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Share and Cite:. Murphy, J. Journal of Human Resource and Sustainability Studies , 8 , Unlinked, Discordant, and Silenced Partners There are seven important players engaged in the quest for school reform: teachers and school administrators, business executives, politicians, parents, researchers, children, and corporations. Conclusion As is the case for a good deal of what unfolds in schooling, the story of reform is multi-faceted and complex.
Conflicts of Interest The author declares no conflicts of interest regarding the publication of this paper. References [ 1 ] Aladjem, D. Journals Menu. Contact us. All Rights Reserved. Aladjem, D. Ancess, J. Appleton, J. Asen, R. Ashton, P. Barnes, C. Beishuizen, J. Bell, S. Biesta, G. Blanton, A. Borman, G. Boser, U. Brady, R. Bryk, A. Burch, P. There are no easy answers. But, there are some lessons that we can glean from past efforts.
Lesson 1: Be humble. Worse yet, supporters of these programs knew full well, from the beginning, that these promises were ridiculous, but in hopes of scoring quick political wins, they were all too willing to say things that they knew to be false. In the short term, this kind of bravado may have helped reformers win support, but it also guaranteed that their initiatives would be viewed as failures over the long term. When told to pursue unrealistic goals, schools and communities eventually lose faith, and programs die on the vine.
The need for humility extends beyond goal setting, though. Every day, learning goes on in millions of classrooms at more than , schools across the U. Policy can only do so much to compel those individual teachers to act in particular ways. We hope that readers will examine policies with humility, recognizing that even though policy has its limits, it can positively affect outcomes. State legislators do not operate schools, nor do foundation executives, nor even school board members.
At best, they can create the conditions whereby thoughtful and talented educators can teach children the things they need to be successful in life. Focusing on how to create those conditions, rather than on trying to engineer a particular outcome, will maximize the likelihood of long-term success.
Ultimately, no policy can succeed without securing a strong base of political support. Ideas need to be debated in the open, the proper channels need to be respected, and the hard work of convincing people has to be done in earnest. There is simply no other way. The Common Core State Standards offer a prime example of how this can go awry. To stand any real chance of success over the long term, that vision, and its tangible benefits, would have had to be embraced by a real constituency.
More often than not, research can only help us understand the various trade-offs at play in any decision we make about policy or practice — it might tell us, for example, that a particular approach has worked for some students and not others, or that it has led to student improvements on a certain measure but only when implemented in a very expensive way. For example, researchers with deep expertise in one area are frequently asked to weigh in on another. In closing. The world of education reform needs to get more comfortable with complexity.
More often than not, contextual factors affect the implementation of policies and even the definition of success and failure. This is not a bad thing. We live in a big, diverse, pluralistic nation that draws tremendous strength from the wide spectrum of ideas and opinions that our citizens possess. Our political process, frustrating though it may be, winnows and refines ideas, and our decentralized, federal system allows for experimentation and pressure-testing.
All of this informs and shapes policy, and, when channeled to productive ends, makes policies better. We do not want people to walk away from this article as nihilists. The purpose here is not to argue that nothing will ever work or that all sins can be washed away by saying that success is context-dependent. Rather, we hope that readers will examine policies with humility, recognizing that even though policy has its limits, it can positively affect outcomes. We hope they will also have more faith, and invest more time and energy, in our political process to put policies through the necessary paces and get them enacted with real support.
Rather, we hope that they will agree that small improvements can and should be woven into our broader understanding of educational improvement and can help our school system move forward.
Elmore, R. Backward mapping: Implementation research and policy decisions. Political Science Quarterly, 94 4 , Von Hayek, F. The pretence of knowledge. The Swedish Journal of Economics, 77 4 , Wilson, J. Citation: Greene, J. Learning from failure. Phi Delta Kappan 99 8 , I found it interesting that the panel that discussed failure was composed entirely of college and foundation elites. We know good teaching and learning when we see it in action because teaching is as much art as science.
Some are even meant to politically or culturally change society — various utopias might then emerge! Does that sound like a self-serving bunch? Would they support something that would put them out of business? Your email address will not be published. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. The dynamic tension at the core of the grammar of schooling. Possible futures: What might we accomplish in 25 years?
The top and bottom of leadership and change. Reformers have operated under an extremely unsophisticated view of the educational landscape and how best to influence it. This causes two fundamental errors.
First, they target their improvement efforts on a limited and weak set of levers for change. Secondly, they undertake solutions that have either little or no basis in research or experiential support. Reformers fundamentally misunderstand how schools and districts work. These strategies fail to appreciate the complex factors that impact school quality and the appropriate places to focus improvement efforts. Other direct and more powerful leverage points have been shown to influence educational performance more than those areas traditionally targeted by reformers.
