The Map Is Not the Territory: Considering the Role of School Improvement Plans in Turnaround Schools

Introduction

Claudia Wilson is an early career administrator transitioning from assistant principal to her first principal position. This case describes her early experiences as a school leader, including her experience developing and using school improvement plans (SIPs) in her first two schools before she became a principal. The teaching case outlines her decision to create a SIP, implementing the process, and then experiencing the consequences of initiating change in the context of a turnaround school. The potential benefits of school improvement planning, including goal-setting and progress monitoring, are contrasted with the practical constraints of the ongoing implementation of the plan. This case also prompts readers to reflect on the ways SIPs serve as a “map” to orient organizational improvement and how, at the same time, they might oversimplify the complex “territory” of school culture.

Context

Claudia Wilson, a White woman in her late 30s, had quickly developed a reputation as a rising star in Central School District—one of Florida’s many sprawling counties. In her first assistant principal role, she worked in a turnaround school in the district. The school—River Road Middle School—made a significant jump in school grade from an F to a C in her first year, meeting the district’s barometer of success. She assisted with instructional coaching in literacy, a subject identified for growth in her school. She also brought strong training in data-driven decision-making from her principal preparation program. She used a variety of data, including proficiency rates and early warning system indicators, to develop data profiles for all low-performing students in the school. She effectively communicated this approach to teachers, emphasizing that they were not only focusing on school-level data but also identifying the needs of individual students. In addition to employing her technical expertise, she quickly developed relationships with students and their families. Although not involved in the development of the SIP at River Road Middle School, she observed firsthand how the principal used the plan to establish a shared vision and priorities throughout the school year. The goals of the SIP were displayed on a bulletin board in the teacher workroom with benchmarks of success for each quarter. The principal assigned Ms. Wilson to lead the data meetings on literacy. Ms. Wilson also saw clear examples of how new curricular programs outlined in the SIP were readily embraced by teachers throughout the school. More importantly to Ms. Wilson, whose strength was in data analysis, assessment results indicated that their efforts were showing positive results in school proficiency rates.

Following her first year at River Road Middle School, another principal in the district asked if she would join his leadership team in a different school undergoing turnaround in the district. She transferred to Ocean Elementary School, taking on another assistant principal role. She helped with data use in the school, instructional coaching, and monitoring of a number of school programs. In the spring, the principal asked her to take the lead in the development of the SIP for the following school year. She began this process with the school leadership team, which consisted of the principal, the dean of students, instructional coaches, department heads, and the chair of the school advisory council. In their first meeting, they completed a comprehensive needs assessment to identify areas of needed growth in the next school year. Team members then gathered additional data before meeting at the end of the school year to develop priorities for the following school year. Through this participatory approach, she guided the school leadership team to identify the three priorities for the following school year: (a) literacy, particularly developing foundational reading skills in the early grades and among their lowest performing students, (b) science in the upper grades, and (c) student attendance, including tardiness. Ms. Wilson was proud of the emerging plan. She felt it was rooted in the needs of the school and reflected the school’s diverse constituencies. After being involved in the enactment of SIP at River Road Middle School, she was excited to help lead the implementation of a plan she had developed. She was also proud of the fact that the principal had empowered her to lead the SIP work and that the teachers seemed to respect her leadership as she collaborated with them regularly.

That summer, when she was putting the finishing touches on the SIP at Ocean Elementary School, she got a call from the assistant superintendent in the district asking if she would assume the role of principal in Orange Ridge Elementary School. She was excited that she had been tapped for her first senior principal position at such a young age, with only 2 years of experience as an assistant principal. Her strong leadership skills had been noticed! However, she knew the reputation of Ocean Elementary—it was a school that had been consistently performing low, with regular principal turnover. She knew that it would be a daunting challenge. However, with her usual confidence, she decided to accept the position, and by the end of the month, she moved her office to Orange Ridge and began assessing the low performance of the school.

