As I write, the nation is observing the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. President Kennedy held office for less than three years. But his presidency transformed the nation. He raised our aspirations for all of humankind and made way for the tumultuous changes in culture and politics that followed his death. All who were alive at the time of the assassination — even the children, of which I was one — remember exactly where they were when they heard the news that our gallant leader had been shot. JFK's impact had been that profound.
The observance reminds me of another day that few Americans will ever forget. For some, the day's imprint is indelible. On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was working in my 11th-floor office on Fifth Avenue in New York City when a plane struck one of the twin towers of the World Trade Center. My colleagues and I raced to a terrace and looked straight downtown in the clear blue sky as a second plane struck the other tower. A half hour later, we watched in disbelief and horror as the towers crumbled in a mushroom cloud of smoke. With the media reporting additional attacks and rumors of still more, we scrambled downstairs where traffic was stopped and hundreds of thousands of panicked pedestrians filled the streets.
I remember something else about that day. Mayor Rudy Giuliani was on television and radio, nonstop, from Ground Zero, conveying the unspeakable carnage, yet somehow reassuring the city that we would pull through. As he consoled firefighters and police who had lost scores of comrades, amidst choking smoke and debris, people believed. Weeks later, support for the mayor was so high that the city considered postponing the November mayoral election so that Giuliani could serve beyond his term limit, through 9/11's aftermath.
President Kennedy and Mayor Giuliani were transformational leaders. The mayor had led the restoration of New York City as the nation's center of business and culture, creating a quality of urban life that had seemed unthinkable. When I arrived in New York City in 1993, my daily walk from the bus terminal to the office was punctuated with peep shows and prostitutes. Eight years later, I strolled through a Times Square brimming with happy families and children. In the 1950s, America prospered but many were left behind. By the time of his assassination, President Kennedy had the nation believing that together we could accomplish anything — and upon his death, we tried like never before.
Our schools need transformation — public schools, charter schools, and private schools. Our students have changed. In five years, the majority of kindergartners will be children of color, many raised in economic disadvantage. Our nation has not done well by these children historically. The academic standing of our students internationally — and this includes students from affluent families — remains mediocre. Reform efforts are stranded in debate about the Common Core State Standards and how they should be tested. Meanwhile, teaching and learning have not progressed meaningfully — school in the 21st century is not fundamentally different from school of the late 20th century. Instructional technology, in particular, is not being exploited as more than an add-on, with rare exception. Independent schools continue to provide students with strong moral communities, a value that should never diminish in importance. But the overall value proposition of independent schools is challenged by tuitions that leave more families asking: Is it worth it?
The nation needs schools that serve a diversity of students more successfully. The nation needs schools that prepare students for a rapidly changing, technologically sophisticated, internationally connected future. The nation needs schools that consistently attract our very best and brightest into careers of teaching and educational leadership. The nation needs schools that taxpayers and parents can afford. Schools that meet these needs are likely to look quite a bit different from schools today.
Creating these schools is partly a technical matter. We need to experiment with alternative classrooms — blended, online, and such. We need to try out innovation-oriented programs like maker labs and design thinking. We need to develop and evaluate new roles for teachers in new instructional spaces. We need to examine alternative business models.
Most of the work, though, is not technical. It requires excellent people skills. Schools will not change fundamentally until all school constituents support it: families, local communities, teachers, administrators, staff members, trustees, alumni, government authorities, higher education officials, and more. And that will not happen without leadership — transformational leadership within schools. Most people are discomfited by schools different from the ones they remember fondly. So school leaders need to not only raise their understanding of what schools should look like today, but also hone their ability to help others understand the value of such change.
For the most part, education leaders have been prepared to maintain, not transform, their schools. This is the nature of things in established systems. United States colleges and universities issue 175,000 master's degrees in education per year, largely to prepare public school educators to assume positions of leadership "in the system." For their part, independent schools too often look for leaders to be trained within other independent schools, again encouraging knowledge of how to lead within the system.
In recent years, organizations have emerged that aim to prepare educators to lead schools out of the proverbial box. I recently completed a study of the most successful of these, success measured by the academic progress of schools after program graduates have taken over. Several of these programs work in the charter sector. Building Excellent Schools, based in Boston, has for the last decade provided two years of intensive training and support for graduates to open "no excuses" — i.e., students will succeed — charter schools. In Colorado, Get Smart Schools prepares students similarly to open any autonomous school — public, charter, or private. The University of Illinois—Chicago offers its training as a special Ph.D. program, giving participants several years of preparation to take over and turn around failed urban schools.
The missions of these programs are different, of course, than transforming an independent school. But the lessons in transformational leadership almost certainly apply. Across the six programs that I examined, through in-depth interviews with program executives and participants, the commonalities are striking. All seek prospective leaders of superior intellectual capacity. Schools of the future need superior academic leadership. Transformational leadership requires intellect as well. All are very selective; this is not like applying to the local university for an M.A. in educational administration. All have explicit competency frameworks, models of transformational leadership that drive their training. All provide lots of practical experience and coaching — not conventional classroom instruction — in a range of schools, often nationwide.
What is most striking about these six programs is their shared emphasis on one element of transformational leadership: the ability to promote followership. Leaders must be able to inspire with vision. They must be able to instill trust. They must build personal relationships with colleagues and constituents. They must develop the strength to hold people accountable and the warmth to offer them support. People skills.
Old-fashioned as these skills may be, they are likely the skills that are most important for securing a different future for our schools and our students. Education is ultimately a people business. The quality of a school will never be greater than the quality of its people. Transformational leaders are those who can cultivate the extraordinary support from their school communities to chart a new course.
Last November, I had the opportunity to participate in my first meeting of the advisory committee of the Klingenstein Center at Columbia University. We honored the founder of the center, John Klingenstein, who 40 years ago had the foresight to recognize the need for a special kind of leadership in independent schools. Today, John Klingenstein can look back proudly at nearly 5,000 leaders the center has trained for independent schools. The center is one of several university-based programs that have helped prepare independent school leaders traditionally. The advisory committee was not there, however, just to celebrate tradition and to honor John. We were there to contemplate the leadership requirements of our schools over the next 25 years. To a person, the committee members agreed that the challenges before us require the ability to transform. As I looked around the table at several school heads who help comprise the committee — icons all — I felt a great sense of hope. Our most successful leaders have always been those who inspire us, who fill us with trust — and who may never be forgotten.