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Chapter 1

The Disappointment of School Reform

A significant body of circumstantial evidence points to a deep, systemic incapacity of U.S. schools, and the practitioners who work within them, to develop, incorporate, and extend new ideas about teaching and learning in anything but a small fraction of schools and classrooms.

—Richard Elmore (1996, p. 1)

The demands of modern society are such that America’s public schools must now provide what they have never provided before: a first-rate academic education for nearly all students.

—Phil Schlechty (1997, p. 235)

The history of American education in the second half of the twentieth century is marked by numerous attempts at reform and by increasing public concern. Articles entitled “Crisis in Education,” “What Went Wrong with U.S. Schools,” and “We Are Less Educated than Fifty Years Ago” may have a contemporary ring, but they were published as early as 1957 and 1958 in Life and U.S. News and World Report. In that same era, Arthur Bestor (1953) argued in his best seller, Educational Wastelands, that citizens should wrest control of the public schools from “educationists” who had “dumbed down” the curriculum. With the launching of Sputnik in 1957, many cited the failure of the public schools as the primary reason that the United States had fallen behind Russia in the race to space. Meanwhile, a spate of university-based curriculum reforms, particularly in mathematics and science, emerged as the preferred strategy for resolving the crisis. A quarter of a century later, the ascendance of Japan as an economic power led critics to conclude that the public schools were responsible for America’s fall from its position of unchallenged economic superiority, and a new wave of calls for school reform was issued.

The Rise and Fall of the Excellence Movement

In April 1983 the National Commission on Excellence in Education captured national headlines with its grim assessment of education in the United States. In its report, A Nation at Risk, the commission argued that national security was in peril because of substandard education in American public schools. The commission made frequent references to “decline,” “deficiencies,” “threats,” “risks,” “afflictions,” and “plight.” The opening paragraphs of the report set the tone:

Our nation is at risk. Our once unchallenged preeminence in commerce, industry, science, and technological innovation is being overtaken by competitors throughout the world…. The educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a nation and as a people…. If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war…. We have, in effect, been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament. (1983, p. 5)

A Nation at Risk served as a catalyst for a flurry of school improvement initiatives throughout the United States that came to be known collectively as the Excellence Movement. Within two years of the report, more than 300 state and national task forces had investigated the condition of public education in America. The United States Department of Education (1984) described the national response to A Nation at Risk as “nothing short of extraordinary” (p. 11), and Secretary of Education Terrell Bell reported with satisfaction that the arduous work of reform was “already bearing fruit” (p. 8).

The Excellence Movement offered a consistent direction for reform. But it was not a new direction. Schools simply needed to do MORE! Students needed to earn more credits for graduation in courses that were more rigorous and required more homework. Schools needed to add more days to the school year and lengthen the school day. Schools needed to test students more frequently and expect more of teachers both before offering employment and before extending tenure. The reforms of the Excellence Movement simply called for an intensification of existing practices. They contained no new ideas.

Five years after the publication of A Nation at Risk, President Reagan hosted a ceremony in the East Room of the White House to celebrate the school-reform initiatives that the report had helped to launch. Edward Fiske, the former education editor of the New York Times, was among those in attendance. Fiske later wrote:

Leading politicians and educators, as well as those in the national media who cover education, used the occasion to reflect on the accomplishments of school reform. And we came to a startling conclusion: There weren’t any. (1992, p. 24)

The United States Department of Education ultimately came to the same conclusion. In 1990 the agency reported that “stagnation at relatively low levels appears to describe the level of performance of American students” (Alsalam & Ogle, 1990). As the disillusioned undersecretary of education wrote shortly after his resignation, “Despite all of the talk of reform, despite the investment of tons of billions of extra dollars, public education in the United States is still a failure. It is to our society what the Soviet economy is to theirs” (Finn, 1991, p. xiv).

