Journal #3 Assignment

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How Schools

Change Reforms

People usually ask: how do reforms change schoolsT Here we examine the reverse: how schools change reforms. Some innovations seem to die on contact with the institutional reality of the school. It is the rare reform that performs and persists precisely according to plan. Even long-lasting reforms are not static but evolve in ways often not foreseen by their proponents.l

Although policyrnakers may lament that their plans become trans- formed in practice, another view is equally plausible. Goals and plans might be construed as hypotheses; alterations of policies in practice might then be expected as institutional facts of life. If policymakers anticipate and encourage adaptations of their plans, they can design reforms to produce hybrids that are blends of the new and the old, the cosmopolitan and the local,2

When reforms do not work out in practice as planned, people tend to give different explanations. Some blame educators. Technocrats may assume that their policies are fine but believe that educators lack the competence-or, more politely, capacity-to implement plans as they were intended. Some social reformers eager to use schools to ameliorate society accuse educators of coopting the reforms, distorting them, or turning them to their own benefit. This kind of goal displacement sug- gests corruption of a noble dream by bureaucrats who consult narrow institutional interests, or their own self-interest, rather than the public good.r

Not surprisingly, practitioners typically arrivc itt it tltrilt' tlil'l't'rcrrt in- tcrprctirti()tl: clitc policytnakers rar.,ly l<ttou' rvlt:tt tt lt,xtls l,',rlly rrt't'..1 rttltl

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How Scbools Cbange Reforms

to live with new mandates from distant legislators and administrative agencies is to adapt innovations to local circumstance, or comply in minimal ways, or sabotage unwanted reforms. And skeptical educators suspect that some reforms were never intended to work. Symbolic ges- tures, and the overpromising that accompanies them, have at times interested policymakers more than substance.a

'Producing sonorous rhetoric about solving social problems through education is easier than carrying out fundamental social change through schooling. Some advocates of home economics, as we mentioned, argued that it would halt the rise in divorce, buttress the family, and atffact u/omen back to traditional roles. In practice, young women learned to make white sauce and stitch seams, while divorce continued to increase, f.amtly patterns to change, and women to enter the public sphere. Often reforms as implemented only chipped away at the obdurate problems they were expected to solve.5

Since schools have almost always changed reforms, it is useful to ask what people mean when they talk of "success" or "failure" in school reform. Consider three criteria: fidelity to the original design; effective- ness in meeting preset outcomes; and longevity.

In one model of rational decision making in school reform, expefts analyze problems, devise soludons, and then see if the reforri is carried out according to plan. Does implementation get high marks for fidelity? The answer may be "yes," yet the benefit of the reform may be question- able. An illustration is one of James Bryant Conant's major prescriptions in 1959 for a good high school. Believing that there were too many small high schools, Conant called for graduating classes of at least one hundred students. In the 1960s educational leaders and state legislators worked hard to consolidate small rural secondary schools and to build large high schools in suburbs and cities. They succeedqd in weeding out most very small high schools. \7as this, then, a "successful" reform? In terms of Conant's plan, yes. But a generation after Conant's report, close ob- servers of secondary education were complaining that large high schools produced feelings of alienation and anonymity among students and iso- lation among staff. Fidelity to plan without continuing attention to unintended by-products masks mistakes.6

A second measure of "success" is effectiveness in meeting preset outcomes. Accountability in terms of improved test scores has been common during the last generation. ![hen reforms fail to produce pre- dicted results, pessinrism often ensues, In the i970s two scholars sur- veyccl a vrrric'.| sct ol'cducatiorral cxpcrinrcnts designed to reveal which innovaliotrs lr;r.l irt'lrit'vcrl srrlrr:rior 1r'r'rlt'lt:r'rrrirrcrl goals. VThen they

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1 How Scbools Cbange Reforms

found that none had, they subtitled their book Should'We Giue Up or Try Hard.er? A problem with defining "success" as meeting predeter- mined goals-say, raising the IQs of litde children through Head Start- is that some of the most significant dimensions of actual programs, both positive and negative, may not be captured by the measured outcomes.T

