January 20, 2025
On Martin Luther King, civil rights, and strategy
Happy Martin Luther King Day, and thank you for subscribing to the Coaching Letter—you rock. It is a beautiful day here in eastern Connecticut—we got several inches of thick, velvety snow last night, and the winter scene out my window is picture-perfect.
I’ve always meant to write a Coaching Letter in celebration of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King (henceforth MLK), for reasons that I’ll go into below. But somehow the timing has never really worked out. I did mention him in a Coaching Letter this time last year, and how he would be surprised to know the place he now holds in American mythology. Speaking of timing, I published the last Coaching Letter after the start of winter break, which was a Bad Idea—fewer views than most of my recent posts, which is a shame because it went into great detail about the work that we have done since the beginning of the pandemic, and how that has led to the Next Level Instructional Leadership workshops, which are being held over the next three months in the following locations (better hurry if you want to register for Fairfield, it’s almost full):
February 19 & 20, 2025 – Fairfield, CT
March 6 & 7, 2025 – Providence, RI
April 28 & 29, 2025 – Southwick, MA
So if you came to any of our Building Thinking Classrooms for leaders or coaches workshops last year, or the workshops on educator evaluation, the NLIL workshops are like the greatest hits, and you should come again and bring your friends, or tell others that they really should go, because it will help you think differently about your strategy for instructional improvement, especially regarding what good instruction looks like, how to think about changing teacher practice, the best use of teacher teams, and especially what your strategy should be for the work of instructional improvement. I copied and pasted the list of objectives at the bottom of this CL.
And speaking of strategy, that’s what I want to write about regarding MLK and the civil rights movement. Because we all know him as a hero, someone who was willing to stand up and speak out against injustice and in support of human rights, a brilliant orator, a deep thinker, etc. But heroism is wasted effort without a great strategy.
When I first moved to America, I did not know much about U.S. History, so I figured I would do some reading—in the first year or so I was here, I had a lot of time on my hands, since I did not yet have a green card and therefore I could not work, so I took classes at UT Austin and spent most of my days in the library. Actually, the first book I picked up was on my husband’s bookshelf in the matchbox-sized apartment he was renting when we got married (fun fact: we lived a couple of blocks away from the original Whole Foods Market on Lamar, which was a very different place from the supermarket chain you may be familiar with). The book was Taylor Branch’s Parting the Waters, the first book in the trilogy spanning years of MLK’s leadership from 1954-1968. And, to be honest, I got really intrigued by the civil rights movement and haven’t really read any other American history. That seems like a rather shocking admission, but there you have it.
Also when I first moved to America, my husband was working on the book that he’s best known for, Shadowed Ground, and was doing research on sites related to the civil rights movement. We didn’t go on vacation, we went on field trips, and so I have visited the motel in Memphis where Dr. King was shot, the bridge in Selma where John Lewis’s skull was fractured, the Audubon Ballroom where Malcolm X was killed, Montgomery where the bus boycott happened, and plenty of other significant locations—one of the features of the civil rights movement is that there is no shortage of places to visit where something violent or oppressive happened. The photo at the top of this post is of me at the Civil Rights Monument outside the Southern Poverty Law Center.
And then when I started working seriously on strategy and strategic planning, I went back to thinking about the civil rights movement, because what I took away from all that reading and those people really got it. (Just to be clear, when I say people, I mostly mean men, because civil rights campaigners in the 1960s were not necessarily feminists, as I’m sure you’re aware. And the single most important strategic thinker among those men was someone you probably never heard of before the Netflix movie came out, Bayard Rustin, because he was gay, and therefore did not occupy a highly visible position in the movement.) This loose coalition of church and secular groups, with remarkably little money and no central bureaucracy, managed to mount a revolution. They changed the American legal landscape. Despite internal power struggles, and lack of funds, and few paid staff members, they were highly strategic, by which I mean:
- They had vision and ambition—most Americans would recognize the words of MLK’s I Have a Dream speech, and many could probably recite parts of it; “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character” is a very powerful vision statement.
- They had very clear goals, most prominently around ending racial segregation and other discriminatory practices such as redlining; achieving employment equality, and guaranteeing the right to vote.
- They maximized their resources. They did not have a lot of money, but they did have people, and they mobilized in large numbers, especially across the South.
- They were excellent communicators. They leveraged churches as conduits, and also communicated via Black radio stations and newspapers in a very grassroots and organic way.
