical groundwork for success for any initiative in the first one hundred days. It is unreasonable to think that significant cultural change will simply bubble up from the bottom if the leader just gets out of the way and allows it to happen. Effective change is not an all-or-nothing affair in which the leader must lead either domineeringly or submissively. Ironically, meaningful bottom-up leadership requires exceptional top-down leadership in order to flourish (DuFour et al., 2016).

      What leaders aspire to do often differs greatly from what they actually accomplish. The question, then, is, What leadership behaviors have links to improved results? A synthesis of the best research on the relationship between leadership and student achievement (Reeves, 2016b) reveals seven essential elements of leadership.

      1. Purpose

      2. Trust

      3. Focus

      4. Leverage

      5. Feedback

      6. Change

      7. Sustainability

      Consider the evidence behind each of these elements.

      Ordinary leaders might ask a colleague, “What do you do?” or “What is your job?” Extraordinary leaders instead ask, “What are you passionate about?” Real purpose stems not from a job requirement, but from passion. An excellent way to use a staff meeting is to ask your colleagues to complete the following sentence frame: “Because I passionately believe _______, I am committed to _______.” For example, a teacher may say, “Because I passionately believe that all students deserve the opportunity to succeed, I am committed to ensuring that every student receives personal encouragement, feedback, and support every day.” The leader does not simply launch into a workshop on formative assessment or effective feedback practices, but rather first taps into the passionate beliefs of the faculty.

      A survey of teachers reveals that teachers are far less likely to change their practices due to administrative requirements than due to evidence and collegial interaction (Education Week, 2018). According to this survey, twice as many teachers receive their ideas from conferences and interactions with colleagues as teachers who receive their ideas from social media—a margin of 78 percent to 40 percent (Education Week, 2018). And how do teachers turn ideas into practice? Three times as many teachers say that evidence is their primary motivator as teachers who receive their primary motivation from endorsements from their administrators—a margin of 39 percent to 13 percent (Education Week, 2018). This strongly suggests that administrative commands will not influence teaching and learning as much as compelling cases that leaders make with evidence and passion.

      Some leaders think that they will create a sense of purpose with their mission and vision statements. Rick DuFour used to joke that he could create a mission statement generator that would automatically produce what committees come up with after pondering and laboring for hours with the help of a strategic planning consultant. It would come up with something like this:

      Our mission is to create productive citizens of the 21st century who will excel in creativity, critical thinking, communication, and every other alliterative word or phrase that we can think of as they prepare for a multicultural world, ready to face the challenges, blah, blah, blah, while valuing the unique contributions and skills of every stakeholder irrespective of differences in learning style or preference, and enhancing the blah, blah, blah.

      You get the idea. The only people who remember mission statements like this, if only for a few days, are the people who wrote them.

      Contrast the ponderous and useless mission statements that are so prevalent in schools with that of the Advent School (n.d.) in Boston: “Learn with passion, act with courage, and change the world.” A seven-year-old at this school could explain what the statement means.

      • How do students learn with passion? “I go to the library anytime I want, not just when it’s library time!”

      • How do students act with courage? “My friend has dyslexia, but she’s really smart. When the teacher gave her an easy book, I said, ‘She’s not stupid—she just doesn’t read very fast—and she should be reading the same hard books that I get.’”

      • How do students change the world? “We collect canned goods for the homeless shelter, and we pick up trash on the street. We even came up with some ideas about how to not pollute water and how to make the playground safer.”

      We’re not suggesting that this is the right mission statement for your school, but this experience does suggest a couple of acid-test questions. First, can a seven-year-old explain what your mission statement means? Second, does the mission statement resonate with everyone in the school who can use it as a springboard for guiding

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