If reformers attend only to fidelity to plan and to achievement of predetermined goals, they may ignore unintended consequences. Such unforeseen results are typically thought to be perverse. Alben O. Hirschman points out that "'unintended' easily slides over to 'undesired' and from there to 'undesirable,"' A shorthand way to express this notion of perverse results, he writes, is "euerytbing backfi.res." In the 1980s, for example, state laws mandating minimum competency testing put pres- sure on teachers to teach students to take the test and to stress the "basics" by using "drill-and-kill" rote methods. An unintended result was inattention to complex thinking skills and to the challenge of fitting the curriculum to the cultural backgrounds of the students.s

But not all unforeseen consequences are unfortunate. Legislators passed laws in the 1980s requiring all students-boys and girls alike-to take more courses in mathematics and science. Policymakers were seek- ing to strengthen the academic basics; the laws did not explicitly promote gender equity. But a positive unintended consequence was that girls took fewer traditionally "female" electives and became better prepared to enter scientific and technical fields if they so chose. Previously, lack of such a background had narrowed career options for many young women.9

How useful is longevity as a criterion of "success" in school reform? Assessing how long a reform lasted turns out to be a difficult task. An innovation may have changed so much over time that it bears little resemblance to the initial reform, even though it continues to have the same name and hence to be thought of as having a long life. One example is the "continuation school," which once was a part-time institution for employed youth, but which became a school of last resort for students unsuccessful or disruptive in regular high schools. By contrast, some reforms have faded to the point where few people even recognize their names, but some of their key practices became embedded in schools. The Dalton Plan of individualized study, discussed in the next chapter, illus- trates this pattern of longevity.l0

In addition, longevity does not necessarily equate with benefits to students. Some long-lived reforms created new problenrs. The graded school, with its annual assessments for pr<lmotiotr, gt'ttt'r:tlul ncw oppor- tr.rtritics lill lailurt' ll()r l)[('\cnI in thc ttottgt':ttlt'.1 s, lt.,,,ls tlrlrt prccetlctl

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How Schools Cbange Reforrns

them, such as the rural one-room school. Likewise,IQ testing and abfity grouping have met the test of longevity, but critics argue that rhese reforms have fostered discrimination against students from poor families. By conmast, some acclaimed reforms, such as those sponsored by the Progressive Education Association in rhe Eight-Year Study in the 1930s, had a short (but happy) life before curriculum and pedagogy returned to traditional partems. Even though such reforms may have faded over time, at their peak they energized both teachers and students.ll

As the difficulty of judging the "success" of a reform illustrares, the story of how schools have changed reforms is very complex. \Ve find it useful to think of reform plans not as clearly mandated policies but as concepts to be evaluated on the basis of their practical effects, positive and negative, and then reframed accordingly. This is what the pragmatist philosopher John Dewey proposed and practiced, \X/hen he found that progressive educators who purponed to be his "disciples" were down- playing the importance of coherenr subject marter and condoning ill- mannered behavior of students, he reformulated his progressive principles. Aims and practices, he thought, should be in conrinuous interaction.l2

In this chapter we use case studies to explore how schools have changed reforms. First, we look ar the history of two major structural and pedagogical reforms, the kindergarren and the junior high school. Here we examine the reformers' goals and the ways in which the two reforms, originally intended to be distincive educational niches, came under institutional pressure to adapt to the rest of the system. In part, the kindergarten and junior high school did become assimilated to es- tablished practices, but they also helped to introduce new ways of thinking and new practices.

Next, we look at interactions of reforms with each other. For the most part, reforms tend to accumulate, one on top of another, adding to rather than simply replacing whar went before. Reformers in New York City, for example, have sought in successive periods to improve education by changing the governance of the schools. But whether they wanted to centralize or decentralize control, reformers could not start with a clean political and institutional slate. Each governance reform built on layers of previous changes going back more rhan a cenrury. Under such circum- stances, the complexity of running a vast system makes "school govern- ance" sound like an oxymoron.

\We also discuss what happens when diffcrent kinds of instructjonal relorms intcrllct irr rapid succession, as hrrs occtrrrcd in the last dccaclc. l)rirclitiorrt'r's lrrrvt. l:rtr.tl il surllc ol lrt.rv lrrws, rr.gtrlrrliorrs, irnrl rcl()nll

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I i,k'irs totrrinH ()n l()l) ol lr syslt'rrr ol ctrrricrrlrrrrr anrl insllrrttt()tr llritt wlts :rlrc:rtly nrirtry laycrs rlcclr irr 1>altially assinrilated innovations. ()ltcn the messagcs seDt by policy elites iD any one year's laws or regulations have conflicted with what went before or came after, creating inconsistency and confusion.

