Nate the Great: Administrator of the Year

Academics aren’t normally called upon to hide what they do. Yet Carol Gordon can cite a case in point: action research. “Action research is catching on, but it’s not a household word,” says Gordon, an associate professor of library and information science at Rutgers University. “It’s even a scary word. Sometimes, when I do workshops, the person who hires me says, 'Don’t use the term action research; it’ll scare them.’”

Apparently, it doesn’t scare everyone.

Nate Greenberg, superintendent of the Londonderry (NH) School District, for instance, wasn’t even remotely alarmed back in 2000—his first year on the job—when Gordon asked permission to turn his 5,349-student district into a laboratory for her national study of action research in school libraries. Actually, Greenberg viewed the methodology as a means for supporting libraries, which he sees as central to education.

Susan Ballard, the district’s director of library and technology, was equally nonplussed. Ballard had hatched the plan for the study with Gordon—“on paper napkins”—when the two first met at a library conference. Then, when Ballard brought the plan back to Londonderry, Greenberg didn’t just approve it, he embraced it.

“It kind of fit in with the things we were doing,” says Greenberg. “We are trying very much to be a data-driven organization and use information to make a determination as to whether or not we’re doing things well.”

Like most things in life, action research isn’t scary once you get to know it. In fact, the approach employs the same data-gathering techniques that think tanks, academicians, and Madison Avenue gurus use—meaning surveys, focus groups, interviews, and questionnaires. Only schools apply these tools to prickly K–12 problems. Gone is education’s traditional try-it-and-see approach. In its place are solid, replicable data. And once they’re compiled, action research proceeds to its finale: a distinct and quantifiable “action plan.”

During the past six years, Londonderry’s cascade of action-research projects (led first by librarians) has tackled challenges such as how to get high school kids to use the district’s expensive databases rather than rushing to Google (it turns out that teachers weren’t demanding it), how to help floundering third graders survive a biography unit (teachers discovered that many youngsters didn’t grasp the instructions “compare and contrast”), and how to teach fifth graders online ethics (some students didn’t realize they could ask a librarian about plagiarism, which came as a real shocker to Ballard). Action research has produced some fascinating findings about how Londonderry’s kids learn, and it’s a major reason why Greenberg is 2007’s SLJ/Greenwood Publishing’s Administrator of the Year. (To learn more about Gordon’s Londonderry research, see the 2006 issue of School Library Media Research.)

“What we want kids to be able to do is not just regurgitate information but to generate their own information and their own knowledge,” says the superintendent, a trim and friendly 60-year-old. “If you look at the skills that kids are going to need to be successful, some of the key skills are ones that are natural for libraries to promote. So a library, instead of being a place where you go to grab a book, becomes, in effect, a viable research center.”

Funding is a thorny issue in the Granite State, and that holds true for this largely white, middle-class community with its picturesque rolling hills, apple orchards, and stone walls. Londonderry has only 24,406 residents and holds the odd distinction of hosting New Hampshire’s highest ratio (25 percent) of school-aged children to total population. And the town’s per-pupil expenditure of $8,820 trails the state average of $9,094.

Still, Greenberg has endeavored to put his money where his mouth is, and media specialists like Jean Sand at Matthew Thornton Elementary and Lynne Jackson, Gail March, and Vicki Goode at the high school appreciate how he has gone to bat for his library staff of 33—including eight library media specialists (LMSs)—by procuring their current $199,145 budget for library resources. Greenberg has also set aside a stipend of $750 and up for any librarian or teacher who wants to undertake an action-research project, and he routinely cheerleads their projects before the local school board. The superintendent was solidly behind an initiative to develop a performance evaluation especially tailored to LMSs. “It’s so nice to work with an administrator that is so supportive,” says Jackson, now in her third decade at Londonderry High. “You know what it is? He gets us.”

So how did the Brooklyn born and bred Greenberg get enticed to leave the big city for the rural wilds of New Hampshire? Through a long climb up the educational ladder. The son of a truck driver and bookkeeper, who still retains the accent of his famous borough—plus a love of the New York Yankees, knishes, and black-and-white cookies—Greenberg, a self-described “smart but lazy” kid, spent a summer as a camp counselor and decided on elementary ed as a career. After an initial teaching job in Beacon, NY, however, he returned to school for an administration degree and made the trek across the state line to an assistant principal’s post in Simsbury, CT. It was there, at age 26, that he first experienced a school literally constructed around its library. “The concept was ahead of its time,” Greenberg recalls. “That was really my first taste of how effective using the library and media personnel could be—as a major impact on the entire school system.”

The concept simmered as he married—his wife of three and a half decades, Nancy, is a teacher—fathered three kids, and worked at a number of education jobs with increasing responsibility before finally arriving in Londonderry.

Greenberg is a man who has faced personal challenges—his daughter, Rachel, now 31, has Down syndrome—and suffered tragedy: his son, Nick, 25, died last June of a sudden illness. The superintendent hopes to donate some portion of his SLJ/Greenwood $5,000 prize to a graphics book collection in honor of his late son, a talented graphic artist. He has also faced public challenges: in New Hampshire, a state with no income or sales tax, “adequate funding” of education doesn’t come easy. A coalition of 16 communities has pressed its case for that goal as high as the state supreme court. Greenberg is its unpaid director.

Finally, this is an administrator who has collected a string of honors for the sterling successes of his six-building school district, the state’s fourth largest: Londonderry boasts top-notch test scores and a one-percent drop-out rate, and 86 percent of its seniors are college bound. Greenberg’s also made strategic planning his hallmark and he’s supported curriculum benchmarks, flexible scheduling, and research opportunities for every grade. “We’re all teachers,” the superintendent said in his inaugural staff address in 2000, making his intentions clear. “You may be teaching English or math or science or elementary school, but we’re all teachers who simply have a different set of skills, which have to be shared.”

Greenberg’s emphasis on collaboration shows in this year’s action-research project. Londonderry, says Ballard, aims to determine whether, based on student mastery of the curriculum, it can justify switching completely to cheaper PCs, which are currently used along with Macs. It’s a big undertaking. But whether Apple wins, or Hewlett-Packard, is not the point. What is, is the hard-core data the project will generate in a district that puts a premium on evidence-based education. “People today don’t want anecdotal answers to something,” says Greenberg. “You’ve got to be able to prove it with data to support your conclusion—and that becomes the key thing.”

As for the key thing behind Londonderry’s continuing success, high school librarian March puts it this way: “Other people tend to think about the library they remember, Nate understands where libraries need to go in the future.”