Orange Ridge Elementary School

Orange Ridge Elementary School is remote, sitting a short distance from the two-lane highway that connects the eastern and western sides of this sprawling county. Surrounded by farmland, Orange Ridge is isolated from the state’s metropolitan centers. The school enrolls a diverse mix of students, many whose parents themselves attended Orange Ridge, as well as the transient children of migrant farm workers. Student poverty is high among students at Orange Ridge, with nearly all students eligible for free lunch. Community pride in the school has historically been strong. One hallway in the school shows class pictures going back three decades. The school is also characterized by strong parental and community engagement.

Despite the strength of the community ties, teachers within the school have had a somewhat strained relationship with district administrators. School improvement efforts over the past decade have brought a steady wave of consultants and state education agency staff into the school. These external stakeholders brought with them new interventions aimed at improving everything from mathematics performance to student behavior. No principal has had more than a 2-year tenure in the past decade. The school entered “turnaround” status following the 2015–2016 school year after receiving two consecutive “D” grades (see Table 1). In the state, schools identified for turnaround were forced to transfer at least half of their teaching staff, extend the school day, and implement a suite of reforms aimed at improving the student academic performance in the school. Even when district administrators have tried to offer various resources and professional development (PD) for the teachers at Orange Ridge, the geographic remoteness of the school poses an ongoing challenge to providing routine, sustained support.

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Table 1.

School Grades, Orange Ridge Elementary School.

School year	2014–2015	2015–2016	2016–2017	2017–2018	2018–2019
ELA achievement	30	32	35	25	29
ELA learning gains	32	35	39	24	31
ELA learning gains of the lowest 25%	35	37	37	25	22
Math achievement	32	36	42	32	33
Math learning gains	40	43	44	38	33
Math learning gains of the lowest 25%	50	47	49	41	29
Science achievement	35	39	42	36	34
School grade	D	D	C	D	F

Note. School grades adapted from the Florida School Accountability Reports. For more information on grade components, see http://www.fldoe.org/accountability/accountability-reporting/school-grades/. ELA = English language arts.

When school grades were released after the 2018–2019 school year, Orange Ridge was labeled an “F” school under the state accountability system for the first time in the school’s history. In addition to dismissing the current principal—making way for Ms. Wilson—the district moved to transfer the 10 Orange Ridge teachers with the lowest value-added scores to other schools in the district. Parents/guardians were sent a letter informing them that they had the opportunity to transfer their child to a school with at least a “C” grade. Widespread rumors suggested that the district administration was considering closing Orange Ridge as a result of shrinking enrollments and low performance.

Teaching Case

Upon assuming her new role in late June, Ms. Wilson spent all day, every day working to fill the teaching vacancies left at Orange Ridge. She also had to attend to the physical condition of the grounds, which had been neglected over the years. She was committed to creating a welcoming environment when students came back from the summer for their first day of school. At night, she poured over school data and began her own assessment of the school needs. She fell into bed exhausted, night after night.

She had biweekly calls scheduled with the principal of her first school, whom the district had assigned as her formal mentor. While they did not connect as consistently as Ms. Wilson would have liked, her mentor emphasized the importance of getting the support for teachers and community members early. She agreed with this sentiment but could not understand how she could make time for this goal as the summer waned. In her previous position, she had the luxury of involving other school stakeholders in this process during the school year. Unfortunately, teachers were not contracted to begin work for another month and the district was asking for a draft of her SIP by then. She was required to attend two afternoons of district PD focused solely on completing pieces of the SIP. For other elementary principals, all of whom were returning to their same schools, this exercise seemed to be easy. Most principals had previously begun their plan or were simply pulling from what they had developed the year before. These other more experienced principals urged Ms. Wilson to place more emphasis on the process by which she developed the plan, rather than on content of the plan itself. Silently, to herself, she dismissed their suggestions, worried that she would be the only principal in the district to start the year without a detailed SIP.

