What The Academy Taught Us: Improving schools from the bottom-up in a top-down transformation era

by Eric Kalenze

Early in the 2000s, a high-school principal in Minnesota, Dr. Bob Perdaems, faced a complex challenge. The demographics of his school were shifting, political tensions in the surrounding communities were rising, and, thanks to the No Child Left Behind Act's new testing and accountability requirements, his school's performance was soon to be scrutinized more intensely and more publicly than ever before. While he had several visions of how his school could continuously improve through these realities, however, he had no additional budget to bring his ideas to life.Undaunted, Dr. Bob set to creating school improvements the best way he knew how--and that, of course, he could he prioritized his school's areas for growth, found teachers who would lend minds and hands, and gathered them to look at the blueprints. What the Academy Taught Us is a book about the collaborative school-improvement culture Dr. Bob created in his Minnesota high the principles that initiated it, the collective effort that kept it running, and the lasting effects it had on its teachers and students. The book also brilliantly explores how bottom-up approaches like Dr. Bob's fare in the current era, which seeks to transform schools through more top-down and 'disruptive' means. Ultimately, What the Academy Taught Us offers today's educators a way forward. While largely viewing the difficult work of school improvement through the prism of a single school, it presents abundant recommendations about how schools everywhere can build effective and continuous improvement from the bottom up.

Genres: Education

409 pages, Paperback

Published August 9, 2019

Reviews

[Ken · Rating 5 out of 5]

In "What The Academy Taught Us," Eric Kalenze somehow manages to write a book about education that reads like:

- An inspiring novella about what it would look like to teach in a 21st Century school lead by an enlightened administrator

- A Greek tragedy, where that same heroic administrator is undermined by well-meaning but ultimately malevolent forces beyond his control

- An eminently readable manual for how to improve academic outcomes in any school

And it all hangs together beautifully.

If you're a teacher who has ever worked in a school where building-level and/or district-level initiatives seemed to be making it harder, or even impossible, to deliver effective instruction, I think you will find this book validating, cathartic, and enlightening. I did.

Kalenze's story of the "Sophomore Academy," started in the high school he taught in, had me saying to myself, over and over, "Yes! This is how it should be!" Kalenze's principal at the time, Dr. Robert Perdaems, recruited a small team of teachers to address the dropout rate at the high school he lead. Pardaems used graduation and credits-earned data to identify a likely fruitful time for intervention, and then tasked this hand-picked team of teachers with designing an effective solution. Kalenze doesn't shy away from describing both the successes and early stumbles of this team. For me, the most validating aspects of this part of the book are how decidedly unglamorous and low-tech the solutions that actually make a difference turn out to be.

I really want to stress that this part of the book reads like a well-told, inspiring story, and NOT at all like a dry tome on education policy and practices. Kalenze's description of "The Fight" actually had me tearing up a bit, as I recognized some of the marginalized students I'd taught in the way he paints this scene.

As should be in Greek drama, I found the parts of the book that recount the imposition of district-wide initiatives to be cathartic. Like Kalenze, and pretty much every teacher in the U.S., I taught in schools that suffered through what seemed to me to be ineffective or even damaging district policies. Just like Osseo Senior High School, two of the most damaging initiatives dealt with technology and student behavior. Once again, I found myself saying to myself "Yes!" as Kalenze points out how poorly researched these "solutions" are and how easy it is to have them poorly implemented. In this, as in all education matters, Kalenze's take is well-researched and highly practical.

Kalenze doesn't leave his readers feeling discouraged, however. His proposals for implementing true continuous school improvement are concisely, precisely, and concretely conveyed. There's no vague, feel-good-yet-useless jargon here. This is the no-B.S. prescription for making schools better.

If you're a teacher, buy two copies -one for yourself, and one for your building administrator.

[Kevin Fulton · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book. It tells the story of school improvement from the teacher's perspective, a perspective all to often overlooked. While there are numerous valuable takeaways, here are mine: framing is very important and the system always matters.
Framing is important if you want to improve your school because, improving means doing something different. So, you first need teachers to buy in, then, obviously, you need student buy in as well. Framing helps with this because, framing, done well, is an attempt to be persuasive while being honest. You highlight the pros, the benefits, while acknowledging the challenges.
The system matters because its framework can either support or limit improvement. Ideally you will have leadership who are willing to adjust the system in order to support good teaching and learning. This can make a world of difference.
I also greatly appreciated the revulsion towards sexy innovations (you know what that is). In education we need to focus on what works, what works may not be sexy, but it will help students learn. Make learning sexy again.
Now, there is more to the book than just this, but that's what stuck out to me. If you are in a different place professionally, your key takeaways will be different. And that is the strength of this book, its helpfulness to all those involved in education, not just teachers, not just admin, but everyone involved in education.

[J. Boo]

Review from Robert Pondiscio at the Fordham Institute here: https://fordhaminstitute.org/national...

[North Landesman · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderful cross between "teacher-memoir" and "helpful research based suggestions for school improvement book." Both the story of the rise and the fall of the Academy were engaging and helpful for any teacher to read. Especially Chapter 13 "The District Knew Best." Kalzene's story on how the district pushed AP initiatives, racial justice initiatives, grading initiatives, and tech initiatives while ignoring basic fundamentals was riveting. I have never read a book like this, a educational reform book with a sad ending. I wonder if the education profession would be in a better places if there were more books that actually admitted fault and took honest looks at what happened and what went wrong. I can't wait to read Kalzene's next book.