The Unfulfilled Promises of the Restructuring Movement

The demise of the Excellence Movement prompted a new, two-pronged approach to school improvement. The first part of the strategy called for national educational goals and standards. In 1989 President George Bush convened the nation’s governors for a summit meeting on education—only the third time in the nation’s history that governors had been asked to meet to consider a single topic. (Theodore Roosevelt once called the governors together to discuss the environment; Franklin Delano Roosevelt assembled them to discuss the economy.) The result of the Bush summit was the identification of “Goals 2000”—six national goals for education, which stipulated that by the year 2000:

1. All children in America will start school ready to learn;

2. The high school graduation rate will increase to at least 90%;

3. American students will leave grades four, eight, and twelve having demonstrated competency in challenging subject matter, including English, mathematics, science, history, and geography, and every school in America will ensure that all students learn to use their minds well, so they may be prepared for responsible citizenship, further learning, and productive employment in our modern economy;

4. U.S. students will be first in the world in mathematics and science achievement;

5. Every adult American will be literate and will possess the knowledge and skills necessary to compete in a global economy and exercise the rights and responsibilities of citizenship; and

6. Every school in America will be free of drugs and violence and will offer a disciplined environment that is conducive to learning. (United States Department of Education, 1994)

Congress later amended this original list to include two more goals:

7. By the year 2000, the nation’s teaching force will have access to programs for the continued development of their professional skills and the opportunity to acquire the knowledge and skills needed to instruct and prepare all American students for the next century.

8. By the year 2000, every school will promote partnerships that will increase parental involvement and participation in promoting the social, emotional, and academic growth of children.

In 1991, two years after the Bush summit, the National Center on Education and the Economy joined forces with the Learning Research and Development Center at the University of Pittsburgh to design a national exam system. Then, in 1994, Congress created the National Education Standards and Improvement Council to review and endorse state and national standards. At about the same time, however, articulating national standards began to become an increasingly political activity. Critics asserted that the standards movement represented a federal takeover of the schools and an attempt to indoctrinate students to the liberal agenda. As a result, when the second Education Summit was held in 1996, the standards movement was transferred from the federal to the state governments, from the White House to the State House. Subsequently, the task of developing national standards was left to professional organizations and curriculum specialists.

While the movement to establish national educational goals and standards advanced, a parallel movement tried to give individual schools more freedom to develop the best methods to achieve those goals. The failure of the Excellence Movement had been widely attributed to the fact that it represented a “top-down” attempt to mandate improvement. Early reform initiatives had tended toward standardization, increased reliance on rules and regulations, and detailed specifications of school practices at the expense of local autonomy. Impetus for the movement had come from elected officials and business. Control was centered in state legislatures. Practitioners had become mere pawns in the movement, and the vast majority of the reform efforts had simply been imposed on them. Ultimately, the paired concepts of establishing national goals and providing local autonomy to achieve these goals seemed to offer a viable alternative to the failed Excellence Movement. National goals could address a national crisis, while job-site autonomy and individual empowerment seemed to be consistent with best practice in the private sector.

This new emphasis on site-based reform came to be known as the Restructuring Movement, a term used so widely and ambiguously that it soon lost any specific, universally understood meaning. Nevertheless, the director of the Center on Organization and Restructuring of Schools noted that comprehensive restructuring typically included some common features: site-based management with meaningful authority over staffing, program, and budget; shared decision making; staff teams with frequent, shared planning time and shared responsibility for student instruction; multi-year instructional or advisory groups; and heterogeneous grouping in core subjects (Newmann et al., 1996).

The Restructuring Movement engendered considerable optimism as it grew to become synonymous with school reform in the early 1990s. The term itself seemed to encompass more than mere innovation or improvement, suggesting instead a comprehensive redesign and systemic transformation of the schools. The simplistic, more-of-the-same approaches of earlier reform movements had apparently been replaced at last by a strategy based on a more realistic assumption: monumental changes were necessary if schools were to successfully respond to the enormous challenges before them.

Another reason the Restructuring Movement generated such hope was the expectation that educators would rush to embrace it. Not only would local educators have greater authority to initiate and oversee changes in their schools, but they would also be given the autonomy to organize and administer programs and facilities. Freed from the shackles of top-down mandates and bureaucratic rules and regulations, teachers and principals could respond creatively to the issues they faced. They could use their knowledge of pedagogy more fully and better serve their students and schools. Resources would be used more efficiently, professional collaboration would flourish, classroom life would be more stimulating, and above all, schools would be demonstrably more effective. As Roland Barth (1991) wrote, “The advent of the restructuring movement brought a sudden confidence that teachers and principals, with the help of parents and students, can get their own schoolhouse in order” (p. 126).

