11. Improving Schools Through Collaborative Leadership and Trust with Anthony Bryk

Episode 11 Transcript:  https://tinyurl.com/5bwsezne

In this discussion, Dr. Jabari Mahiri and Professor Anthony Bryk explore the complexities of educational reform, particularly in relation to high school graduation rates and the dynamics of trust within school systems. 

Professor Anthony Bryk, former president of the Carnegie Foundation, shares insights from his book, How a City Learned to Improve Its Schools. The book focuses on the case of Chicago Public Schools, where research revealed that students transitioning to high school faced substantial challenges, leading to increased dropout rates. Bryk discusses his long-term engagement with the school system, focusing on leveraging research to foster partnerships between academia and schools, which played a crucial role in this improvement.

Mahiri and Bryk also focus on the principles of continuous improvement and improvement science, highlighting the importance of problem-centered approaches that empower educators at all levels. Bryk distinguishes between continuous improvement as a methodology focused on rapid cycles of inquiry and improvement science as a broader framework encompassing these efforts. He expressed that focusing on high-leverage problems, such as gatekeeper courses in community colleges, can catalyze systemic change, ultimately advancing equity in education.

Lastly, Bryk highlights the importance of relational trust among educators, students, and community stakeholders, arguing that trust is essential for effective collaboration. He describes how low trust can create a competitive atmosphere among teachers, ultimately hindering collective growth and school improvement efforts. Conversely, fostering a trusting environment can facilitate better communication, engagement, and a shared commitment to student success. Bryk emphasizes the importance of democratic localism in creating environments where educators can innovate and respond to local needs, thereby diffusing contentious debates that often arise at higher administrative levels.

Equity Leadership Now! hosts conversations with equity-conscious leaders from pre-K through university settings who transform structures and strategies for educating students, particularly for those from historically marginalized communities.

Transcript

Improving Schools Through Collaborative Leadership
and Trust
with Anthony Bryk

Jabari Mahiri Host, Editor, and Producer
Brianna Luna Audio Editor and Production Specialist
Mayra Reyes External Relations and Production Specialist
Becca Minkoff Production Manager
Diana Garcia Communications Manager and External Relations
Audra Puchalski Communications Manager and Web Design
Jennifer Elemen Digitally Mediated Learning Coordinator
Jen Burke Graphic Designer
Robyn Ilten-Gee Editor and Media Consultant
Rian Whittle Sound Technician

Transcript

Brianna Luna 0:17
Equity Leadership Now! hosts conversations with equity-conscious leaders from Pre-K
through university settings, who transform structures and strategies for educating,
particularly for those who are marginalized. We complement the mission and goals of the
21st Century California School Leadership Academy, 21CSLA.
Housed in the Leadership Programs of Berkeley School of Education, we acknowledge our
presence on unceded Ohlone land.
We explore innovative ideas and compelling work of educational leaders at the intersection
of research, policy, and practice to realize individual, social, and environmental justice
because our democracy depends on it.


Jabari Mahiri 1:08
Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of Equity Leadership Now! We're here
today with Professor Anthony Bryk who served as the ninth president of the Carnegie
Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching from 2008 to 2020, and where he led the
work on bringing the discipline of improvement science and organizing and improvement
networks into education. In Chicago, Dr. Bryk co-founded the Center for School
Improvement at the University of Chicago, subsequently expanded and operating as the
Urban Education Institute and the consortium of Chicago School Research, now the
UChicago Consortium on School Research. Welcome, Dr. Bryk.
Jabari Mahiri 1:50
A good place to start is with your recent [2023] book, with several co-authors entitled, "How
a City Learned to Improve Its Schools”. Can you talk about the scope and focus of this book
on the transformation of Chicago public schools from one of the worst systems to one of
the most improved and the key reasons and lessons offered for system improvement
overall from this work?
Anthony Bryk 2:13
Well, the context of this book was that, for almost 20 years, while I was at the University of
Chicago, all of my work was organized around how the kind of research knowledge, the
tools, the disciplines that exist in research universities could more productively enter into
conversation and into partnerships with the school system itself and - various other
external organizations that were trying to support the improvement of what, in the late
1980s had been called by then Secretary of Education, Bill Bennett, the worst public school
system in America. And as I said, I did that work for almost 20 years. That consisted of
everything from working directly, creating a network in schools on the SouthSide of
Chicago, which some of the poorest neighborhoods in the city of Chicago, to working on
transforming the preparation of teachers to succeed in those kinds of schools, to creating a
professional development school to support the professional learning of Chicago teachers
as efforts tried to move toward more ambitious outcomes, to actually spending a year and
a half working inside the central office of the school system itself. So, over that period of
time, I was engaged in and around these issues of improvement of the Chicago Public
Schools through many different roles and many different projects. I left in 2005 and when
you're in the middle of doing the work, you tend to be focused on the challenges and
presenting problems right in front of you. It's very hard to have much of a sense of whether
we have progressed. And then, a couple of things happened. Around 2015-2016, results
were starting to come out about the dramatic improvement of high school graduation rates


