It may seem, as one presenter at ASCD's 48th Annual Conference in Washington, D.C., put it, that not much about schools has changed in the 10 years since the landmark report A Nation At Risk was published. Achievement scores are flat, businesses still harp on the deficiencies of high school graduates, and educators continue to be asked to solve one social problem after another.
But, in fact, the decade since the National Commission on Excellence in Education's report was issued has been marked by an unprecedented range of efforts to change schools to match the needs of a vastly different society, speakers said. And if those changes have not yet brought about the hoped-for advances in student learning, it's not for lack of effort.
The major education theme of the past decade is "the persistence of our school reform activities," Joyce Epstein of Johns Hopkins University told those gathered at the annual John Dewey Society lecture. "These 10 years have been a continuous line of action."
Epstein and other speakers shared a belief that school reform efforts in the 1980s fell short, in part, because they advocated "more of the same": longer school days or years, more required courses, more testing. Further, many reforms were piecemeal. As a result, reforms sometimes were contradictory, as when state curriculum guides pushed critical thinking while state assessment programs relied on multiple-choice tests of basic skills.
A New System
As experts now see it, school improvement must go further in questioning our present educational practices and trying new ones. In addition, several speakers said at ASCD's meeting, educational change must reflect a systemic orientation that accounts for how reforms fit together.
"We are now talking about the system of education, not simply about schools," said Frank Newman, president of the Education Commission of the States. To some extent, he said, state and federal policymakers are attending more to how the components of the education system interact.
At another conference session, Phil Schlechty, president of the Center for Leadership and School Reform, said that "schoolhouse-by-schoolhouse reform" will never add up to the wholesale changes needed in American education. "You can't change one piece of the system without changing all pieces of the system," he said. "You've got to be systemic." Said Newman: "The pieces that aren't changed drag the schools back to the old system."
Several speakers noted that—in spite of the limitations of the education bureaucracy—some individual schools have changed dramatically to better serve their students. Newman, for example, estimated that about 10 percent of schools nationwide are involved in some way in "restructuring" their programs. Still, he noted, "we will, in the end, kill" these efforts "unless we change the whole system while we're getting schools to restructure."
- Schools will shift fundamentally from a system for sorting students to an institution that helps all children learn.
- Students will be rewarded for "meeting expectations and goals," not merely accumulating "seat time."
- Similarly, schools will be held accountable for meeting outcomes, not merely following rules and regulations.
- Instruction will focus on fostering active, rather than passive, learning.
Capacity for Change
Perhaps the most important feature of the new education system would be its capacity for continuous change and self-renewal, several speakers said. Public bureaucracies traditionally have had "maintenance," rather than "development," at their cores, Schlechty pointed out. Yet staff development—which would contribute to the ability of educators to improve their work—is frequently the first area cut in tight budget times, he added.
Carl Glickman of the University of Georgia also emphasized the importance of establishing a culture of self-renewal in schools. For school renewal to succeed, he said, the process should be ongoing, not a response to a crisis. He advocated a focus on the "core principles and practices that will stay the course"—those that help prepare students to engage productively in a democratic society.
The combination of school-based renewal and changes in the larger education systems to support this renewal is seen as the right mix to bring about widespread improvements in American education. While it may not appear that much progress is being made, "what is happening is so slow and incremental that we don't always see it," Newman asserted. And he reminded ASCD conference-goers that changes are often easier to see in hindsight. Those skeptical of the notion that schools have changed in the past decade, he said, should take a lesson from King George III's diary—the one whose entry for July 4, 1776 reads: "Nothing much happened today."