Because the school was off the beaten path, she had little interaction with parents or community members upon taking on her new position. Lacking the time to involve others in the needs assessment and feeling pressure to meet the district’s deadline, she decided she would have to “go it alone.” Looking at school performance data, it was immediately apparent that literacy was the subject in need of substantial improvement. Despite making some growth in the previous year, only 29% of students were deemed proficient. Upon further examination, Ms. Wilson noticed that the proficiency rates of the Latinx students were particularly low—only 21% of Latinx students were proficient.

In sketching out the goals for the following year, she set a school-wide goal of improving English language arts (ELA) proficiency rates by four percentage points. She also committed to narrowing the White–Latinx performance gap in ELA, though she did not establish a formal improvement goal. To improve literacy, she arranged for Title I funds to be used toward hiring a literacy coach and purchasing a reading curriculum that could be delivered specifically with emerging readers. From her previous positions when she helped develop and implement the SIPs, she knew it was critical to elicit the feedback of teachers, parents, and other community stakeholders in the process, but she just did not have the luxury of time to do that. Ms. Wilson figured she would share the plan with staff during the first faculty meeting of the year, and the parents shortly after that. She kept reminding herself how critical it was to start the year with an articulated direction for the school year. The deputy superintendent had made it clear when she accepted the position that her longevity at Orange Ridge depended on immediate evidence of success. She also felt she had something to prove within the district now that she had been given the opportunity to lead the turnaround process at Orange Ridge.

For the remainder of the summer, she put the final touches on the SIP and arranged for some of the new interventions she wanted to implement. She had some meetings with the school leadership team, which included an assistant principal, the guidance counselor, and a Title I specialist. With the exception of the Title I teacher, they were all new to the school. She had opted not to involve them in developing the SIP as each had taken on different assignments to get the school ready to open, and did not want to burden them with what she thought was her main responsibility.

Ms. Wilson was anxious to meet the teachers as they came for their preplanning days which started August 5. She carefully prepared for her first faculty meeting, where she would share the SIP and her goals for the year. Following introductions at the first faculty meeting, Ms. Wilson shared the broad findings from her needs assessment. She took the nodding heads all the way to the back row of the cafeteria as a good sign. There seemed to be consensus that literacy was the critical need area in the school. Then, she shared the plans underway to hire an instructional coach to and to implement a reading intervention plan with those students who had not yet reached proficiency. That is when teachers began to raise their hands.

A first-grade teacher remarked,

I don’t understand why we have to adopt this new curriculum. We already adopted a new curriculum last year and we started to see improvements in the early grades. The student performance just isn’t reflected in the school grade yet.

Ms. Wilson concurred that there had been growth but emphasized, “We’re not adopting a new curriculum, but it seems like a number of our students would benefit from additional reading instruction. We need to support these struggling readers however we can.” A veteran teacher in the school then asked, “Which teachers were involved in creating this plan?” The room went quiet and it quickly became clear that teachers were not consulted in the planning process.

From there, another veteran first-grade teacher questioned what they were going to do to improve chronic absenteeism, remarking, “If the students aren’t here, how do you expect me to help them?” Ms. Wilson had not even realized absenteeism was a problem at Orange Ridge, nor did she know how best to respond. She suggested setting up a working group to develop possible solutions, but the idea was not revisited during the meeting.

A series of complaints followed, all centered around the “F” grade, which the teachers had just found out about in July. One returning teacher said, “What do I tell my parents tomorrow? They don’t want to send their kids to a failing school.” A veteran teacher followed, “What do I do? I don’t know if I want to work in a failing school.” Another teacher added, “How do I know I’ll even have a job next year?” Ms. Wilson was speechless. She was blindsided by the feedback, as she had anticipated that teachers would want to meet the challenge of pulling up their school grade. Instead, teachers were demoralized. She realized that teachers were not on board with her plans. Shaken, Ms. Wilson wrapped up the meeting and teachers headed to their classrooms to finish preparations for the start of the year.