But in spite of the Utopian ideals, the high hopes of the Restructuring Movement have yet to be realized. Studies of the movement’s impact to date have consistently found that school practitioners have typically elected to focus on marginal changes rather than on core issues of teaching and learning. When given the opportunity to make decisions for their school site, teachers have opted to focus on peripheral issues that do not directly address the quality of student learning (Newmann & Wehlage, 1995). In fact, teachers in restructured schools seem no more inclined to discuss conditions of teaching and learning than are their colleagues in traditional school structures. As one study concludes:

The connections between teacher empowerment and site based management and improved educational processes and outcomes are tenuous at best…. It remains to be seen if restructuring leads to radical changes that deeply affect teachers and students or if changes will stop at the classroom door, leaving the teaching-learning process largely unaltered. (Murphy, Evertson, & Radnofsky, 1991)

Our experience with schools around the country confirms the research finding that the school improvement agendas of restructured schools tend to drift to non-academic, administrative issues. In fact, faculties demonstrate a fairly predictable pattern in their consideration of school improvement issues. First, they focus on student discipline: How can we get the students to behave better in our school? Then they tackle parental involvement: How can we get parents to accept greater responsibility for their child’s learning? Finally, they address faculty morale: How can we ensure that the adults who work in our school feel good about their working conditions?

Certainly student discipline, parental involvement, and staff morale are important issues and should be a part of a school’s comprehensive improvement effort. But it is imperative that these initiatives also consider what happens in the heart of the school’s enterprise—the classroom. Unfortunately, restructuring seems to have left students virtually untouched by the reforms that swirl around, but not within, their classrooms. So the Restructuring Movement, like the Excellence Movement before it, has been unable to make a real difference in the ability of American schools to meet the challenges they face.

Succumbing to Despair

The failure of the Restructuring Movement seems to have led to unprecedented levels of despair about the possibility of school improvement in the United States. Because neither top-down nor bottom-up school reform have proven to be successful, there is a growing tendency to conclude that American schools are simply incapable of transformation. The Consortium on Productivity in the Schools (1995) concludes that schools resist any meaningful change efforts, have changed very little despite all efforts to reform them, and are unable to learn and improve. A review of the research on school innovation led to “the profoundly discouraging” conclusion that “almost all educational innovations fail in the long term” (Perkins, 1992, p. 205). Michael Fullan (1997b) writes that “none of the current strategies being employed in educational reform result in substantial widespread change…. The first step toward liberation, in my view, is the realization that we are facing a lost cause” (p. 220). In a 1996 sequel to a book on school change that he had written 25 years earlier, Seymour Sarason lamented the failure of efforts to reform American education and observed that the single greatest change since he had written his first book was “the sense of disillusionment with and disappointment in our schools” (p. 345).

The inability of the Restructuring Movement to achieve the anticipated results has not only discouraged educational theorists, but has also caused some besieged educators to respond to the constant criticism of their schools with growing defensiveness and resignation. According to a recent report on teacher perceptions, most teachers believe that schools are doing as well as possible given the societal problems and lack of parental involvement (Farkas & Johnson, 1996). From the perspective of these teachers, the improvements that must occur for schools to be more effective must be made outside of the school environment. For example, many educators suggest that schools cannot become more productive until students take more responsibility for their learning. According to this argument, students must decide whether they will come to school, be attentive, complete their homework, and try to learn. This argument assumes that these decisions are not influenced by what happens at school. Benjamin Levin (1994) is among those who contend that the focus of reform should shift from improving educators and schools to improving the children we send there:

Students must do the learning; there is no way around this fact. Whatever schools provide, whatever teachers do, in the end it is the student who must use the resources to acquire skills and knowledge…. Every teacher realizes that what happens in a class is fundamentally dependent on who students are, how they make sense of the world, and what they want to do or do not want to do…. [E]very educator recognizes that our best laid plans may, and often do, come to nothing in the face of students with different agendas. (p. 759)

