Pennies From Heaven

(Released to the web March 13, 2008)

The pennygate media frenzy, while tame in comparison to what other organizations and communities have faced, still took our school administration and some others by surprise.  The finger pointing by various subgroups within our school community began almost immediately.  It was the fault of disrespectful student pranksters, not the work of serious protesters.  It was the fault of a few loose cannons in the school administration who were later backed up by unthinking superiors.  It was the fault of spiteful parents who would rather call in the media than do their job raising their own children.

The administration will be getting hate emails from around the world for some time to come, but as the Readington penny incident fades from national attention, can we gain some perspective locally and learn from this?  Is there actually an opportunity to use pennygate as a catalyst for positive change within our school district and our middle school?  Perhaps.  But, it will take some brutally honest admissions of failure by some stakeholders and an even more difficult course of action.

Whether the action of the students in paying for their lunch was a prank or a protest, and whether or not the action should be seen as disrespectful is beside the point here. Instead, lets start with an examination of the local reaction to pennygate and how the incident can be seen as a microcosm of long simmering issues within the Readington middle school.

Just days before pennygate erupted, parents had brought to a head at a school board meeting the issue of student bullying.  With very personal stories of ugly student behavior, these parents got the immediate attention of school board members.  The administration, obviously feeling defensive, had even staffed the school board meeting with representatives from the middle school to respond.  After pennygate, a very high percentage of emails and phone calls to readingtonparents.org made a direct connection between a perceived negativity among middle school staff toward students and the manner in which the penny incident was handled.  Parents and others wrote about what they perceived to be a particularly harsh response by the staff and administration to the student protest versus what the see as the ineffectual way that student bullying complaints have been handled.  These parents were shaking their heads at the contrast of reaction by the administration.

As we dig deeper into this vein, the conflicting viewpoints of various stakeholders and subgroups is clearer.

Among parents, there is widespread agreement that the middle school culture is negatively charged and often pointlessly callous.  Parents of 6th graders notice the difference in the first week their children attend the middle school.  Some are scolded at back-to-school night that "the teachers and staff at the middle school will take it from here,"  implying that parental oversight is no longer needed or welcomed.  To be sure, there are parents who support such an attitude and who place a high value on obedience and strict authority.  A greater percentage, though, question tactics from teachers and administrative staff which seem to stress intimidation, arbitrary control, and sticks over carrots. 

Teachers in the middle school generally fall into three subgroups.  There are some who are trying to concentrate on the intrinsic value of learning and teaching and who are most interested in closing their classroom doors and privately connecting with students.  There are some who feel that both parents and current administrators are simply hurdles to their work getting students in line and getting students to "respect" them.  Privately, with like-minded faculty, they talk about how Readington parents are out of control.  They regularly ignore or even overrule edicts from the administration by doing their own thing or guiding newer hires toward their point of view.  Finally, there is a group of newer teacher hires who are simply confused or weakened by this unstable atmosphere.

Among middle school students, there are relatively few who are enthusiastic about school.  Sixth graders just entering the middle school are often shocked by the sudden change in culture, and comment on the yelling, the arbitrary rules, and the rote forms of classroom learning.  In the higher grades, students sometimes become despondent or else find some means of coping with what they perceive to be boring lessons, a lack of say in their own existence, a reliance of many teachers on humiliation as means of motivating student behavior, and a complete disconnect between their desires and the adults running the show.  Bus stops are unhappy places even on the first day of school.  Absences are sometimes seen as a means of escape.  Grandparents are heard to comment about the lack of smiles at school gatherings.  These pre-teens and teens take solace in friendships, sports and other activities outside of the classroom, including paying for lunch with pennies.

What we have here is more than just a failure to communicate.  In point of fact, we have stakeholders who are at odds with each other in their beliefs.  We have a large number of middle school parents who feel that serious issues like student bullying and intimidation of students by teachers and staff are being ignored.  We have staff and teachers who believe  that parents need to back off and let them handle things, and an even harder-core subgroup who believe that the administrators need to back off too.  We have students who believe that their classroom experience is scripted and empty and that they are just cogs on the wheel of the school system.  And, the administrators?  While they cannot be blind to these issues--their own surveys and private conversations with stakeholders have confirmed the problems--they have not come to that "eureka" moment as of yet.  They have not publicly put forth a plan to address these issues in a meaningful, permanent way.