The first school advisory council brought another round of heated resistance. Parents, who had historically been active in school decision-making, had not been consulted in the development of the SIP; they were only asked to ratify the plan during the first school advisory council meeting of the year. Ms. Wilson tried to justify this decision, pointing to the importance of starting the year on a strong note. Parents were not convinced. One parent remarked, “You’re just going to follow what the district office says and not listen to our needs.” Ms. Wilson was now feeling that she was starting the new year defeated, her hope for a strong start fading from view.

Teaching Notes

Underperforming schools face an array of external pressures to change organizational processes in efforts to improve academic outcomes for students. SIPs mark one approach that has gained increased traction over the past decades (Fullan, 2001; Honig & Hatch, 2004; Strunk et al., 2016). The role of school improvement planning has become heightened under the Every Student Succeeds Act, with low-performing schools in the United States required to outline their improvement goals annually (Meyers & VanGronigen, 2019). The goal of these plans is generally fourfold: (a) establish a shared vision, (b) set strategic goals that help achieve this vision, (c) identify areas of staff development, and (d) create measurable outcomes that can be routinely monitored by school, district, and state personnel. High-quality school improvement plans have been linked with desirable school outcomes such as improved instructional coherence (Newmann et al., 2001), improved implementation quality (Strunk et al., 2016), and improved school outcomes, such as reductions in chronic absenteeism and gains in student achievement (Sun et al., 2019). In addition, they improve transparency among school personnel, parents, and community members.

Regardless of these potential benefits, school improvement plans, and school improvement efforts more broadly, leaders may make faulty assumptions about how schools operate and the role of school administrators in any improvement efforts. The underlying purpose of SIPs aligns with a conception of schools as technical-rational organizations, with school administrators at the forefront of efforts to change school structures to promote efficient operations (Beck & Murphy, 1993; Cuban, 1988; Peck & Reitzug, 2012; Tyack & Cuban, 1995). This outlook is particularly acute in turnaround schools, as school administrators initiate drastic changes to school operations by applying a business-minded approach (Peck & Reitzug, 2014). Although this approach may yield positive student outcomes, a narrow focus on improving school operations may result in indifference to the ecological complexity of the schools and communities they serve (Peck & Reitzug, 2014).

In this case, the central question for Ms. Wilson is the extent to which improvement planning can adequately structure the complexities of school improvement. The phrase, “the map is not the territory” has been used to describe the relationship between a reality and its representation (Korzybski, 1933/1994). To recognize that the map is not the territory is to acknowledge the discrepancies between the perceived situation and the reality of its complexity. A SIP—the map—can never capture the intricacies of school culture—the territory. At the same time, because of the organizational complexity of schools, leaders appreciate the tools that simplify the change process in managing school personnel, culture, and structures. Yet, in implementing these very important tools, leaders risk oversimplifying the ecological complexity of schools, and may draw, instead, on the prescribed managerial approaches to improvement, such as the SIP.

Given this complexity, researchers have questioned whether the actual design of SIPs can assist school leaders with aligning programs, practices, and policies with desired student and school outcomes (Meyers & VanGronigen, 2019; Mintrop & MacLellan, 2002). In addition, Mintrop and colleagues (2001; Mintrop & MacLellan, 2002) described how the content of most SIPs is closely aligned with the prescribed outcomes of the state accountability system. In Florida, the current SIP online template actually auto-populates test score data from the state accountability system. This evidence prompts the question of whether school leaders are designing plans for their own local improvement efforts or simply to meet external expectations.

School leaders may also face more practical constraints that limit their completion of ambitious SIPs. Research from Meyers and VanGronigen (2019) indicates that administrators often engage in satisficing behaviors when developing the SIP for their school. In other words, they do the bare minimum that is required in the written plan. Plans are often identical and undifferentiated across schools within a district; are reused in subsequent school years; focus strictly on test scores; and do not detail clear programs, timelines, or responsibilities for carrying out the plan. Meyers and VanGronigen (2019) suspect that it is not the school improvement planning itself which leads to this behavior, but larger bureaucratic hurdles associated with managing the demands associated with the change process in low-performing schools. In other words, despite the possible benefits of improvement planning, the day-to-day demands of being a principal in a low-performing school overshadow the necessity of formal planning.

