At the Heart of the Heart of the Matter: Interview with Roland S. Barth

Roland S. Barth, author of Improving Schools from Within (Jossey-Bass, 1990) and the recent Learning By Heart (Jossey-Bass, 2001), knows his way around schools. He has served as a public-school teacher and principal for 15 years and as a Senior Lecturer on Education at Harvard University for 10 years. He is also the founding director of the Principals' Center at Harvard and was a member of the National Commission on Excellence in Educational Administration. These days, he spends much of his time as a consultant to schools, state departments of education, universities, foundations, and businesses in the United States and abroad.

In an era when many national voices on educational reform argue for sweeping, top-down, systemic solutions, Barth argues with singular directness and clarity for more emphasis on local solutions -- reforming schools from within, through authentic dialogue among all those in the schoolhouse. As Deborah Meier, school principal and author of In Schools We Trust, says, "I'm one of those many people whose work has depended on Barth's capacity to clear the underbrush and let us see where next to set our feet." About Barth's writing, author Terrence Deal says, "In a very large chorus of proponents of school reform, Roland Barth's voice stands out." Ted Sizer, author and founder of the Coalition of Essential Schools, describes Learning By Heart as "plain spoken and persuasive convictions about schoolkeeping by a wise and humane educator."

We caught up with this wise and humane educator at his farm in Maine where he spends half the year (the other half in the Florida Keys). Alongside his expansive garden -- tended with the meticulous care of a lifelong educator -- we talked about some of the ideas put forth in his latest book, as well as the state of education today and his views on the increasingly complex teaching life.

Independent School: There's a great deal of talk about school reform today. Is there something in particular that's driving this discussion -- some sense of urgency that is different from, say, 20 years ago?

Barth: It's been just about 20 years since A Nation at Risk was published, and that report helped launch what has clearly been an unprecedented focus on improving schools, particularly public schools. In the history of American education, there has never been a period of such sustained concern with, and interest in, education. And it has taken on immense political importance, too. If you look at what the voting public cares about, education has been near the top of the list, if not at the top, for many years. Why now? There are lots of reasons. Part of the justification has been the link with the economy -- our need to compete in a global society and the desire to make sure our schools have world-class standards. At the time of A Nation at Risk, the Japanese were threatening to overtake the United States as an economic power, and the argument was that Japanese success was directly related to the quality of its schools. Now that the Japanese economy has declined, no one is saying this anymore, but we have kept schools in the spotlight, saying our schools ought to be more rigorous, but, above all, more accountable. And that's the phrase that's hammering away at the schoolhouse door.

Independent School: As a parent, the words "rigor" and "accountability" are words that make me anxious about schools. In Learning By Heart, you write about the importance of caring, nurturing, learning communities. This seems to be in opposition to the prevalent thinking about schools as rigorous places that must be held accountable to larger public standards. How do we balance these things out?

Barth: Most of the heat around accountability comes from without, from federal and state legislatures, departments of education, and superintendents. Most of the emphasis on the heart -- on caring, on a relevant curriculum for kids and individualized instruction and appropriate placement of students in classrooms -- comes from within schools. So there are two sets of values in operation. And, I think, more and more schoolteachers and school heads are finding that they must keep two sets of books. One set is for compliance with the demands of those outside the school. This set provides evidence that school people are doing what they will be held publicly accountable for -- standards, test results, and so on. By maintaining this set of books, they earn the right to keep a second set of books. This set contains what they hope to do when they signed up for our profession: inventively promote profound learning in youngsters.

Teachers and school heads who keep just one set of books -- who either just comply (and there are an awful lot who are doing that -- those who have lost heart) or who are saying "to hell with standardized tests" -- are not going to get far. Tests and measures and different forms of accountability are here to stay. So two sets of books is the current paradigm.

Independent School: So it's pragmatic to have two sets of books, but is it a good thing for education?

Barth: The sets should and do overlap, of course, but it feels like less and less these days. I wish committed educators could initiate more and comply less, but I think that the realities are that the best deal that can be struck right now is some kind of a balance. But it's a precarious and often demoralizing one.

Independent School: We often read about the imperatives for teachers today -- what teachers ought to be doing in the classroom. But we don't hear a whole lot from teachers themselves. The voices of change are more the voices, as you say, of politicians and government officials and perhaps even university researchers. What's a teacher teaching, say, middle-school English supposed to do in this new world of education?