A variation on this theme is to cite the many problems in society that must be solved before schools can become more effective. Forty percent of those living in poverty in the United States are children. This is the highest percentage of any industrialized nation. One of every three babies born in this country is born to a single mother, and 30% of those single mothers are teenagers. Children aged 12 to 15 are the most likely group in America to be the victims of violent crime, and over 4,000 children are murdered each year. By the eighth grade, seven of ten children have consumed alcohol. The youth population of the United States is becoming increasingly fragmented with more students from minority groups and more students who do not speak English, live in broken homes, are disadvantaged in every way, and are subject to violence in the community (Hodgkinson, 1996; Mehlinger, 1995). Some educators argue that they cannot be expected to improve schools until these societal problems are solved. As Mehlinger (1995) contends, “If America’s poor children could be provided the same conditions for growing up, including the same quality of schools, as those afforded to middle-class suburban youth, we would have no crisis (in education) at all” (p. 27).

Another response to mounting criticism among members of the education community is to challenge the premise that schools are ineffective. Books such as Berliner and Biddle’s The Manufactured Crisis (1995), Schneider and Houston’s Exploding the Myths (1993), and Bracey’s Setting the Record Straight (1997) have blatantly refuted some of the allegations aimed at public education in the United States and have argued that schools in this country are indeed more effective than ever. Such major professional education associations as the American Association of School Administrators, the Association of Supervision and Curriculum Development, and the National Education Association have distributed the findings of these “revisionist” works and have also encouraged their members to use the findings in defending their efforts.

While these defensive responses on the part of weary educators are entirely understandable, they do nothing to create the conditions that are critical to improving schools. If teachers and principals believe that the impetus for student learning remains outside of their influence and that there is nothing they can do to overcome these external variables, the idea of school improvement will undoubtedly seem futile, if not downright ridiculous! Unfortunately, if educators continue to argue that they cannot be responsible for students’ learning until the problems of society are solved, they are essentially saying that they will never accept responsibility for their students’ learning. If they are content with the assertion that “we are not as bad off as everyone says we are,” they will not create organizations capable of continuous improvement.

We are not prepared to accept the conclusion that it is impossible to improve schools. Nor do we believe that improvement can only occur when parents provide schools with a better class of students and society has solved its problems. Although much of the popular criticism of schools has been unfair and unfounded, we do not believe that educators should accept the status quo. Even Gerald Bracey (1997), one of the most ardent defenders of American schools, cautions that his work should not be interpreted to suggest that schools are not in need of significant reform. If future efforts to improve schools are to be more productive than their predecessors, they should address two questions:

1. Why have past school improvement efforts not achieved their intended results?

2. What course of action offers the best hope for those who seek to make their schools more effective?

Why Educational Reform Has Failed to Deliver

The complexity of the task. Changing any organization is difficult, but changing something as complex as the American system of education is an absolutely daunting task. Fifty states operate over 15,000 relatively autonomous school districts through more than 80,000 school board members who employ over 200,000 district administrators, 120,000 principals, and 2.5 million teachers for the 84,000 schools that serve over 43 million students. But the scope of the effort is not the only obstacle to be overcome. Our educational system is fundamentally conservative. As Fullan (1993) writes, “The way that teachers are trained, the way the hierarchy operates, and the way that education is treated by political decision makers results in a system that is more likely to retain the status quo than to change” (p. 3).

Furthermore, while Americans are quick to identify education as a national problem, they consistently express satisfaction with the schools in their own communities (Elam, Rose, & Gallup, 1997). In fact, results from the annual Gallup Poll seem to suggest that educators are conducting their local schools in accordance with community expectations. Effecting change in this amorphous, fundamentally conservative “system,” when educators seem fatalistic or defensive and when parents indicate that their schools are serving the community well, has been and will continue to be an incredibly complex, intractable problem.

Misplaced focus. The good news is that there are strategies for school improvement that can make a difference in the effectiveness of schools. The bad news is that neither the Excellence Movement nor the Restructuring Movement focused on these strategies.

Lack of clarity on intended results. Past reform efforts have been characterized by a lack of clarity on intended results. While there has been general agreement that schools should improve, consensus on the criteria that should be used to assess that improvement remains elusive. This inability to articulate the desired results in meaningful terms has led to initiatives that focused on methods and processes rather than on results.

