Readings

 

Abstract: Fuel for Reform: The Importance of Trust in Changing Schools

David T. Gordon
"Fuel for Reform: The Importance of Trust in Changing Schools."
Harvard Education Letter, 18, (4).
July/August 2002
 

"Can excellent work be coerced from principals, teachers, and students simply by withholding diplomas, slashing funds, and publishing embarrassing statistics in the newspaper?" This question emerged from a recent Harvard Kennedy School of Government conference on accountability and assessment considering the implications of the No Child Left Behind Act.

Gordon posits that schools with a high degree of relational trust are more likely to make changes that help raise student achievement. He cites two studies of Chicago's decade of school reform. One study (now to be found in the book by Anthony Byrk and Barbara Schneider TRUST IN SCHOOLS: A CORE RESOURCE FOR IMPROVEMENT. New York. Russell Sage 2002) finds that a broad base of trust across a school community "lubricates" much of a school's day-to-day functioning and is a critical resource for school improvement work.

Citing research on the foundations of effective democratic institutions and economies, Byrk and Schneider report that when citizens trust each other less and become less engaged in society, a country loses an asset essential to collective problem-solving.

Byrk and Schneider define relational trust as having four dimensions that can be observed and assessed: respect, competence, personal regard, and integrity. They look at trust through three perspectives—principal-teacher relationship, teacher-teacher trust and ties between school professionals and parents. They find that teachers' relationships with one another can often be the most challenging.

In one analysis of data from the 1997 school year, Byrk and Schneider found that three-quarters of teachers in top-quartile Chicago schools academically reported strong or very strong relations with fellow teachers, and nearly all reported good relationships with their principals. At schools in the bottom quartile, a majority of teachers reported having little or no trust in their colleagues and two thirds said the same thing about their principals.

In a separate analysis of the 100 schools that made the greatest improvements on standardized tests between 1991 and 1996, compared with the 100 schools that made little or no improvement, they found the following:

• Schools with strong levels of trust at the outset of reforms had a 1 in 2 chance of making significant improvements in math and reading.
• Schools with weak relationships had a 1 in 7 chance of making gains.
• Of the latter, the only schools that made any gains were those that strengthened trust over the course of several years.

While these statistics alone do not make a cause and effect case between trust and achievement, this analysis and others do make a strong case that trust is essential to school improvement, but not sufficient.