Barth: Most policy makers believe that the knowledge base for improving the school resides in large-scale social science research literature. And, indeed, there is a lot of helpful information in this knowledge base. But there's another knowledge base that is at least as important to schools. I call this the "craft knowledge of the practitioners." Any teacher who labors for 186 days a year for six to 10 hours a day inevitably comes to know a great deal about curriculum development, parent involvement, discipline, standardized tests, ability grouping, and a host of other matters. This knowledge base is vast and, yet, for a number of reasons, not valued. It's not taken seriously by those outside the school, and, even more tragic, it's not often taken seriously by those within the school.

I've been in faculty meetings in schools where a teacher would stand up and say, "I've got this great idea I want to share about grouping kids in math," and the response of the other teachers is to gun him or her down, to start to yawn and get ready to leave. What they are saying to this teacher who dares to disclose an idea for improving education is, "There is nothing that you have to offer me, and we resent your trying to elevate yourself above the rest of us." It's a taboo. You violate that taboo by suggesting you know something that others don't, even if you're sharing it with the best intentions. So craft knowledge gets corked up.

Next June, like every June, teachers will retire from schools all over the country. And, on that last day, they will take with them all they have learned over five, ten, 50 years of engaged work with youngsters. And it will be forever lost to the school, to the profession. It's a tragic loss for two reasons. One, the new people arriving in September will be reinventing wheels and recommitting a whole lot of mistakes that the veteran teachers know better than to commit. And youngsters will suffer. It's also a loss because a lot of evidence in the adult-development literature suggests that when a person gets to be about my age, 65, he or she almost inevitably has a wish to give back, to share everything he or she knows with those who are coming up behind. And this kind of mentoring, this kind of downloading, this kind of legacy is terribly important to the human species. Yet in most schools there is no format that enables, let alone encourages, the exchange of craft knowledge.

Independent School: If you're a principal or the head of a school and you have a young, enthusiastic faculty member who has just returned from a wonderful summer workshop with all sorts of new ideas, how do you protect those ideas from a faculty body ready to shoot the teacher down? How do you harness that sort of energy and help transform it into programmatic change?

Barth: Part of the remedy is not going it alone. If one teacher from one school goes to, say, the Westtown Teacher Seminar, the burden is on that teacher alone to somehow replicate the energy, magic, learning, and disseminate it to others. That's almost impossible to do. But, let's say two or three people from a school go to a summer workshop together and together return home and think about what they could do, the likelihood of making some connections with the rest of the faculty is much higher -- and the likelihood of their becoming discouraged is much lower.

Another condition that would enable more teachers to bring more school-based reform to their workplace would be a close alliance with the head or other administrators. The school head, first of all, must be committed to that teacher going to the workshop. It would be best if the head went with the teacher. But that's not common. At the very least, when the teacher comes back, the school head should show interest in the experience and talk with the teacher, and ask the question, "So what did you learn that might be helpful to our school?" And, "How can we work together to make use of this knowledge here?" Such a response would be very important to the teacher's continuing commitment and to school improvement.

That said, I think most important to the success of educators implementing their newly acquired ideas is the existence, in the first place, of a school culture of continuous experimentation and adventure. If "the way we do things here" is to always be out looking, asking, reading, talking to people, having visitors come in, then everyone is always interested in a better way. You don't have to chip away at the prevailing armor of inertia and indifference.

Independent School: There does seem to be excitement in the air about the possibilities of schools doing just this -- evolving into school cultures, as you say, of continuous inquiry and experimentation. On the other hand, many educators feel so overwhelmed and over-programmed today that the barrage of ideas is just too much to handle. You talk about this in Learning By Heart, that the sheer volume of things to think about can discourage educators. So what is the trick to staying open to ideas -- to not getting overwhelmed with information? Or perhaps I'm asking: With so much information, what new developments and ideas should schools focus on?

Barth: The concept of collegiality is one. It's so important to the health of the school and the health of its educators. That is to say, I believe the nature of the relationships among the adults in the schoolhouse -- teacher to teacher, teacher to administrator, teacher to parent, administrator to parent -- has more to do with the quality and character of the school and with the accomplishments of the youngsters than anything else.

All too often, the adult relationships are (in that wonderful phrase from preschool education) parallel play. For hours at a time, two- and three-year-olds in a sandbox can be so engrossed in themselves, in their own work and project and tools, that they are oblivious to anybody else in the sandbox. This is thought to be a stage of development through which two- and three-year-olds soon pass on their way to far more sophisticated forms of human interaction. But I'd say that parallel play characterizes most of what I see going on in schools. The self-contained classroom is parallel play. The English department that doesn't interact with the math department is parallel play. One school doing one thing, the school a mile down the road doing something different, oblivious to each other, is parallel play. Parallel play is endemic. It's as if we have a case of professional arrested development.

