BTB: In M-DCPS, you introduced an instrument called the Scorecard to measure the performance of your deputy superintendents, regional and area superintendents and supervisors, and building-level administrators. Can you explain the strategy and design behind the Scorecard system?

RC: First, the Scorecard is going very well, and I'm pleased with what I'm seeing. The idea of having greater accountability isn't just based on students doing better in school. It's also based on administrators establishing the conditions for sufficient educational progress and organizational culture so that every child can be doing better, every teacher can be supported, and everybody can be measured by an objective performance standard. On any given day or in any given year, there should be evidence of performance; this Scorecard system is simply the evidence, a way of keeping score.

Good organizations that are hell-bent on doing really important, knowledge-building work keep score, measure, and ask hard questions about the findings from one school to the next or the scores from one person to the next. Those scores will be eclectic, and won't necessarily just be about how your children do, but will also go to the heart of how you did in setting the conditions in which a teacher can teach, a parent can engage, and a child can learn. These conditions actually determine how the race will be won. If you don't provide the right cultural and organizational conditions—support guidance and psychological services, build a rapport with your faculty, tally student attendance rates, and monitor teacher and administrator attendance rates—then I guarantee you these conditions will slip gradually more and more. The organizational culture that is supposed to uplift the children and the teachers will begin to degenerate.

I believe the Scorecard is a way of changing and transforming culture. It goes beyond a pay-for-performance indicator. It's really about setting in place the right expectations—moving the high watermark every year—so the culture gets richer and deeper for the adults and the focus on the children remains resolute.

BTB: What is your perspective on professional development, and what would you like to see come to the forefront in terms of ongoing professional development?

RC: I think the days of professional development being a mass session of three or five hours performed two or three times, with people trying to both acquire the skill and become proficient at using the skill, are gone. There is so much research in this area to suggest that it's gone, and hopefully, it is. If I were to reframe professional development, I would say that it's primarily going to be a function of how well a school system does training and helping people learn in the following three areas:

1. Does the school system actually help people to be teacher-leaders?
2. Do the teachers know content and methodology?
3. Do the teachers have multiple and diverse ways of teaching for understanding at all levels and learning styles?

Whether you are a teacher, principal, or assistant principal, these questions pertain to you. You need to ask yourself, "What kind of teacher are you?" I believe teachers are leaders and leaders are teachers. We engage people in such a way as to make them more proficient and more confident in something than they were before. That's true for teachers, and it's certainly true for administrators. I think professional development has to focus, at least in part, on that aspect of teacher development.

Secondly, professional development has to be delivered in a way that builds resilience. By resilience, I mean that teachers, principals, and others in education literally need a way to stay in their own developmental zone—they can't abort. They can't say, "Well, the stress is gone, so I am now absolved; I don't have to learn anymore. There's nothing I need to know this year that would be any different or enable me to be any better going from one year to the next." Resilience is a function of people acquiring new skills because they stayed in the "zone" of development; they didn't check out. Dropouts from schools check out of the zone of development. They no longer can handle the disconnect between lost confidence and high challenge. They've lost their confidence and cannot keep going, so they say, "I'm out." Now, imagine doing that as a third- or tenth-grader; I'm going to tell you that it makes for a long and very dull life. So you need someone who's going to be a resilient learner. Professional development, therefore, really needs to be engaging, enjoyable, and fun. And there has to be complete transparency as to application. There needs to be a way to monitor use so that people feel as though they are doing something not just for the moment, but to enrich their profession.

Thirdly, I believe a certain degree of connectedness that is passion is essential to professional development. It's professional development as a lifter and a challenger. Oftentimes, I have observed sessions in which people feel they are either one of two things: They are either very frustrated because the topic is just completely off their radar, or they are completely engaged because they find that it is an enabler for them to do what they love to do. When I see professional development that is the latter, I am happy. To be able to attain that, you actually have to provide professional development the way people want, which argues for a 24/7 type of model. There are schools and school districts that need professional development very differently. The cycle for reviewing a textbook during an adoption is woefully long, and the cycle for professional development is woefully short. I think we need to reverse that. The cycle for professional development ought to be one-to-two years. People ought to take that amount of time to acquire necessary new skills and, ultimately, use those skills and get feedback on their application of them. That, in and of itself, is an eighteen-month process. On the other hand, the textbook adoption cycle should take two to three months. The remaining time should be diverted to professional learning communities for the educators who are going to be using the textbooks.