for decades, literally decades, about half of the students who began ninth grade graduated
and the other half dropped out. 10,000 students a year almost entirely, students of color
from low-income households, were dropping out of Chicago public schools, and that had
been the story for literally three decades. Over this period of time, the high school
graduation rate moved from 50% to now, over 80%. That was a big change, a kind of
change that we just simply don't think about happening in urban school systems.
So, that data was beginning to appear, those results were beginning to appear. Then there
was work published by a former colleague of mine at Stanford, Sean Reardon, where he
and colleagues had put together this evidence on the size of learning gains in districts all
across the United States. In that period between 2010 and 2016, Reardon reported that the
average learning gain was 1.2 years of learning for a year of instruction. Well, in the work
that the consortium had been doing, we knew back in 1989, that number was .85 years of
learning for a year of instruction. By 1995, it rose to .96 years but by 2001, which is the last
research report that I was involved in, it was 1.01 years. Something happened in that next
period of time that moved it from basically one year of learning for a year of instruction to
1.2 and put Chicago in the top 96 percentile of all districts in the United States in terms of
the size of the learning gains of students in these schools. Something really important had
happened in Chicago, and the book was really an attempt to understand, how did this
come about? Because people could see the results, and they were very impressive. And
there's no question that there were substantial improvements in student outcomes, but no
one had any sense as to how this actually happened, because it wasn't a simple story. It
wasn't like they adopted an intervention. It wasn't- well, we introduced charter schools.
There were charter schools. There was increased choice, but we looked at all the simple
explanations, and that wasn't the account. So the book became this question, how did this
happen? And how did it happen in a 30-year period when there were 14 different CEOs
running the system? Because, again, not a set of conditions you'd expect that would be
ideal for transformation. So that was the genesis of the book.
Jabari Mahiri 7:14
We definitely encourage our listeners to pick up this book and study it closely, because you
dealt with such a large, complex school system, which has its own issues of scale. I have an
intimate knowledge of the Chicago Public School system because I was born in Chicago. I
graduated from Hyde Park High School. I went to the University of Illinois, Chicago, and
both my sons graduated, one from Morgan Park High School and one from Kenwood High
School, which, as you know, was created to offer one of the ways to embellish and enrich
the education of students. So, we really appreciate this work and think particularly because


of the complexity of that particular school system, its scale, it has many, many lessons that
your book will help us decode and be applicable to school systems across the country, even
when they're not at that scale. But we're in a situation where the nation is polarized, and
we're wondering also, how can continuous improvement efforts respond to or help
circumvent challenges inherent in what's going on in our nation, generally and schooling
specifically regarding considerations of what and how content that has become
contentious, might be taught? Is there a way that continuous improvement helps us deal
with those contentious issues that are going on across the country right now?
Anthony Bryk 8:43
Well, I don't know if this is so much a continuous improvement story, but there is a lesson
in the Chicago work, and it goes back to the first catalyzing reform for this change in
Chicago was the State Legislative Reform Act of 1988 that decentralized the system and it
devolves substantial resources and authority out to individual schools, and with regard to
this particular point, it created local school councils and principals were hired at the school
building level, and it sent considerable authority about the choice of curriculum instruction
down to the school site. These issues become very contentious when they got to get solved,
we're going to do one thing, and everybody's got to do the same thing at the level of a
Board of Education mandating it. You get this out into school communities and what you
saw in Chicago as well, different places solve this in different ways. The clearest example of
this was really in the largely port of immigration communities in Chicago around issues of
English language learning and you know, how best to accomplish that, which was, at that
point in time, a politically contentious topic. Well, you know, it actually gets solved
somewhat differently in different schools. But the point was, it takes a lot of this energy
that gets people fighting with each other at the top of the system about what the system
should mandate, and it pushes it out to where the work actually happens, out in the
schools. And you got a great idea, can you make it work? You know, somebody, somebody
else, has got a great idea. Can you make it work? And so a lot of that energy that goes into
fighting gets translated into, can we actually make our ideas work on the ground? Can we
create better conditions for teachers and students? So that's one of the ways that the
Chicago reform was this great experiment in vitalizing democratic localism, opening up
spaces where more people not only got a say in what happened, but it was more than just
voting like, we want this policy. Can you make it work?