- They thought deeply about strategy and tactics. In educational planning, we put great emphasis on vision and goals. But they are nothing without strategy and tactics. Bayard Rustin was a Quaker and visited India in 1948 to study and learn about Mahatma Gandhi’s philosophy and practice of nonviolence. While Rustin did not meet Gandhi personally—Gandhi was assassinated earlier that year—Rustin immersed himself in the study of Gandhi’s teachings and their application to social and political movements, and applied what he learned to the civil rights movement. We now tend to characterize the non-violence of protesters as a moral choice, and for Rustin it was, but it was also a strategic choice—as a tactic it was a stark contrast with the frequent violence of law enforcement, which then seemed like the immoral party; when law enforcement is usually seen as holding the line against bad actors, it is a striking dissonance when it starts to look like the bad actor. Rosa Parks did not randomly decide not to give up her seat on the bus one day—she was already well-connected in the civil rights movement, and her status as a respectable, church-going woman with a good husband and a good job (she was a seamstress)—and definitely not a rabble-rouser—made her an ideal person to put a face to the bus boycott—it was important that she was unimpeachable, that her character was not going to become part of the story. Her refusal to yield to a racist policy was strategically well thought through and tactically brilliant.
- They were adaptive. The 1960s was a politically volatile time, and civil rights leaders had to be ready to grasp opportunities and take advantage of challenges. They had to be able to respond quickly to public response to events, media attention on them or other organizations, and policy shifts. And just to hammer home this point, when I get to talk about strategy at workshops, I talk about all these features of the civil rights movement as a strategic tour de force, and then make a joke about the lack of a 3-ring binder or website that contains their strategic plan—because, obviously, there wasn’t one. As Eisenhower said, plans are useless, but planning is invaluable.
This list is a road map that schools and districts might follow.
If you want to read more about strategy, here’s a good collection to start with. Can I just preface this by saying that I don’t get a lot out of reading business books about strategy, because they are so focused on factors like innovation and market share that I just can’t square with educational improvement. But these I like…
- You could read all three of Taylor Branch’s books about the civil rights movement, which I highly recommend.
- Being Strategic, by Erika Andersen, is a really easy read and well worth the couple of hours it would take to read it.
- Strategy, by Lawrence Freedman, is a history of strategy, with each chapter a case study—including a chapter on the civil rights movement. It is a great, but really long, book.
- Amy Edmondson and Paul Verdin wrote a really terrific short article in HBR, Your Strategy Should Be a Hypothesis You Constantly Adjust, which does a great job of explaining why traditional strategic planning often fails—because business, like life, is unpredictable. They advocate for viewing strategy as a flexible hypothesis that evolves through continuous testing and learning. This approach involves regularly collecting data, assessing outcomes, and refining strategies to adapt to changing circumstances. By embracing uncertainty and fostering a culture of experimentation, organizations can remain agile and responsive, enhancing their ability to achieve long-term success. Of all these texts, I think it does the best job of summarizing how I have come to think about strategy—which I think Bayard Rustin had figured out by 1948.
- Systems for Instructional Improvement, by Paul Cobb et al, is really incredibly useful and I have written about it in CL #191 and CL #192.
- I wrote a Kappan article about strategic planning and I co-wrote a book about it with Jennie Weiner called The Strategy Playbook for Educational Leaders. They highlight some of the problems with current approaches to strategic planning in education, and how we might think differently.
- And to round out the appeal to thinking about strategy from an adaptive perspective, please read Managing the Unexpected by Karl Weick and Rosemary Sutcliffe.
I know that the people who participated in the civil rights movement in the 50s and 60s were courageous, and they should be admired for that courage. But I also know that they were smart and cunning, and they should get credit for that also. We honor Dr. King for his bravery and his sacrifice, but we should also honor his thinking and his skills. And we should learn from them.
As always, I would love to hear your feedback. Oh, and one more thing—there’s going to be a special screening of Counted Out, the new documentary about mathematics education, at Central Connecticut State University on March 5. See the flier for registration details—it’s free—and I hope to see you there. Best, Isobel
Objectives for the Next Level Instructional Leadership workshops.
- Understand and Apply Strategic Thinking for Instructional Improvement: Develop a comprehensive strategy for improving instruction across systems, taking into account recent innovations and research in educational leadership.
- Foster System-Wide Equity and High-Quality Instruction: Engage in activities that help create a shared understanding of what constitutes high-quality, equitable instruction, ensuring alignment across all levels of the educational system.
- Design and Enhance Professional Learning Systems: Explore the role of professional learning, including the integration of coaches and how their work supports instructional improvement strategies.
- Strengthen Improvement Infrastructure: Analyze the specific roles and responsibilities of building and central office leaders in establishing and sustaining structures that promote continuous improvement.
- Transform Teacher Team Practices: Reframe traditional approaches to data teams or Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) by introducing improvement teams that focus on the rapid prototyping of impactful instructional practices.
Isobel Stevenson, PhD PCC
860-576-9410
@IsobelTX
Author of The Coaching Letter
Author with Jennie Weiner of The Strategy Playbook for Educational Leaders: Principles and Processes Routledge, 2021
Author with Sarah Woulfin & Kerry Lord of Making Coaching Matter: Leading Continuous Improvement in Schools Teachers College Press, 2023
