This book presents a series of cultural situations that could occur
within the first one-hundred days of a school year: responding to
entrenched vocabularies and behaviors, addressing professional and
instructional bad habits, enacting alternative teaching scripts,
leveraging a policy blindside, redefining the goals and practices
of teams, and implementing outside-the-box programs. Each cultural
situation offers a new school leader the opportunity to redefine
the goals, values, and practices of an entrenched school
culture-the Central High way. Administrators reading the title of
this book may view one hundred days as an arbitrary number picked
out of administrative thin air. I argue that disrupting and
replacing organizational and instructional routines is a race
against time. Every school day that goes by without some sign of
creative destruction is one more day that comfortable
organizational and instructional routines live on in main offices
and classrooms. The idea for this book originated from a question I
asked a former student of mine who had just signed a contract to
become the principal of a high school. We were discussing the
complexities of changing a school culture when I asked the
following question: "What would you do on the first day in your new
office to change your school's culture?" The response to that
question described a series managerial routines that all new
administrators have learned to perform as they move from the
classroom to the main office: organize the office, meet staff, tour
the building, write a newsletter, examine data, and visit community
venues. Nothing in this conversation described strategies for
redefining the beliefs and values of an entrenched school culture.
With this conversation in mind, I made it a point in my formal and
informal contacts with school administrators to always ask the
question: "What would you do in the first day in your new office to
change your school's culture?" The most common responses involved
reviewing district documents, touring facilities, meeting staff,
listening to stakeholders and managing systems. In each
conversation, school leaders populated their responses with the
current jargon of school reform: learning communities, data mining,
standards-based curriculum, differentiated learning, common core
standards, formative assessment, race to the top, continuous
improvement, etc. While these responses encompass reasonable
behaviors on the first day in the main office, not one of these
actions possesses the capacity to connect educational values
expressed in school mission statements-why are we here-to daily
organizational and instructional routines. Each activity gives the
appearance of leading, but produces no connections between beliefs,
values, and practices. Although none of these responses would make
or break a school culture, they do represent a pattern of thinking
and behaving that holds out little possibility of fundamentally
changing a school's culture.
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