Jabari Mahiri 11:00

Two terms float around a lot that have continuous in them, but I want you to help us see
the distinction between the two. One is continuous improvement and the other one is
improvement science. Can you help us parse out what's different and what's connected
about improvement science and continuous improvement?
Anthony Bryk 11:20
Well, improvement science is this larger umbrella of, we actually refer to as network
improvement science, is this larger umbrella that encompasses the entirety of the
enterprise. Continuous improvement is an essential inquiry process of, ”I've identified
some problem. I'm going to try some things, rapid cycles of, I'm going to try to get some
evidence. Did it work? If not, if it partially worked, how am I going to change this?” So these
are rapid cycles of inquiry. The difference between this is, in education, the cycle of inquiry
is typically a full academic year. You do a school improvement plan, you get data at the end
of the year, you write a new school improvement plan. That's one cycle. Part of the press of

improvement science is, how can we learn faster, and so-
Jabari Mahiri 12:19

And make incremental improvements.
Anthony Bryk 12:21
So you're making incremental improvements, but you're moving on a trajectory. It's not like
a random walk. I got a problem that's oriented and I'm constantly learning how to get
better at attacking that problem.
12:40
[break]
Jabari Mahiri 13:13
When I talked a little bit about the contentious nature of our society right now, one of the
things that is challenged often are words that we had sort of taken for granted, you know,
issues of equity and things like that. And then 21CSLA, we definitely have an equity focus
and an equity lens. But can you talk a little bit about how continuous improvement and
improvement science might actually be helping to realize issues of equity, specifically, even
when we don't use that word?

Anthony Bryk 13:44
The Chicago Public Schools, even 30 years later, are not- have not achieved equity, but
when they went from 50% graduating to 80%, that's 10,000 students a year, almost entirely
students of color from low-income families, who now have new life opportunities that they
didn't have before. That's making real progress toward equity, through this kind of
improvement framework. When I came to the Carnegie Foundation, the first problem we
decided to work on were the high failure rates in developmental math courses in
community colleges. Well, why did we pick that problem to work on? Community colleges,
of course, are the lowest tier within the post-secondary sector. About half of the students
in post-secondary education are in community colleges, and disproportionately, they’re
students of color, they’re students first-generation college going, this is the great
democratic institution that's supposed to open up opportunities for many young people.
When we looked at who is succeeding and who is not, it really focused our attention on the
gatekeeper function of these developmental math courses, that approximately a half a
billion students a year nationally were being sent into these developmental math courses,
and 80% of them were never acquiring a college credit. If you didn't get that college credit,
you didn't qualify for a two-year degree, you couldn't transfer to a four-year degree. Some
of the technical certification programs that you might be interested in, you couldn't get
into. That was a gatekeeper opportunity. We managed to break that gatekeeper open.
Jabari Mahiri 15:38
...around math specifically, too, because that's one of the bigger gatekeeping subject areas.
Anthony Bryk 15:43
..but that's also within this framework of improvement science, there's something called
The Pareto principle. And what the Pareto Principle says, there are many factors that cause
the observed outcomes, but typically, there's a handful of them which are really the
primary factors, that 80% of the variability in outcome is typically caused by a small number
of factors. So if you can figure out those high-leverage problems and make headway on
them, you can really make a difference in students' lives.
Jabari Mahiri 16:10
Exactly. And of course, if you didn't get algebra under your belt, or the subsequent
geometry- or trigonometry, that's all off the table.