This teaching case highlights the ambiguity a new school principal faces when planning for improvement. Even when her mentors suggested that she do more to connect with the school community, Ms. Wilson’s compliance orientation and previously positive experience with school improvement planning led her to complete the SIP on her own when preparing for the school year. She believed it was critical to establish a clear direction for the school year, a finding echoed in the research on turnaround leadership (Leithwood et al., 2010). This decision proved consequential for her initial efforts to initiate change in Orange Ridge. By focusing narrowly on performance data, she overlooked other school issues, such as poor student attendance or low teacher morale. The “F” grade, combined with the involuntary transfer of the majority of the teachers, seems to have been a demoralizing experience for the instructional staff. Teachers began the school year feeling very defeated. They feared that they would be next to lose their jobs if school performance did not rebound. Ms. Wilson did not anticipate these concerns when designing the SIP. She aimed to set high-performance expectations for students, but was not responsive to the ways in which teachers might also need to be supported.

In addition to low teacher morale, teachers, as a whole, felt excluded from the planning process. They agreed that literacy was the critical area of focus but felt that they had made positive strides in literacy instruction in the younger grades that were not yet reflected in the school performance data. Teachers indicated that continued implementation of the same practices from the previous year would lead to improvements. They felt that there was not a need to bring in a literacy coach or a pull-out reading intervention.

Another point of criticism was Ms. Wilson’s sole reliance on student performance data. Even though Ms. Wilson had previously drawn on diverse forms of evidence to inform school improvement planning, she made no consideration of other forms of data when formulating the plan at Orange Ridge. Critics have pointed out that an overreliance on student test performance is problematic, particularly when performance is defined narrowly in terms of proficiency rates and other student data is not consulted. In this case, the focus on school performance data led Ms. Wilson to identify one area of need but overlook the problem of chronic absenteeism. In the process, she risked reifying a narrow definition of student achievement and school performance.

Parents, who had historically been active in school decision-making were not consulted in the development of the plan; they were only asked to ratify the plan during the first school advisory council meeting of the year. Amid the fears of school closure and transfer, the school advisory council had perceived the lack of participatory decision-making as further evidence of erosion of local control. Her lack of engagement with parents and other community members, many of whom were Latino/a, may also indicate a failure to contend with the racial politics surrounding the possible closure of Orange Ridge. Ewing’s (2018) research on school closure in Chicago shows that parents were often suspicious of motives underlying closure; parents viewed closure decisions as evidence of structural racism, suspecting that closures were designed to expand charter schools. As this case is written from Ms. Wilson’s vantage, we do not know how she was viewed in the local community. Perhaps, the assignment of a beginning principal to this struggling school and her lack of parental and community engagement once she arrived was seen in the community as further evidence of a district poised to close Orange Ridge.

In conclusion, we return to the broader purposes of school improvement planning. Meyers and VanGronigen (2019) describe that “There is undoubtedly a cycle of improvement requiring knowledge, practice, and reflection” (p. 274). There is a place for SIPs—“maps” for the improvement journey. But are they too narrowly structured, ignoring the broader contextual school “territory” that involves school culture, community context, and district politics? The central challenge for Ms. Wilson is to discover which improvement planning structures can adequately address the complexities of school improvement. If Ms. Wilson’s map is flawed, how can it be modified? What aspects of the territory does she need to consider going forward? When should Ms. Wilson discard her map altogether and follow the terrain?

The following discussion questions and classroom activities provide students in principal preparation programs the opportunity to further reflect on these pressing questions when preparing for school improvement.

Discussion Questions

Class Activities