But, what if pennygate was that "eureka" moment?  What if the student protest actually represented pennies from heaven--a means to translate negatives into positives?

While the administration has created a student activism club for our middle school students and trumpeted that fact as progress, the truth is that only a handful of students in each grade will be directly affected by this move.  A single, hesitant step like this will not be sufficient to solve our issues in the middle school.  We hired a new administration for more substantial progress than this.

In an April 2006 article Managing Successful Organizational Change in the Public Sector: An Agenda for Research and Practice in Public Administration Review,  authors Fernandez and Rainy discussed the resistance to organizational change which often faces managers and made this point:

"Several researchers have observed that a crisis, shock, or strong external challenge to the organization can help reduce resistance to change. Van de Ven (1993) explained that because individuals are highly adaptable to gradually emerging conditions, a "shock" or stimulus of significant magnitude is typically required for them to accept change as inevitable. In a similar vein, Kotter warned managers against the risk of "playing it too safe" and noted that "when the urgency rate is not pumped up enough, the transformation process cannot succeed" (1995, 60). He even observed that in a few of the most successful cases of organizational change, the leadership manufactured crises (see also Laurent 2003; Thompson and Fulla 2001)."

Could it be that pennygate is enough of a shock to the system to be a catalyst for change?  There is no question that the administration, having demonstrated a lack of expertise in media relations, is certainly shocked.  Virtually every reporter or media contact who discussed the incident with readingtonparents.org expressed wonderment at the naiveté.  But, can the lingering effects of a satellite uplink van be used for advantage now, after the fact?

Pennygate has galvanized opinion among many middle school stakeholders.  Parents who were irritated before about a negative culture are hopping mad now.  Parents who placed a high value on obedience in children are more sure of their position now.  Teachers and staff who always sought more control over student lives or who believe students to be generally disrespectful are also more sure of their position, if chagrined by the overwhelmingly critical response nationally. Students, who have now witnessed that critical national response, may feel emboldened even if they are still unhappy.  Interestingly, and perhaps hopefully, there is a contingent of teachers and staff who feel caught in the middle, and who have not been vocal at all.

Fernandez and Rainey continue:

"Widespread participation in the change process is perhaps the most frequently cited approach for overcoming resistance to change (e.g., Abramson and Lawrence 2001; Young 2001)....The literature indicates that involving organizational members helps to reduce barriers to change by creating psychological ownership, promoting the dissemination of critical information, and encouraging employee feedback for fine-tuning the change during implementation.

Participation presents a particularly important contingency in the public sector. As Warwick (1975) asserted, career civil servants, allegedly motivated by caution and security, can use to their advantage the frequent turnover among top political appointees; they can simply resist new initiatives until a new administration comes to power. However, their participation in the various stages of change can help to reduce this kind of resistance to planned change."

If ever there was a time when every stakeholder is paying attention, it is now.  Even the teachers who have waited out previous administrations and therefore prevailed with their own agendas are now paying attention. What is required at this point, according to these authors and many other management experts, is a mechanism for stakeholders to participate in the change process--and, most importantly, a champion in top management of the ideas involved in the change.  In other words, it is leadership and commitment for the cause from the top of the food chain which makes the difference.  In this case, that is the superintendent's office and the school board, who must do more than just mentor lower level administrators.  Instead, they must push hard for specific changes and manufacture further crises if necessary.

A 1996 article by management consultant and professor Paul Strebel, Why do Employees resist change?  noted:

"For many employees... including middle managers, change is neither sought after nor welcomed. It is disruptive and intrusive. It upsets the balance. Senior managers consistently misjudge the effect of this gap on their relationships with subordinates and on the effort required to win acceptance of change. To close the gap, managers at all levels must learn to see things differently. They must put themselves in their employees' shoes to understand how change looks from that perspective and to examine the terms of the "personal compacts" between employees and the company."