Anthony Bryk 16:18
And actually that's another story we write about in the book, that in the aspiration for more
ambitious academic outcomes for students, there was targeted work that was done in
Chicago on eighth and ninth-grade algebra.
Jabari Mahiri 16:34
Thank you for that. And also, we're engaged a lot with research practice partnerships, are
there ways that you all have connected continuous improvement in your work in schools to
this sort of generalized concept of research practice partnerships? How did you guys
position yourselves as researchers coming from the University of Chicago, or coming from
the Carnegie Foundation with those principles in terms of engaging in the work with the
actual people on the ground who are doing the work at all of those levels, district leaders,
school site leaders, teacher leaders, community leaders, all of the stakeholders involved in
the process?
Anthony Bryk 17:14
You know, the work on dramatically improving high school graduation started with some
more traditional research inquiries. It was a key study that a colleague of mine, Melissa
Rodrick, had done, where she followed 98 students. Chicago is a system of primarily K-8
and then a transition to high school. They don't have a middle school system. So she
followed for a year and a half, a group of eighth graders through their ninth-grade
experience, and in eighth grade, these children are showing up every day in class. Their
attendance is good. They're on or close to grade level. Six months at the high school,
they're chronically absent and they are failing courses. Something is happening in that
transition, and that predicted- was an incredibly strong predictor of dropping out.
So, no one's focusing at that point in time, the notion of being on track, the transition to
high school. Literally, nobody's paying any attention to that. The problem is there, but it's
invisible. And it happened because, you know, there was that study going on where we're
analyzing system-wide data, and we can now begin to see that this isn't just those 98
students. Keeping students on track through this transition into high school is a
high-leverage problem to attack, but that's how the framing of, this is what we should work
on.
So that kind of leads you to what eventually become these early warning indicator systems
where educators can now actually see what's actually happening to their students, because
the structure is such that, I teach subjects, but nobody sees the students. And then you


gotta bring the faculty together. So you start to get these ninth-grade teams, where,
traditionally, faculty are organized differently. They're organized by their disciplines, rather
than organized around their students. So it starts to make clear what you need to work on,
and then you have to figure out how to get these parts to work well. But that's the
continuous improvement story and this iterative trial and error that goes on.
Jabari Mahiri 19:30
I love what you're saying and I'm thinking about the graduation rate as a problem that if
you solve that, a number of other collateral problems like discipline issues, suspension
issues, you know, marginalization of the community and relationship to their role in the
school kinds of issues also get solved as you move toward the larger central problem that
you're trying to address. And if you solve that problem in terms of increasing the
graduation rates, as you've seen your work has helped to contribute to, in Chicago from
50% to 80%, which is huge, then you really are making the transformation in the outcomes
for the students that’s sustained. It's not just like we could lower the discipline rates, for
example, and still not increase the graduation rates.
Anthony Bryk 20:21
And in fact, it works the other way. As they're trying to solve this problem of keeping
students on track, they're beginning to see, well, you know the- a key part of being on track
is getting passing grades in your core classes. Well, you know, the grading policies are kind
of working against this, that if a student misses homework and is assigned a zero, it's pretty
hard to get up, even if they do good work going forward, it's pretty hard to compensate for
that. So, should we really be doing that? And then, they begin to see the effects of
disciplinary policies. Because if we're pushing students out of class and they're therefore
not able to complete assignments on time, and they're accumulating those zeros, we've
created a system that's leading them toward failure and then dropping out. So, you're
beginning to see how these, which normally someone's doing discipline, have grading
policies, but you don't see it through the lived experiences of the students. So that's all part
of this. And the other interesting thing about Chicago, and more generally, on these reform
efforts that are attempting to improve graduation rates, is not only did the graduation rate
go up, but there's also good evidence in Chicago that the amount of student learning was
going up at the same time, that Chicago, during this period of time, required all 11th
graders to take the ACT over the same period of time when the graduation rates were
going up, and so we got more students in their 11th grade who wouldn't have been there
before, the average ACT scores were going up. And at the same time, there's also evidence
that there were many more students taking advanced placement courses, and the success


