Tipping Point: From Feckless Reform to Substantive Instructional Improvement

Abstract

Even though we already know best way to improve instruction, we persist in pursuing strategies that have repeatedly failed. Mr. Schmoker urges us to break free of our addiction to and large-scale reform. THERE ARE simple, proven, affordable structures that exist right now and could have a dramatic, widespread impact on schools and achievement -- in virtually any school. An astonishing level of agreement has emerged on this point. Indeed, Milbrey McLaughlin speaks for a legion of esteemed educators and researchers when she asserts that the most promising strategy for sustained, substantive school improvement is building capacity of school personnel to function as a professional (emphasis added).1 But here's problem. Such learning communities -- rightly defined -- are still extremely rare. For years, they have been supplanted and obscured by hugely popular, but patently discredited, and improvement models. The record is clear that these failed, unnecessarily complex reforms have had only most negligible impact on what should be our core concern: quality of teaching students receive. As Jim Collins has famously found, any organization attempting improvement must first confront brutal about itself.2 In our case, facts point to a fairly stark choice and an unprecedented opportunity for better schools. The place to begin is with a hard look at evidence against conventional and improvement efforts -- and at evidence that argues for right kind of learning communities. The Rise (and Fall) of 'Strategic Planning' In years since reform first became a byword in education circles, strategic planning has had a pervasive influence on and improvement efforts. It was given a big boost by people like William Cook (some called it Bill Cook model), an organizational theorist who eventually wrote a popular book on how to adapt for schools.3 The terms and trappings of this process reach into virtually every school and district. In late 1980s, I began to work closely with schools to develop such (sometimes comprehensive or systemic) plans. Led by sharp, well-intentioned people, work required days of dialogue involving large swaths of school and community stakeholders. There were procedures for conducting wide-ranging needs assessments; for writing lofty-sounding (but ultimately irrelevant) mission, vision, and belief statements; for reaching consensus, setting and listing steps and We then designated persons responsible, resources needed, evaluation, and timelines for abundance of goals, action steps, and objectives we had set. All of this was then transferred into fat, published plans, replete with columns and boxes for each term and category. Some of us began to notice that, once under way, juggernaut was hard to control. Invariably, we wound up committing to far more activities and initiatives than anyone could possibly monitor, much less successfully implement. In selecting professional or staff development activities that filled our plans, novelty and surface appeal overwhelmingly trumped evidence of school success -- or any direct connection to improvements in teaching. Clarity and coherence suffered. These processes were conducted with no clear definitions of key terms. We worked for years before we learned that right definition of was central to success: to have any impact on instruction, they had to be simple, measurable statements linked to student assessments -- not commitments to offer workshops or implement programs.4 It also took us a long time to learn that coherence required that number of goals be severely limited.5 We wound up setting an impossible number of even as word was used almost interchangeably with steps or objectives. …