The personal compacts the author writes about allow employees to understand what they are supposed to do for the organization, what help they will get doing it, and how they will be evaluated. Strebel also notes the effectiveness of shocking the organization into change.  He describes the approach of new CEO Jan Timmer at Phillips Electronics when he took over at the helm:

"Timmer's approach was a dramatic one; in fact, it was shock treatment.  Shortly after becoming CEO in mid-1990 he invited the company's top 100 managers to an off-site retreat at Philips's training center in De Ruwenberg. There he explained the company's situation in stark terms: Its survival was in jeopardy. To reinforce the message, he handed out a hypothetical press release stating that Philips was bankrupt. It was up to the group in the room to bring the company back. Everyone would have to contribute. Operation Centurion had begun and, with it the end of life in the company as all those in the room had known it.

Readington middle school is not multinational corporation, but the principles described by Strebel are just as effective here.  Imagine a meeting of administrators and teachers, with some school board members attending, laying on the line for everyone in attendance just how important it is that the middle school become a new place.  Imagine a middle school principal tasked by the superintendent's office with ending the sniping by teachers, using autocratic means if necessary, and firing up the silent staff members with personal compacts as agents of change.

Of course, there are structural issues which must be addressed too.  Good teachers enter the classroom not for money, or even benefits, but for the intrinsic value they place on connecting with students.  Frederick Herzberg's motivator/hygiene theory stated that employees are motivated by factors of the work itself (satisfiers) and that other things like pay, and benefits and management policy (dissatisfiers) are merely hygiene issues.  The implication is that employees are best motivated to work and do well because they love what they do, but they can become dissatisfied when the hygiene factors overwhelm their environment.

In Readington we have a problem in this regard.  Rather than structuring curriculum, policy and practice around encouraging teachers to be entrepreneurs in their own classroom, we are doing the exact opposite.  We insist that teachers follow highly scripted curriculum which is also aimed at increasing state test scores instead of promoting authentic learning.  We supplement this with assessment "tools" like NWEA testing and use the results to further limit options for teachers and students alike.  What kind of teacher thrives in this environment? On the administrative level, instead of accepting state testing as a necessary evil and minimizing its impact on students and teachers, we embrace the scores as truly meaningful and hold principals accountable directly and indirectly to the numbers.   It shouldn't be any wonder that students report being bored and dulled by their lessons in class.  They have told us in their own words on a survey sponsored by the school district that they are not being challenged.  They report to their parents when they enter the high school that they are behind the curve compared to kids from other sending districts.

Adding to that structural issue is an inordinate amount of energy wasted on supporting past practices going back over a decade alongside current directions.  This includes practices in areas of discipline, teaching strategy, scheduling, and curriculum timing which were introduced over multiple administrations and administrators.  Unfortunately, the "we've always done it this way" argument never seems to be answered with a strong reply, so these practices continue to build up over time, often contributing to cliques within the teaching staff who support one old method or practice over another.

So, how do we get out of this mess?  The superintendent's office could use pennygate as a starting point and immediately ratchet up the pressure even more.  All employees need to see dramatic change as inevitable. Either the school leadership admits that the structural issues will have to be addressed or it will doom the effort to promote change.  The superintendent's office must manufacturer further crises in the form of a "sit up and wake up" call to all employees.  The middle school principal's office must be supported in autocratic moves to route out unprofessional behavior among some educators and democratic moves to increase participation in the change dialog by more progressive educators.

Students must be engaged, valued and supported as learners and human beings.  A Friends of Rachel program, or something similar, could be useful in shocking the student culture of despondency and going through the motions into something more productive.  It will take much more than a student activism club, that is certain.  The complaints of student bullying and violence must be sorted out quickly and ruthlessly.  That does not mean arbitrarily clamping down on student movement and rights, but coming to an enlightened understanding of the source of the issue and helping students find their own voices.

Parents, once pushed away as their child reached middle school age, must come to feel that they are valued by educators again and that they are part of the solution, not a part of the problem.  That is a two sided coin, it is true, but it is the educators who are the professionals and who must take the first step.  There is no good reason for the bad-mouthing of parents to be common practice, nor is there any good reason for parents to believe that they are not required to contribute to an improved atmosphere.

If pennygate can spark a revolutionary change in the way the Readington middle school is run, the stakeholders involved must jump now--not next year, not as part of a five year strategic plan.  A failure of the school leadership to ratchet up the pressure before the end of this school year will mean that the opportunity to gather up pennies from heaven will have passed us by.

For further study:

• Public Administration Review Article
• Paul Strebel Article
• Star Ledger Editorial
• Washington Post Blog
• Example AP report