When adult relationships in schools are interactive, too often they are adversarial. As one teacher said, "You know we educators have drawn our wagons into a circle and trained our guns...on each other." As if there aren't enough people outside shooting at schools.

It is in collegiality that school improvement resides. It's in collegiality that teacher professional development resides. And it's in collegiality that real energy resides.

Independent School: What does collegiality look like in a school?

Barth: By collegiality I mean four things. One, teachers talking with one another about the work they do -- talking in faculty meetings, in hallways, in classrooms, at the dinner table about practice. Second, sharing that craft knowledge, shouting it from the mountaintop, and honoring it when someone else is sharing it. Third, making our practice mutually visible. That is, you come into my classroom and watch me teach seventh-grade biology and I come into your classroom and watch you teach ninth-grade geometry, and, afterward, we talk about what we are doing and why, and what we can learn from each other. Above all, collegiality means rooting for the success of one another. If every adult in the school is rooting for you, when the alarm clock rings at six a.m., you jump out of bed to go to that school.

When these qualities of collegiality are in place, a lot of good things happen to schools, to kids, to teachers.

Independent School: What else should schools focus on?

Barth: Another big one for me is teacher leadership. I've visited schools to talk with teachers about teacher leadership, and hear, "Hey, you want to see the leader, go down to the head's office. I'm just a teacher." That's a dagger to my heart. First of all, being "just a teacher" is, in and of itself, quite sufficient to command my respect. Some pretty reputable people have been teachers: Moses, Gandhi, Jesus, Martin Luther King. Teaching is a noble profession. So don't demean it by saying, "I'm just a teacher." Secondly, no school can be run well by one or two people called heads or assistant heads or department chairs. A school is far too complex, far too overwhelming for any small number of people to adequately lead. Schools that really fulfill their potentials are communities of leaders, where not just the anointed ones -- the department chairs, the heads, the assistant heads -- lead, but where everyone is invited to become, and is expected to become, a leader. And this includes youngsters.

Independent School: At the college level, professors usually do take an active role in leadership -- with, for example, some departments having rotating department chairs so everyone gets a crack at it. Should schools be doing more of this?

Barth: Despite the prevailing view that the best education in our country occurs in colleges and universities, I believe that the higher education model is a lousy model of good instruction. It's 90 percent large-group didactic instruction, which is a notoriously weak approach. Research suggests that, in six weeks, you and I will remember perhaps 5 percent of a lecture. Researchers who have tapped into students sitting in lectures and ask, "What are you thinking just now?" find out that much of the time students are not even focused on the lecture. But one piece of the university model that I do believe schools should emulate is their empowering of teachers as leaders. For example, at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, faculty members are involved in selecting a new dean, and in all matters of budget, curriculum, selection of faculty, and admission of students. So there is thorough faculty leadership. The expectation is that everyone pulls an oar for the school as well as within one's own classroom. I'd say that's a great model for KÐ12 schools.

Independent School: In Learning By Heart, you note a great anecdote about students being involved in leadership. It's what you call the "snowball rule" in which students were asked to come up with an effective policy regarding the throwing of snowballs. And, not surprisingly, they did. But, generally speaking, schools don't take student ideas, or even teacher ideas, very seriously. How do we address that? What does a school need to do to open itself up to the ideas of teachers and students?

Barth: To me the question you're asking really is, "How might a school come to resemble more a community, rather than an organization or bureaucracy or institution?" A community -- like the little villages in Maine -- is a place where everyone's participation in valued. It's a place where people can ask for help without fear. It's a place where people can offer and receive help without fear. And it's a place where everyone from time to time takes leadership. The word "community" gets used a lot, especially in independent schools, but I don't think most schools are communities of learners or communities of leaders by this definition.

Independent School: Who are the contemporary educational thinkers we should be paying close attention to?

Barth: In terms of contemporary writers, I think the work of Deborah Meier -- who is a MacArthur award winner and now principal of the Mission Hill School in Boston, a small elementary school, and a former kindergarten teacher -- is very provocative. In her books, The Power of Their Ideas and the more recent In Schools We Trust, she asks a lot of very good questions that bear on respect for youngsters as learners, as human beings, and that bear on the obligation of the adults to honor not only their own work as teachers, but to honor their clients. She has also shown how you can do more with less, by breaking units up into smaller segments, by involving parents more, and by creating more leaders in the school. At her school, there is a strong community of learners and leaders. Unlike a lot of education reformers, she not only writes it and thinks it and says it, but she does it. And that's unusual. It gives her great credibility.