If the aims of reforms seem vague, contradictory or unartainable, educators often respond by turning reforms into something they have already learned how to do. Policy means often are inconsistent with policy goals. The talk this year may be about "excellence," but if teachers respond by coaching students for minimum comperency tests-a ractic they used to sadsfy last year's critics-the results are counrerproductive.ll

Finally, agreeing with Lee Shulman that teachers have their own "wis- dom of practice," we explore ways in which pride of place in shaping school reform need not go mosdy to policy elites, Instead, we suggest, reforms can be deliberately designed to be hybridized to fit local circum- stances. In this way, educators can adapt innovations to the ongoing lives of their schools and seek to create coherence where it counts the most- in classroom instruction,14

Interactions of Reforms with Schools

The reformers who created kindergartens and junior high schools be- lieved that they should be distinctive institutions, antidores to the faults of public schools rather than simply new rungs on the existing ladder of grades in elementary and high schools. At the same time, however, these institutional innovations were lodged in public school systems whose practices slowly altered the original designs. Not surprisingly, both the kinderganen and the junior high school came ro resemble and serve the pimary grades and the high school into which their graduates moved. Influences did not move in one direction only, however; both kindergar- tens and junior high schools also shaped philosophy and practice in the school systems that surrounded them.

The Kindergarten

As Barbara Beatty obsenres, nineteenth-century pioneers in the kinder- g rten movement "were highly critical of the traditional school curricu- lum." Elizabeth Peabody, an advocate of the "children's garden," believed that the graded public school treated students as automata, learning machines, rather than as spontaneous, curious, active, impres- sionable children. She urged kindergartners (the term then used to

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dcscrilrc tcircltcrs, ll()t slu(l('nls) t() tlclrt thcir'pupils as "clriltllcn iu socicty il commonwcalth ol rc1>ublic of childrcn," to bc contrasted "in every particular, with the old-fashioned school, which is an absolute monarchy." Children, she believed, achieved social and intellectual de- velopment through organized games, music, gardening, art work, social- ized play, and gymnastics-not by sitting sileprl, at bolted-down desks until called on to do rote recitations.l5

Reformers expected the kindergarten to be a cure for urban social evils as well as a model of education for young children. German refugees from the Revolution of tg+g had founded the early American kindergar- tens (based on the theories of Friedrich Froebel). Peabody staned the fust English-speaking kindergarten in Boston in 1860. In the next two decades private kindergartens serving the middle and upper classes spread rapidly across the East and Midwest. Philanthropists soon con- cluded that the institution would also benefit the children of the urban poor as a kind of "preventive charity" to counteract the pauperism and vice that awaited them otherwise.l6

Elite women in large cities across the nation embraced kindergarten work as a social mission of child saving. In private kindergartens in slum neighborhoods the teachers went beyond the standard Froebelian cur- riculum and fed the pupils breakfast, washed them, and attended to their health. They reached out to create a bridge between home and school. Often the middle-class, native-bom teachers in these charity, or "free," kindergartens spent their afternoons visiting mothers in crowded tene- ments to instruct them in the ABCs of cleanliness, citizenship, and proper child-raising. An elementary school teacher in San Francisco wrote her superintendent in 1892 about the wonderful results of kindergarten training. As the children pour into kindergartens from crowded tene- ments, she said, "I hear no more . . . the wild phrases of the Barbary Coast or the mule-drivers' oaths. The little ones are clean, self-respecting, eager for knowledge." They leam "to respect older people, to be honest, and to tell the truth. It is a rare thing now to find a child that does not know it is wrong to steal. If you meet one, you may be sure that he has never been to kindergarten."lT

Kindergartens proved to be popular with parents, social reformers, setdement house workers, women's groups, unions, foundations, experts in "child study," and philanthropists. \(/hen it became apparent that private charity schools could not keep up with the demand from parents, these groups lobbied to include kindergartens as a regulat pafi. of the public school systems (especially in large cities). Already hard pressed to provide enough elementary classrooms for the onrush of immigrant

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