Lack of perseverance. Because schools have been unable to articulate the results they seek, they have become susceptible to following the educational fads du jour. As a result of the constant cycle of initiating and then abandoning innovative fads, educators rarely pursue ideas with the diligence and tenacity that is necessary to anchor a change within the school. Overwhelmed by disconnected, fragmented change initiatives that seem to de-scend upon them one after another, teachers often respond to calls for change with jaded resignation. New proposals fail to generate either enthusiasm or opposition from teachers because experience has taught them that “this too shall pass.” As one battle-scarred veteran teacher summarized his experience, “Everything has changed, but nothing is different.” Phil Schlechty (1997) argues that nothing has been more destructive to the cause of school change than this inability to stay the course.

Failure to appreciate and attend to the change process. Most educators have not been trained in initiating, implementing, and sustaining change. They have moved too quickly, or they have lost momentum by not moving quickly enough. They have thought too big—or too small. They have neglected the process of creating a “critical mass” of support or have failed to proceed because of the mistaken notion that they needed unanimous support before launching an initiative. They have regarded conflict as a problem to avoid rather than an inevitable and valuable byproduct of substantive change. They have failed to anchor the change within the culture of the school. They have considered a change initiative as a task to complete rather than an ongoing process. In short, school practitioners have not learned how the complexities of the change process transform organizations.

Can This School Be Saved?

It is far easier to critique past strategies for improving schools than it is to identify and implement strategies that are more effective. There is, however, an emerging consensus on what pathway offers the best hope for significant school improvement. Researchers from a variety of fields—organizational development, school improvement, teacher preparation, professional development, effective schools, and innovation and change—have all offered remarkably similar models for school improvement. As Milbrey McLaughlin (1995) excitedly proclaimed at a national conference, “We are closer to the truth than ever before.”

What is that truth? It is simply this: If schools are to be significantly more effective, they must break from the industrial model upon which they were created and embrace a new model that enables them to function as learning organizations. We prefer characterizing learning organizations as “professional learning communities” for several vital reasons. While the term “organization” suggests a partnership enhanced by efficiency, expediency, and mutual interests, “community” places greater emphasis on relationships, shared ideals, and a strong culture—all factors that are critical to school improvement. The challenge for educators is to create a community of commitment—a professional learning community.

So there you have it. Educators seeking to create more effective schools must transform them into professional learning communities. It sounds simple enough, but as the old adage warns, “the devil is in the details.” Educators willing to embrace the concept of the school as a professional learning community will be given ambiguous, oftentimes conflicting advice on how they should proceed.

Just how daunting the details can be is illustrated by the following story. When Germany launched its first submarines, Great Britain feared its naval superiority was in jeopardy. An international prize was offered to anyone who could develop a strategic defense to eliminate the threat of the submarine. Mark Twain wired a solution—“Boil the ocean”—and asked that his prize be sent immediately. When an incredulous naval officer asked Twain how he proposed to boil the ocean, Twain replied that he had developed the concept; it was now up to His Majesty’s Navy to work out the details! So it has been for those who would reform education.

Concepts are great, but at some point most of us need practical suggestions on applying those concepts to our current situations. This book begins with the premise that schools need to develop into professional learning communities and includes specific steps educators can take to succeed in “boiling their oceans.”

Summary

Despite persistent attempts to reform public education, there is little evidence to suggest that schools have become significantly more effective in meeting the challenges that confront them. The Excellence Movement of the 1980s represented a top-down improvement initiative that was based on standardization, increased reliance on rules and regulations, and detailed specifications of school practices at the expense of local autonomy. The Restructuring Movement of the 1990s based its approach to school reform on the premise that the paired concepts of national goals and local, site-based autonomy offered the best hope for genuine change. The failure of these reform initiatives has led to heightened disillusionment with public schools. Educators have become increasingly defensive and often either blame the problems of public education on factors beyond their control or challenge the premise that problems actually exist. While these responses are understandable, they do little to improve the effectiveness of schools.

Past efforts to improve schools have not had the anticipated results for a number of reasons: the complexity of the task, misplaced focus and ineffective strategies, lack of clarity on the intended results, failure to persist, and lack of understanding of the change process. But educators should not succumb to despair. There is growing evidence that the best hope for significant school improvement is transforming schools into professional learning communities. This book provides educators with specific, practical strategies they can use to make that transformation.