Moving the Mountain of Secondary Education

Introduction

This book is about leadership in secondary schools. Of course, there are many books with a similar focus. The secondary school leadership addressed in this book, however, focuses on a particular type of school that we refer to as a Marzano Academy or simply as the academy model. While this book is certainly designed for schools that are pursuing the official process of becoming a Marzano Academy, it is also intended for schools that do not wish to pursue that process but do wish to implement some of the components of the Marzano Academies model within their current system. Schools that wish to go through the formal process should contact MarzanoAcademies.org.

Traditionally, the term academy has been used to describe secondary schools, but it is now used across the K–12 continuum. Regardless of the grade level referenced, educators frequently use the term to describe a school designed to produce students who have mastered specific areas of knowledge and skill, such as an academy for the arts, an academy for science, an academy for literature, and so on. By convention, then, in the United States, the term academy generally means that a school has a primary and somewhat narrow focus. The academy model we describe here is, to a certain extent, the antithesis of the traditional approach to academies. Instead of having a primary, narrow academic focus, it is designed to develop a wide and interconnected array of knowledge and skills that allows students to pursue any endeavor they so choose and to succeed in that pursuit. We believe that this approach is particularly well suited to the substantial challenges of transforming secondary educational systems.

Moving the Mountain of Secondary Education

Calls to change education have been persistent and varied, particularly at the secondary level. There are some who make the case that the U.S. educational system has consistently failed to provide equal opportunities for all students, despite the elimination of some unjust social structures such as segregation (Harrison & Clark, 2016). Others go so far as to assert that the current education system inherently perpetuates inequality of opportunity (McGee & Hostetler, 2014). While most criticisms of the system are more centrist in nature, one fact that seems self-evident is that the public education system struggles to address the growing diversity of its students. Schools are enrolling more and more students of color, many of whom are also impoverished (Kondor, Owusu-Ansah, & Keyne-Michaels, 2019). In urban schools specifically, many students reside in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty and are being taught in a language other than their native tongue—four hundred different first languages are represented among English learners in the United States (Chen, 2021; Diem & Carpenter, 2012). Since the turn of the millennium, the percentage of schoolage White children has decreased from 62 percent to 51 percent (de Brey et al., 2019). In 2020,