Dr. Lytle describes a three-year effort to lead a group of urban principles and a group of middle management support staff toward the design of demonstrably effective educational organizations. The problem investigated in collaboration with teachers and staff was to assess the effectiveness of teaching throughout the district, with special emphasis on promotion policy, grading guidelines, and assignment of students to special education programs. The outcomes were to demonstrate that the superintendent's job could be done in less conventional and more effective ways and to cause principals and teachers to question their own practices. Mixed methods were used: observations, artifacts, focus groups, interviews, and ethnographic studies. By the end of this study, a volunteer planning committee from the regional office staff had redesigned both the organization of the office and the individual roles and responsibilities of staff members. Though no causal relationship was claimed, the author reported that fewer students were retained, suspensions and requests for disciplinary transfers dropped markedly, the number of students referred to and placed in special education classrooms dropped substantially, the proportion of special needs students included in regular classrooms increased significantly, and all Chapter I schools met their three-year school improvement goals.

The specific problems studied were threefold:

• failure and retention rates were not only inordinately high but also varied widely among different schools with similar demographics;
• teachers were not reflecting on the teaching and learning process nor its outcomes; and
• the special education programs throughout the district needed to be re-evaluated.

These problems are indeed significant, since leadership, restructuring and organizational change have received much attention in recent literature, but the author states that few if any real world examples have been provided as evidence of successful district-wide restructuring programs. They were also extremely important in the context of the author's district--a diverse sub-district of Philadelphia comprising 36 schools in which 75% or more of the students came from low-income families, almost all of whom were African-American; only a quarter of the schools were desegregated; and over 10 percent of the students throughout the district were enrolled in special needs programs.

Lytle's language is clear and jargon-free. His theoretical framework is based on Donald Schon's work on practitioner research and inquiry as well as Peter Senge's views on school leadership as designing, teaching, and stewardship. He states his orientation clearly:

As the new regional superintendent I was charged by the general superintendent to "break the mold"--to demonstrate that the job could be done in less conventional and more effective ways.
(p. 666).

the traditional roles of superintendent and principal must be eliminated and new leadership structures invented and implemented at each school site.
(p. 664).

For completeness, I would have liked to see Lytle at least give lip service to the various Sage publications on qualitative methods, since it is apparent from the excellent design of his data collection activities that he is well-versed in research methodology, and since these are the books that are generally used by practitioners in the field. I would also like to have seen him refer Yin's (1994) classic book on case studies, because he was using converging lines of inquiry to deal with a single set of related questions within a single large case (his district). Lytle had a good prior theory base and triangulated data sources. Moreover, case study results are generalizable to theoretical propositions, not to populations or universes. It is clear that Lytle was, in fact, attempting to expand and generalize his findings to the theory base of school restructuring, not trying to replicate his findings in any other similar school district. Whereas case studies usually attempt to explain causal links in complex, real-life interventions, Lytle was quite careful to state that he drew no causal explanations from his study, though there was good evidence of some strong correlations which will be discussed later under findings.

In each phase, Lytle provides the reader with sufficient information to judge the care and fidelity with which he conducted his research, and to replicate the research process in his or her own context. Regarding alternate explanations, I feel that the entire study was conducted to elicit them. Judging from the recurrent themes in the discussions, it is evident that the study groups uncovered issues that they did not expect to find, and that were not always easy to confront. Here is a detailed description of the sampling and data collection process for each phase of the study.

Phase I. Classroom Observations

For the second round, he followed one class from each grade in which failure rates were inordinately high, and observed all basic subject classes and perhaps one art or music class, until lunch time--a total of 30 "shadow" visits. For the lower grades, he generally observed the same teacher for 2 to 3 hours, whereas for the upper grades, he generally observed 4 to 6 teachers in succession. He took extensive field notes throughout all of his observations, recording everything from classroom furniture arrangements, to student responses to instruction, to recess activities. Later, he organized these into categories and topics, and shared his results with the principals and administrators, but not with the teachers.

Lytle was acutely aware of the asymmetry of this process--as a superintendent he could enter any classroom at will, for any purpose of his choosing. To reduce this asymmetry, he invited all 90 teachers, in grade-level groups of 16 to 18 teachers, to his office to discuss the purpose of his study and the general issues that concerned him, but at no time did he discuss the events that took place in any particular classroom.