One of the most revolutionary figures I know in this profession, Dennis Littky, is another person who both thinks it and does it. He's a real dreamer. I've been involved with him for three or four years in a revolutionary program to prepare school principals differently. Most administrative programs are about 90 percent formal course work and 10 percent internship in a school. Littky's program is about 98 percent internship and about 2 percent coursework. His idea is to help the aspiring principal squeeze the juice out of a learning experience by aligning that person with a distinguished mentor principal. He has set up different centers in Providence and Boston and other places. During their two-year internship, they do not take courses on budgets, dealing with the school board, parent relations, or curriculum. Rather, they create budgets, run committees involving parents, serve as the liaison with the school board or with a curriculum committee. And they reflect on it and learned from the experience. We've all heard it said, "We learn from experience." Well, that's part of the equation. John Dewey once said, "We learn from experience, if we reflect upon our experience." In other words, learning from experience is not inevitable. You learn from it if you reflect on it. So far, a modest number have graduated from this program. But these educators are among the most outstanding and promising school leaders I have ever seen.

I think the work of Alfie Kohn -- the questions he raises, the points he makes about the limits of standardized tests and the costs of standardized tests -- are having a big impact and will have a long shelf life. Standardized tests are going to be ratcheted up even tighter in coming years, and it's going to be very important to be mindful of the limits and costs of such testing. I also suspect that Ted Sizer's work will continue to have an impact. Sizer, through the Coalition of Essential Schools, for a number of years was without question the leading school reformer in this country. The nine coalition principles are, dare I say, timeless.

Independent School: Let's look at the flip side of that question. What ideas in education should be dropped in the coming decades?

Barth: One of the problems with our profession is that it's cumulative. Just as schools each June throw out used-up books and equipment, so it is a good idea for our profession to divest itself of ideas that no longer have merit or no longer have utility in this current age. It's a great question to ask: Who and what should be jettisoned? I would jettison our heavy reliance upon large-group, didactic instruction. In most schools, this is the predominant pedagogy about 85 percent of the time, while 15 percent of the time we do "something else."

If I could wave a magic wand and have only one wish for our profession, I would reverse this ratio. I would employ large-group instruction by the teacher 15 percent of the time and "something else" the other 85 percent. "So," you say, "what else is there to do for 85 percent of the time?" Now, we have become educators, devising a repertoire of experiential learning, role-play, dramatic play, field trips, community service, cooperative learning, and more. I would like to see dropped from our profession the persistent belief that, in schools, there are two classes of citizens, the learners (i.e., youngsters) and the learned (we adults, the priesthood). I would replace this unfortunate, antiquated hierarchy with a commitment to the schoolhouse as a community of learners, where all of us engage in, model, and support in others the most important business of the schoolhouse -- learning.

Yes, educators ought to jettison some people and some ideas and clear the plate for more promising new people and ideas.

Independent School: The cumulative effect of doing too much is that we end up only being able to deal with what's right in front of us. We don't end up having time for the sort of reflection you're talking about. What's the answer to the pressure of time?

Barth: Without question, more is being expected of teachers and administrators, but with less resources, time, and support. That's a prescription for disaster. A great metaphor comes from the biology lab: You can put a frog in boiling water and the frog will immediately hop out. But put a frog in cold water and heat it slowly and the frog will sit there until it dies. I'd say, educators have become like the second frog. If we understood that the water would soon start boiling and threaten our life, we'd hop out quickly. But because the heating-up process has been slow, incremental, we don't realize just how untenable the environment has become. What's the answer? First, get more people involved in sharing responsibility for educating kids. In particular, I would say that the underutilized are parents and the students themselves. There are 15 times as many students in a school as there are adults. They have ten times as much energy as adults. At the end of the day when the schoolhouse door opens, the teachers come dragging out and fall into their cars; kids, on the other hand, explode out the door with seeming boundless energy. Something is wrong with this picture. Kids have the energy, but, more importantly, they want to help; kids want to be treated like first-class citizens of the school, with a hand in making it a more hospitable learning environment.