Schools are complicated. Among the factors that influence school quality and student achievement are:. Any successful improvement effort must include strategies to improve the performance of each of these major stakeholders and, crucially, engage them in working toward a common goal. This requires a much more positive, comprehensive, and considered approach than the school reform community has offered thus far.
An example of comprehensive policy can be found in Greatness by Design , which was developed for California by Tom Torlakson, the state superintendent of public instruction. He formed a prestigious commission chaired by Linda Darling-Hammond, one of the most respected school improvement researchers in the country, and Chris Steinhauser, superintendent of the Long Beach Unified School District, which was designated one of the top districts in the world.
The resulting policy document is a superb example of the more supportive and comprehensive strategy needed. An example of policy that addresses all the necessary components of reform at the district level is the Leadership Planning Guide California , which was produced by the California Consortium for the Implementation of the Common Core State Standards. These topics are fully covered in Lessons Learned from Successful Districts.
Unfortunately, the specific measures in the reform playbook rely on discredited and faulty assumptions about the best ways to improve schools. This is why these individual reforms have produced limited or nonexistent results. The rest of this article focuses on two of the faulty assumptions of the school reform movement: the belief that threats, pressure, and incentives work and the use of standardized math and reading test scores as the most important measures of student learning.
For a detailed discussion of the lack of overall success of conventional reform initiatives, see Have High-Stakes Testing and Privatization Been Effective? Schools and teachers must be held accountable. Almost all school staffs want to do the best job possible. As professionals, they desire to perfect their performance and improve student achievement, but they do not necessarily possess the strategic or tactical know-how to accomplish those goals.
Many work in extremely difficult school situations—bereft of capacity-building resources and student social supports such as health clinics, isolated from collaborating with other teachers, and lacking structures and techniques to help them grow professionally. The fear engendered by high-stakes accountability makes the situation worse by narrowing the curriculum, focusing on test preparation to the detriment of deeper learning, gaming the system, discouraging collaboration, and increasing widespread disaffection.
A more productive strategy relies on a positive, engaging approach and concentrates on developing the leadership and infrastructure to bolster continuous improvement efforts of all teachers at a school. The punitive strategy of Test-and-Punish has little evidentiary support and only meager backing from questionable research conducted by a few economists. For example, Milton Friedman and Eric Hanushek have argued that improvement will occur only if strong incentives push schools and districts to upgrade.
Reformers have leaned heavily on those ideas—advocating the necessity of competition, consequences, and high-stakes evaluation. However, the belief that positive or negative incentives work has been thoroughly discredited by a long history of findings that show such strategies do not produce improved student performance. Hout and Elliot reviewed the research on incentives, specifically whether positive incentives such as bonuses for teachers or negative incentives such as threats of dismissal had any positive effect.
They found that these policies did not produce improvements in student achievement nor bring about changes in instruction. Fifty years ago, W. Edwards Deming warned of the negative side effects of an overreliance on evaluation strategies. Fear tends to make employees disengage, narrow their efforts, or game the system so they appear compliant. It diverts attention from and diminishes motivation to participate in developing cooperative teams and structures for continuous improvement.
The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor. A New York Times opinion piece by Robert Wachter , a prominent physician, reinforces the point that emphasis on evaluation of teachers, or doctors, actually causes more harm than good.
Specifically, reliance on incentive schemes hampers or diverts attention from collaboration—one of the main strategies for improving school performance. In fact, in The Missing Link in School Reform , Carrie Leana argues that collaboration at the school site is the most powerful strategy for improving instruction. She found that instructional conversation and help from fellow teachers outweigh all other improvement initiatives. Professor Leana calls into question school reforms that pursue test-driven rewards and punishments.
Since, according to Professor Leana, only about an estimated five percent of US schools are actually managed this way, the unrealized potential in expanding this approach far outweighs other strategies. Team building around powerful instruction and curriculum should be one of our major priorities.
She also emphasizes that this approach requires:. Esther Quintero , a management expert, has published a series of articles on the crucial importance of building social capital. In addition to being ineffective, pressure and illegitimate negative incentives lower morale and undermine positive working conditions at the school site—another key component of successful school improvement.
A post by John Papay and Matthew Kraft summarized the research on the importance of a positive professional environment :. Put simply, teachers who work in supportive contexts stay in the classroom longer, and improve at faster rates, than their peers in less-supportive environments. And, what appear to matter most about the school context are not the traditional working conditions we often think of, such as modern facilities and well-equipped classrooms.
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