Efforts to improve American education are at an impasse. Some schools excel but many others struggle. Policymakers respond by introducing new policies and regulations aimed at “fixing” all schools, whether they need it or not. Some of the top schools figure out how to use (or subvert) the system and continue to excel. Other schools, weighed down by the constant demands of “bucking the system,” slip into mediocrity. Still others are so troubled that they are unable to satisfy the system's demands for accountability and appear destined for continued failure.
While public schools have always varied in quality, the demands placed on the education system have risen substantially in the past decade. Instead of being charged with ensuring students' minimum competence, schools are now being asked to dramatically increase the level of performance of all their pupils. As a result, more and more policymakers are turning their attention to a central issue: can America's entire education system (actually composed of thousands of smaller systems) be rebuilt to ensure that schools educating students to world-class standards will be the norm rather than the exception? Moreover, can the education system begin to encourage, rather than thwart, the pockets of change and innovation already in existence—and help other schools to do the same?
Advocates of systemic change (or systemic reform, as some call it) believe that no amount of fine-tuning will result in large numbers of schools capable of meeting future demands. Instead, they assert, the education system itself must be rebuilt to support, encourage—and demand—that schools meet new, higher standards of performance. And that, experts say, will entail turning a fundamentally conservative public institution into one able to continually transform and renew itself.
The United States has embarked on an “untried effort to create a new and different system of education,” suggests Frank Newman, president of the Education Commission of the States (ECS). The question, he believes, is: “Can publicly operated enterprises become exciting, performance-oriented, efficient, change-oriented” institutions?
Lessons from the 1980s
The current push for systemic change in education is strongly influenced by the lessons from state-led education reform during the 1980s. In state after state following the publication of A Nation at Risk (National Commission on Excellence in Education 1983), legislatures passed volumes of new education regulations and policies. But even if those reforms could be considered “comprehensive,” critics say, they frequently failed to spur systemwide improvement.
Although numerous states enacted omnibus education bills, “they were individual pieces of legislation,” explains Susan Fuhrman, who directs the Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE). “They weren't substantively connected, and they were frequently contradictory.” For example, she says, some states passed legislation raising the standards for entry into the teaching force—while also setting up “loopholes” of emergency certification for shortage areas. Others passed laws mandating new basic skills tests while mouthing support for higher-order thinking skills.
Fuhrman believes the unclear signals about what schools should achieve, combined with the lack of a supportive policy structure for schools trying to improve, helped to prevent widespread school improvement during the past decade.
“There's a lot of frustration at the school level about having to deal with conflicting demands,” says Fuhrman. Moreover, “while many entrepreneurial schools managed to ignore the chaos and do what they wanted, they generally were not able to sustain their efforts over time. They just got tired of bucking the system.” Finally, “because the system did not support school-based improvement, we never found a way to spread the terrific things going on in individual schools.
“I see systemic reform as a way to support the kind of school-based reform that has a lot of people very energized,” Fuhrman adds.
Definition Unclear
Although calls for “systemic change” or “systemic reform” have become increasingly common, both terms mean different things to different people.
Politicians, for example, have incorporated the term “systemic reform” into their stock speeches on education. Typically, they mean that all schools in the education system must improve dramatically to meet new challenges. The term is also used loosely to describe any effort to address several elements of the education system in a comprehensive fashion. Others, drawing upon the work of scholars such as Peter Senge (1990), author of The Fifth Discipline, stress the dynamic interaction among all components of various systems. They emphasize the need to help schools build their capacities to become “learning organizations.” And they underscore the need to consider the relationships between the education systems and other systems—such as health care or social welfare.
The most commonly cited explanation of systemic reform currently in circulation is contained in the work conducted by a number of scholars affiliated with CPRE, a consortium of six universities. That work, encompassing numerous articles and several books, stresses the state's role in developing challenging student outcomes around which school policies would be aligned. Marshall Smith, formerly of Stanford University and now Undersecretary of the U.S. Department of Education (See p. 12), is considered a key architect of the model of systemic reform advanced by the Consortium—an approach one observer dubs the “standards-driven alignment model.”
- A unifying vision and goals describing what schools should be like. These goals should be communicated and measurable.
- A coherent system of instructional guidance. Agreement must be reached on a core body of challenging and engaging knowledge, skills, and problem-solving capacities as goals for all students. Then the various key elements affecting instruction—curriculum frameworks, curricular materials, professional development, and accountability assessment—must be redesigned to align with the goals for students.
- A restructured governance system. States would focus on developing, through a consensual process, the student outcomes and the accountability structure, while schools would enjoy more flexibility to determine instructional means to achieve desired outcomes.
If there is a common thread among the various interpretations of systemic change, it is a belief that change in one component of a system affects everything else in that system—and that various pieces of the system must be better aligned toward achieving common ends. If some components of the education system are left untouched, “the pieces that aren't changed drag schools back to the old system,” says Newman.
An American Twist
Although conceptions of systemic change differ, some experts see promising signs of movement in this direction at the local, state, and national levels. Still, most admit that, owing to America's unique political structure and traditions, the drive for systemic change is proceeding—ironically—somewhat unsystemically. Unlike nations such as Japan or France, whose strong federal structures allow easier alignment of policies affecting curriculum, testing, and so on, the United States has no strong centralized educational program. So districts, states, and the nation as a whole are pursuing various pieces of the systemic reform agenda in their own ways, although there are key linkages in the changes sought at each level.
At the national level, several major efforts have begun to support the vision of systemic reform advocated by Smith and others. Professionals and lay people, guided by the ground-breaking work of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, are developing content and performance standards in many subject areas. These are expected to have a heavy influence on student outcomes statements developed by states and on national assessment programs and textbooks. In addition, many practitioners already are drawing upon the standards in math, for example, as part of their local improvement efforts. The National Board of Professional Teaching Standards, which is developing a voluntary certification program for teachers, also is expected to use these content standards in its work.