rate inside the courses was also going up, so you get all the indicators saying, we really are
transforming student experiences inside the system.
Jabari Mahiri 22:19
I just have a couple more questions for you. I want you to help us see where there are
throughlines between your earlier work on trust in schools, and I was also going to add the
work that you've done on Catholic schools. Let's separate those. Let's see if there are some
throughlines that you could help us see between this earlier work on trust in schools and
how elements of that might be playing themselves out in the larger considerations of
continuous improvement. I'll just say as a sidebar earlier today, right in the hallway out
here, I bumped into one of my colleagues, Professor Erin Murphy Graham, who teaches in
our School of Education. And I said, oh, we're going to get to interview Tony Bryk today. She
said, wow, he was so influential. His book on trust in schools really changed my whole
perspective on what we need to focus on when we're attempting to make change in school.
So help us see the continuity between that earlier work and what's going on in continuous
improvement right now.
Anthony Bryk 23:17
Well, the early work, it did actually start with the research on Catholic schools and the
common good. In directing my attention to the power of relationships, because when there
had been earlier work that said, on average, student outcomes were slightly better in
Catholic schools and comparable public schools, well, they didn't have better human
capital. They didn't have more fiscal resources, when we sat in classrooms, this wasn't
much more engaging instruction. So, what was it about these places? And it was, people
use this language of “we’re a community” and the quality of the relationships between
parents, students, teachers, educators, that was a difference. Then, early on in the Chicago
reform, where this decentralization had occurred, where resources and authority had been
devolved to local school communities and leadership teams at the school level, and we're
looking at these too, and some places are really moving forward, and others are struggling.
And we're paying a lot of attention to how people talk about their lived experiences, so, you
can start to get the user-centered perspective again. How are people making sense of their
efforts and environments they're in? These words of respect, personal regard, going the
extra mile, really listening, these are the kinds of things that people were talking about in
the places that were really moving forward and were not characteristic of other places we
were in, where either there was nothing happening or there was real conflict occurring
inside the school communities. And so with those observations, how do we make sense of


it, and that's what really led, originally thought about using Nel Noddings framework of
caring to capture this, but it didn't quite work, but this notion of relational trust...
Jabari Mahiri 25:24
‘Cause caring is more focused on the students themselves, even though it's caring in the
institution, but you have to get at what's going on with the adults in the situation.
Anthony Bryk 25:33
And school improvement, system transformation, this is an adult game. It requires
sustained, collaborative work over long periods of time. It puts a premium on the quality of
the relationships among the people that have to do that work and, that's what kind of really
directed our attention to relational trust and, in many studies since then, it almost doesn't
matter what the intervention is or what people are trying to accomplish in the schools,
relational trust tends to predict the differences in places that really move forward, versus
places that struggled.
Jabari Mahiri 26:11
How then do we encode that into leadership preparation? You know, I'm the Faculty
Director of our Leadership Programs. We have an educational doctorate called LEAD,
Leaders for Equity and Democracy. We have a principal leadership program. They're
simultaneously participating in leadership while they're also learning to become emerging
leaders that can take their leadership skills to higher levels. Are there- how do you build
trust or perspectives around trust in a leadership program that is not necessarily the same
as actually engaging in leadership practices? Do you use case studies? Are there
experiential kinds of things that we help students with? I'm going a little off-script here, I
know, but I'd love to get your perspective on this as we move to a close of our conversation
today.
Anthony Bryk 26:58
One thing when I engage with education leaders, and people preparing educational
leaders, what are these, the people you're preparing, what are these people supposed to
do? Well, they're supposed to go into an organization and help this organization get better
at what they do. And so one of the questions I tend to ask folks is, well, how does that
affect how you organize their experiences, if your challenge is to help them get better at
transforming the organization they're going to go into? And some of that's methodological,
like understanding the tools, methods, and the logics of improvement work in networks.
But these are also activities that have to play out among adults inside that environment,