BTB: What advice do you have for school board members to support and ensure the success of newly hired superintendents?

RC: I think school boards really need to pay much more attention to the learning needs of the adults in the school system. It is a learning organization, but only to the extent that a governing body allows it to become explicitly so. So, a superintendent walking in cannot work in a pyramid construct in which all knowledge is centralized at the top, and the superintendent was hired because he or she is all-knowing. That structure presupposes that one person now has enough knowledge to handle and fix all of the ensuing problems for the duration of his or her contract, which is exactly the wrong model. School boards ought to facilitate the development of more of an hourglass construct, in which there is knowledge at the bottom and the top, and you could invert it on any given day, and the knowledge would still flow. Teachers and principals have enormous craft-knowledge that becomes usable for building policy—and policy has an enormous capacity for being influenced by new knowledge, and therefore, goes back into the system in the form of new practice. These things literally operate much more like an hourglass. The relationship is more symbiotic than top-down.

If I were advising school boards, I would say there are three things they ought to ask as they bring in and support a new team and new superintendent. First, how can they help that superintendent? They should be explicit in finding out the ways in which they can support learning for him or her before he or she acts.

Secondly, they should determine how best to support learning-while-doing. There is new knowledge developing in every single school, and somebody has got to start culling, pulling, analyzing, and sifting it. In M-DCPS, we're in the process of doing that, executing in accordance with what the board would want and the goals that they've set.

Lastly, school boards literally should learn after they've implemented or done something. They have to place a higher priority on the learning of administrators and teachers, who, after all, are in the business of teaching. There are enormously new platforms of work out there for school boards to get their policy hands around with the goal of shaping a knowledge-capture or knowledge-generation business. The reason why school boards and districts are reluctant to do so is because no one is really compelling them to. The truth of the matter is that if education was being run as a private enterprise, your survival would be a function of how much knowledge you acquired from all the work you did over the 180-day period, and how you are going to use that new knowledge to fuel your objectives and work plan for the subsequent year. It is an enormously important piece of work that we're just not considering yet.

BTB: Clearly, you have accomplished so much as an educational leader. What do you believe are your greatest strengths?

RC: I think, in large measure, my strengths are in shifting the lens ten to twenty degrees in either direction and always finding new ways of developing solutions. You have to constantly find new angles to be able to get the right kind of solution to a particular problem.

The Parent Academy is my best example of this. By simply turning the lens slightly away from the regular parent resource centers to a new angle, I was able to shift the roles of both the parents and the schools. Parents are no longer simply a supplier of children, and we are no longer simply a supplier of materials. Now, we are partners. And the roles are clearly defined, so much so that each partner demands something from the other. It's a dramatic shift from having parents visit the school just to see new materials that they can hopefully use at home with their children.

The issue of literacy in America demands a complete angle change. We need to rethink what it means to have a literate nation because our literacy rates have actually decreased. We're still talking about seventh- and eighth-grade literacy rates for our nation as a whole. I don't want to denigrate that in any way, shape, or form. But we're going to lose market share in the world if we don't start considering the need for dual-language education, for example. We also need to invest in the arts again, and in culture, to ensure that we pass on all the important historical contributions and facts that many thousands of people have made across the annals of time.

BTB: There is no doubt that you will remain a lifelong learner and teacher. But, when you are ready to move on to the next great challenge, how do you want to be remembered as a superintendent?

RC: I'd like to be remembered in the very same ways as I was just describing the best of learning theory: that I was passionate and that I could take a punch and come back at it because I was resilient. Throughout my superintendency, there have been many ways of approaching difficult challenges and problems, and I'd like people to believe that I stayed in the groove long enough to get through those challenges and develop the right solutions. Most importantly, I'd like people to think that there was substance in my approach and that I played to win—and if I lost, I lost nobly and came back and tried again.