Thoughts on Leadership for Cultural and Linguistic Competence

Cultural competence is a developmental process that evolves over an extended period of time. Both individuals and organizations are at various levels of awareness, knowledge, and skills along the cultural competence continuum. Where am I in my journey to develop cultural competence and where are the staff I supervise and our Maui District Special Education Office as a whole?

Several areas of concern jump out at me when I think about our (Maui district DOE staff members) level of cultural competence – the impact on students and their families' satisfaction with their child's education, the impact on newly hired staff particularly from the mainland,  the impact on developing leadership from within our current staff, and the impact on our ability to consider and adopt new programs and new ways of leadership to the future of education.

There is no disputing that a special educator's ability to build trust with her students and the students' families directly impacts the student's outcomes and the parent's satisfaction with the school. I believe that while the participation of the parents in the IEP process is mandatory and therefore occurs regularly, their participation is meeting a requirement rather than being an actual partnership made up of mutual respect and exchange of ideas and information. So with respect to our desire to increase satisfaction and meaningful parent participation, I ask, What role does culture play in these relations between parents and educator? What different "cultures" are parts of this relationship? There is the actual culture of the family (ethnic, socio-economic, gender) , the culture of disability and how the family perceives that, the organizational culture of the particular school the student attends, and the culture (ethnic, socio-economic, gender) of the educator, just to name the obvious ones. Could our parent involvement and satisfaction levels and student outcomes increase if we were to be more skilled in our cultural competency?

New staff members join our district (and school) teams yearly. Cultural competence issues come up for new staff who are primarily from the mainland and struggle to understand our operational cultures of the DOE district administration, the schools, the kids, the parents etc. Additionally, their own cultural style is often misunderstood by their new peers and supervisors, leading to dissatisfaction, ineffective job performance and ultimately to new hires leaving their jobs. We have "cultural introductions" to new staff members, and they are effective to a degree – exposing new hires to understanding our "salad bowl" of disparate ethnic groups, the concept of being "local", our food choices, special language styles, music etc. But I am not aware of a cultural introduction to the culture of the DOE which has rigid unwritten rules, mores and expectations and is likely to cause a culture clash with new hires. On the flip side, do we recognize to what degree we are affected by our DOE culture? Are we contributing to quality employees to become disengaged from our system? If we were more culturally competent and able to identify cultural mores in our DOE culture could we more effectively maintain quality staff and increase job satisfaction?

A close friend and fellow DOE educator visited with me the other day and voiced her frustration with the teaching staff at her school; they are mostly young and several are new to Hawaii DOE. The problem her school was having was that no one was willing to step up and move into teacher-leadership positions.  She expressed the opinion that the new generation of employees was unwilling to give the amount of time that educators gave in the past without compensation.  This is a familiar theme;  I have had many similar conversations with veteran DOE administrators. Many complain that teachers leave the school right at 2:45pm; no one will step up and volunteer for committees and leadership positions. The immediate reason voiced is that they lack the commitment of earlier generations, they are too interested in the own personal pursuits to give time back to the DOE. However, upon further discussion and analysis, we started looking at other possible reasons for this phenomenon. Is it possible that staff are actually afraid to take a step up to leadership because there is accepted DOE cultural behavior to undermine peers that take that step up? We all know the a'ama crab syndrome; we laugh and shrug; but could it really be keeping us mired in provincial educational philosophies and preventing new blood and new ideas from taking root?

And finally, are we as special educators keenly aware and deeply involved in disability culture? Do we know the mores, the styles, the values the wants and needs of people with disabilities that we are charged to help? We have the data shows Hawaii's rates of inclusion of special needs students in general education classes is at the very bottom, dead last, of all 50 states AND territories. Interestingly, our statewide rates of adults with disabilities employed after high-school is nationally second to last! Do we see a connection here? Is it time to STOP giving lip service to inclusion in schools and recognize that WE, the people who are supposedly the champions of students with disabilities are part of the problem. If we understood and respected the culture, would be do a better job to stand up for the rights of people with disabilities?

Yes, we need to increase our cultural competence in these areas – immediately! 
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