Chapter 11: Lead, Follow, or Get Out of the Way: When Getting Out of the Way Is the Direct Route to Success

This chapter describes a culture of labor‑management relations, which typified opposition and acrimony between district leadership and instructional staff. The challenges presented in this chapter are complaints from faculty against central office administration centered on “us‑them” conflicts, derision toward curriculum selection, and “intrusion” by school administration into closely held beliefs about classroom autonomy. This acrimonious culture dominated the district for years and thwarted meaningful educational change, while graduation rates lagged alongside precipitously declining reading and mathematics scores.

Essential to solving these challenges were oppositional tactics and an enhancement of positive culture, which called for district stakeholders and subcommunities to co‑construct, collaborate and enhance teacher efficacy to break through social and political roadblocks. This chapter answered the following question: how could a district mired in conflict between management and labor retool its curriculum and instructional practices? The remedy called for a decentralized central office supervisory model that transferred decision‑making to teachers. A small cohort of four teachers instituted changes to instructional practice, and this instructional cohort eventually recruited 200 additional teachers the following year to institute expansive curricular innovations. These efforts have decisively enhanced local school capacity, improved reading and mathematics performance, and instituted harmonious inter‑staff collegiality.