Phase II. Intensive Studies of Individual Students

• Shadow the student for a whole day or two half-days and keep detailed notes about all student activities.
• Interview the student, then transcribe the interview tape.
• Interview the student's parent or guardian and transcribe key responses.
• Review all of the student's official records and samples of work.
• Interview the student's teachers.
• Keep a journal of reactions to the observation process, including any incidental information about the student.
• Write a study team report with the other four members of the team.

At the end of Phase II, a research conference was convened in which the nine groups presented their findings on the 45 students they observed.

Phase III. Focus Group Studies of Report Card Grades

Lytle was careful to use a separate recorder, so that he could be free to moderate the discussion without biasing the observations of the group itself. Moreover, he modeled the process of conducting a focus group by alternating the roles of facilitator and recorder for each session between a regional office administrator and himself. Discussions were intended to be nonevaluative, and at the end of each focus group, the recorded observations from the focus group session were shared with the participants. We can infer that these group discussions were taped and transcribed, because he refers to transcripts later on and also states that written summaries of the sessions were shared with all participants.

All participating principals were provided an important artifact--summary sheets of report card data which included information about their own schools, the other schools in the group, and citywide averages. It was the group's task to interpret the data and to share their perceptions with other members of the group.

Phase IV. Ethnographic Studies of Principals

This is an interesting new twist on the type of staff development activities that are used effectively by RMC Research Corporation (Foxworth, O'Donoghue, & Rutherford, 1996), in which administrators are guided through relevant literature and then carry out self-reflective studies and discuss their observations with the group, rather than carry out ethnographic studies of one another. I have not seen Lytle's process used before, so I have no basis on which I can judge its effectiveness.

The conclusions from phase I were similar to those of John Goodlad's classic (1984) study, which Lytle cites in his list of references--

A great deal of classroom activity was boring, repetitive, unengaging, and vapid. It seemed intended primarily to kill time.
(p. 666).

• official records were very poor representations of these students
• there was no evidence to support their grade level retention
• an unnoticed child was both complex and an astute critic of his school experiences, and
• a middle school principal could not understand why students in her school were so well-behaved considering how boring their classes were.

The phase III conclusions derived from recurrent themes in the focus group discussions appear to be commonsensical:

• teachers often use grades as control mechanisms
• teachers consider grades to be their private property and resent intrusions into their student evaluations
• in schools with a pattern of high grades, there appears to be a stronger sense of communal responsibility for student performance.

The phase IV conclusions from the ethnographic studies of the principals revealed just how isolated these urban principals were from one another. Lytle remarks that

the group's willingness to undertake a research project that violated the norms of the urban principalship suggests that they were beginning to accept and internalize the notion of practitioner inquiry.
(p. 668).

A very strong point of the study, though it is no longer part of the qualitative research process, is the follow-up set of actions that Lytle took, based on his findings:

• in the winter of 1993 there were five regional staff meetings in which the sessions were conducted by teacher experts from local schools, and in which they modeled their new developments and assessment methods for teaching mathematics, whole language, instructional technologies, social studies, and hands-on science;
• in the summer of 1992, 25 teachers, principals, and parents from Lytle's district met for an eight day seminar, six hours per day, over a two week period, to discuss the ways in which race affects the work of the school district and the life experience of the students;
• during the 1990-91 school year there was a series of meetings with special education staff members to explore differing perceptions on how students with special needs were being served (or not served!) by the programs in which they had been placed;
• early in the 1992-93 school year the entire regional office staff met to consider how members might begin to rethink the ways they worked with schools, and to reorganize the staff into service teams, each responsible for working with clusters of schools.

This is action research at its best, in which:

the social scientist is seen, not as objective, but as learning from the people in the situation, making them part of it by helping them learn at the same time.
(Krathwohl, 1993, p 640).

Lytle concludes with this succinct statement referring to the generalizablity of not only his findings, but his methods as well:

By deciding to demonstrate that the job of regional superintendent could be carried out in less conventional and potentially more effective ways, I was intentionally modeling an approach to leadership that I hoped would cause principals and teachers to question their own practice.
(p. 670).

Foxworth, A., O'Donoghue, R., & Rutherford, B. (1996). Title I Schoolwide Principal's Institute. Available from RMC Research Corporation, 1512 Larimer Street, Suite 540, Denver CO 80202.

Krathwohl, D.R. (1993). Methods of educational and social science research. White Plains, NY: Longman.

Krueger, R.A. (1994). Focus groups: A practical guide for applied research. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications.

Yin, R.K. (1994). Case study research: Design and methods, Second edition. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Back to Research Critiques
Back to Leadership and Innovation