The Clinton administration is touting its “Goals 2000: Educate America Act” as a federal contribution to systemic reform. One piece of the bill, currently being considered by Congress, would establish a new council to set criteria for voluntary national content standards and assessments—a move designed to coordinate standards efforts across the subject areas and the states. A second part of the bill authorizes nearly $400 million to support state efforts at systemic reform linked to challenging content standards.
Several states already have taken initial steps to rebuild their education systems along the lines suggested by CPRE. Most prominent is Kentucky, which was forced by court order to completely redesign its education system (See “Top Down—Bottom Up: Systemic Change in Kentucky,” p. 42). The state is restructuring its assessment, accountability, and professional development efforts, for example, around 75 “learner outcomes.” California, Texas, and South Carolina also are cited by policymakers as exemplars of the standards- or outcomes-driven alignment model.
Finally, hundreds of schools and school districts, either on their own or as part of regional or national change networks (for example, the Coalition of Essential Schools, the National Alliance for Restructuring Education), are attempting to incorporate some aspects of systemic change. Many, for example, are involved in outcome-based education, which stresses redesigning schools around learner outcomes. Others are experimenting with Total Quality Management, which requires looking deeply at how systems within schools interact. How these local innovations relate to the larger push for systemic change, however, is not yet clear.
Doubts Raised
Even as educators begin to refine their ideas about what systemic change actually means, many are raising questions about what they're hearing.
On paper, for example, the idea of aligning policies around a common vision of student outcomes makes eminent sense. But education policymaking is rarely so cleanly orchestrated. Education bills are usually deliberated one at a time (often changing shape in backroom deals), regulations are promulgated atop existing laws, and different committees have responsibilities for different turf. Meanwhile, legislators worry about coming up with “solutions” before the next election. None of these actions is conducive to long-range, systemic strategies for changing schools.
Another concern is that the standards-driven alignment model of systemic reform—which tends to be pushed by policymakers—doesn't fully account for either the complex nature of systems or the lessons learned from decades of school change efforts.
“Obviously, being clearer about outcomes, getting better assessment of change, and linking it to the curriculum—those are all good ideas, but I think what people need to realize is that there are no shortcuts to creating a dynamic system that works,” says Michael Fullan, education dean at the University of Toronto. “I'm not saying those things aren't important. But they often are seen as the `solution' rather than as a tool of the solution. And for them to be tools, there has to be broader thinking about how to use them.”
Systems thinking, Fullan adds, “is not the mere articulation of one element of a big system to another element. It's the recognition that elements dynamically interact. So that whatever happens with the family, or with the computer revolution, for example, is going to have an impact on the school. So systems thinking leads a school to be capable of really dealing with change on a continuous basis.”
Moreover, some experts argue that the systemic reform strategies currently being tried—like the state-led school reforms of the 1980s—overestimate the ability of centralized accountability and instructional guidance to bring about change in local classrooms. Such thinking, argues Stanford University Professor Larry Cuban (1993), wrongly assumes that “tuning up” the system will help all schools improve—even the bottom third of schools that proved impervious to top-down state reforms. During the 1980s, Cuban notes, efforts in California and other states to revamp their instructional guidance systems met with mixed results.
Building Capacity
Fullan and others say that any strategy for systemic reform must emphasize building the capacity of schools to renew themselves as much as it emphasizes new accountability or outcome-based policies. New content standards mean little, for example, if teacher preparation and staff development programs are not revamped to address them. One of the chief reasons that centrally led improvement efforts of the ‘80s failed to penetrate local classrooms is that relatively few resources were expended on professional development or other means of promoting school-based change. The absence of a revamped professional development system “is the Achilles heel of the best-designed systemic reform efforts,” says Stanford University Education Professor Michael Kirst.
Currently, a major battle is brewing at the federal level over whether content and student performance standards ought to be supplemented by “opportunity-to-learn” standards. The Clinton administration has proposed that a consortium develop “opportunity-to-learn” standards—which would address the “standards of quality” needed in such areas as professional development and curriculum quality—and make them available to states. But conservative legislators, buttressed by state groups such as the National Governors' Association, believe such a move would lead to costly mandates and shift the focus from “outcomes” to “inputs.” The outcome of the debate may send a strong signal regarding how much emphasis will be given to standards and policy coherence and how much to helping schools improve.
Another central issue facing systemic change efforts is what balance there ought to be between guidance from the top and bottom-up innovation. This may be the pivotal issue upon which rests the success or failure of systemic change efforts, some experts say. “Getting a million teachers to do exactly the same thing on the same day is not what's going to change the system,” says Rex Brown, senior fellow at ECS. “What we're looking for are ways to really get more diversity, because that's where the buy-in comes for achieving these robust goals. How we get from uniformly high standards to widely diverse ways of helping children achieve them is the fundamental question.”
A Paradox Facing Reformers
Given the uncertainties inherent in large-scale change, many observers are still guarded about the prospects for systemic change. As illustrated by the curriculum reforms of the 1960s, the effective schools movement of the ‘70s, and the restructuring efforts of the ‘80s, it is far easier to achieve success in one component of the system, or in a few schools, than on a larger scale. In a chapter of a recent book, David Cohen and James Spillane (1992) of Michigan State University capture both the allure and the elusiveness of systemic change.
“Most schemes for fundamental change present a paradox,” Cohen and Spillane note. “They offer appealing visions of a new order but also contain a devastating critique of existing realities, which, if pursued, reveals the lack of many capacities that would be required to realize and sustain the new vision. Reformers can imagine a better world in which those capacities would be created, but their problem is more practical: how to create the new world when those capacities are lacking.”