Another part of it is setting priorities. You have six to eight hours. What is important and what isn't? I think quality time with small groups of individual youngsters is what is most important. There's a wonderful phrase from Goethe, "Things which matter most should never be left at the mercy of things which matter least." In schools, a lot of things which matter least -- much testing, paperwork, lunch money, bus schedules -- are getting in the way of things that matter most -- learning. Somehow, we must find a way to rein this stuff in.

I also think teachers who work together can save time. We can free up our colleagues and ourselves once we get out from under the notion that each teacher has his or her class, and that's the only sacrosanct unit.

Independent School: You've spent many years working to help schools improve the quality of education. You've seen numerous movements in education come and go. But do you feel as if we're making real progress in education?

Barth: Like everyone in this field, I get discouraged from time to time. And, like everyone in this field, I have experienced extraordinary moments of breakthrough, of insight, of success. I try to put these brighter moments in a spray can and, when things get bleak, I take them out and spray them around. Otherwise you can't continue to get up in the morning. Certainly on my watch, which has been just 40 years, I would say that lots of things have changed and improved. You can point to a lot of pieces of federal legislation like Title IX. Girls are getting resources now for sports and other activities. That's an improvement. This was a male-dominated society, even among students. And schools have become far more heterogeneous -- public and independent schools alike. There is a lot of evidence that suggests that people learn most when differences in a group are maximized, not minimized. So when you have girls, boys, Black kids, White kids, Hispanic kids, rich kids, poor kids sitting around the same table talking about, say, the events of September 11, 2001, that conversation is more laden with learning than if you have any monochromatic group having the same conversation. Class sizes have come down over the years. California recently cut its class sizes in half from about 30 to 15 for primary school kids. In public schools, there is a far better ratio between teacher and students than there used to be. Pedagogy has improved, though not as much as I'd like. What goes on in classrooms is certainly more varied. And often more appropriate for most kids. I think the resources available to schools, public or private or independent, while never enough, are better than they were 40 years ago -- and they'd better be because the issues and the problems of today's kids are far more pronounced than they were 40 years ago.

On the other hand, I'd say the quality of teachers and school leaders entering the profession is still woefully lacking.

Independent School: Why is that?

Barth: Our society does not accord to the teaching profession a high level of import. In Japan, where teachers are revered, teachers come from the top quarter of their college classes, because the society conveys that you are somebody if you're a teacher. When I was teaching fourth grade, I used to go to cocktail parties and everybody said, "Well, what are you going to do next?" As if no self-respecting person should stay in this profession for long. These days, the job description is so heavily linked with test scores and accountability that few able people want to take it on. In independent schools, things are a little more sane, but only a little. To be sure, independent schools are independent of local school boards and state departments of education, but they are hardly independent of pressure from parents, colleges, and universities. And that nut is getting tightened.

Independent School: What would you say to someone interested in entering the teaching profession? Why should they do it?

Barth: I would say there is no more honorable, noble profession. It's a dedicated profession. It's going to take a lot of courage and a lot of stamina to sustain, but I believe it's worth it -- not only for yourself, but also for those kids who deserve the best you've got. But I'd also say there are teaching jobs and there are teaching jobs. You don't want a teaching job in a school that has a toxic culture, where people are constantly complaining about undermining one another or the head of school. You don't want a teaching job in school where everyone is hiding fearfully behind their classroom door. You don't want a teaching job where you are seen as the subordinate in a sea of superordinates.

On the other hand, you do want a teaching job in a school that has a culture hospitable to human learning -- yours and the kids. You want one where there's going to be support from the head of the school. You want one where you're invited to sit at the table with the other adults and be a leader. You do want one where there's a culture of collegiality, where adults work together for their own best interest and the interest of the kids. You want one where, at the end of the day, you can feel that you're not only getting recognition from the kids and their parents and other educators in the building for your effort, but where you find evidence that you've done a good job. You are making a difference.

Independent School: When you look back on your career to date, do you think it has been worth all the hard work and effort?

Barth: Oh, yes. It's still in the present tense. But I have just turned 65 and I'm starting to think I should be retired at least some of the time. In a way, my book, Learning By Heart, was my attempt to convey and pass on whatever craft knowledge I may have acquired during those 40 years. It was my attempt to say what I want to say to others in this important work. I was pleasantly surprised to find that I had a lot to say -- and most of it was very positive. Even the points of criticism, for me, came out of real affection for this work. So I find myself gradually leaving, but I think the years I've spent in schools teaching and as principal are indelibly etched in my soul. And I'm not about to, able to, nor do I want to, forget them.