and so part of your charge is to figure out how to create a supportive social learning
environment among the adults inside that institution, and one of the key in the relational
trust framework is that, well, how do you build relational trust? It's incumbent on those
who have more power to reduce the vulnerability of others, and that's how trust builds
inside an organization. You can't build it just by taking them out to a workshop and saying,
we should all trust each other, but, people listen to what you say, and they watch what you
do, and they make judgments, interpretations about that, and to the extent that they can
interpret leaders in the organization as competent in the execution of their roles, having
personal respect, they listen. I may not agree with what you're telling me, but the sense
that we came out of this conversation, and I really listened to you, this willingness to go the
extra mile for your people, personal regard, and then the last part of it is integrity. Part of
that's about the walk and talk. Do those things really align? And then, when values come
into conflict, as they regularly do in organizations, do I understand what you're doing as
being about advancing the best interests of children and advancing the opportunities of I
as an educator, to get better at what I do, or do I understand what you're doing as
following somebody else's guidance, or whatever.
Jabari Mahiri 29:22
Going to go a little off script as we close, because I agree with everything that you said. And
yet, in our contemporary moment, we see that maybe there's a way that some leaders
have leapfrogged over a lot of the considerations that you just laid out for how trust is
developed, and still, garner the trust of followers in ways that might be argued as sort of
cult-like, in relationship to how people are following people without looking at the efficacy
of what they're doing on a day to day basis. What I love about what you said is that, it's on
the leader who has the most power to set the conditions for trust to occur, and yet those
same leaders can have power and somehow circumvent it. Help us think about that, and
we'll let you go after that.
Anthony Bryk 30:15
It's interesting because we did look at this dynamic in Chicago in how principals related to
teachers. And so, we had the principal teacher's trust. We had teachers' trust in their
colleagues, in a context where teachers reported about their trust in their principal was
weak, they also tended to report their trust in their teacher colleagues was weak, because
on the ground, what you tend to see is that principals were essentially pitting people
against one another, and people saw their incentives as, I got to curry favor with the
leadership. But what that meant was, the organizations weren't necessarily characterized
internally as having conflict, but they had no collective capacity to improve, because people


couldn't work with each other, because that leadership to teacher dynamic had not created
the possibilities of trust emerging in the social dynamic among the teachers themselves.
But that was created by leadership, these tended to be very stable organizations, but they
were not improving organizations.
Jabari Mahiri 31:33
So as the director of the Carnegie Foundation for so many years, more than a decade. In
closing, have there been things that you have understood from that work on educational
transformation that you can share with us as we close our conversation today?
Anthony Bryk 31:55
These are two huge developments, the recognition of social learning, the company, with
that, the role of leadership in advancing that kind of social learning, how we look at
evidence to inform and in the processes of getting better, these are really important
developments that have occurred in our field, and now, as we've begun to embrace this
idea of doing this work in improvement networks, well, education is the quintessential large
network. We have millions of people doing highly related work every day so that for any
problem or challenge I might be thinking about, there's somebody out there who's been
working on this, who's figured this out. It's how we got vaccines in response to COVID in
one year, rather than when the process used to exist. Because when that problem arose
across the globe, people were working 24 hours a day, seven days a week, in this incredible
problem-solving network. So we know we can accelerate progress, and we are the
quintessential large network in education.
Jabari Mahiri 33:05
Professor Anthony Bryk, author of the recent book in 2023, "How a City Learned to Improve
Its Schools,” with the extensive work in this mega school system, mega in the sense of large
school system, Chicago Public Schools, many books, of them, "Trust in Schools" having a
phenomenal impact on so many leaders and educators across the country, your work with
Catholic schools. We will post all of this on the website in terms of the books that you
publish. We just want to say thank you so much for sharing your ideas and insights with us
today at Equity Leadership Now.
Anthony Bryk 33:41
Thank you for inviting me, and I've really enjoyed the conversation, and I hope some of this
is of value to others going forward.


Brianna Luna 33:56
Thank you for listening to Equity Leadership Now!.
If you enjoyed this episode, please consider subscribing on your preferred podcast
platform. Subscribing helps you stay updated with our latest episodes featuring leaders
who are redefining education.
We also invite you to share the episode with colleagues, friends, or anyone passionate
about equity and justice in education.
Our podcast team includes Jabari Mahiri, Brianna Luna, Mayra Reyes, Becca Minkoff, Diana
Garcia, Audra Puchalski, Jennifer Elemen, Jen Burke, Robyn Ilten-Gee, and Rian Whittle.