The Future of Educational Change

International Perspectives

Ciaran Sugrue

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781134084661
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This timely book provides a systematic overview and critique of contemporary approaches to educational change from some of the best-known writers and scholars in the field, including Andy Hargreaves, Larry Cuban, Ivor Goodson, Jeannie Oakes, Milbrey McLaughlin, Judyth Sachs and Ann Liebermann.

Divided into four sections, the book addresses the key themes:

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• What has been the impact of educational change?

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• How has the impact differed in different circumstances?

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• What are the new directions for research on policy and practice?

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• How can we link research, policy and practice?

By highlighting critical lessons from the past, the book aims to set an agenda for policy-related research and the future trajectories of educational reforms, while also taking into account the dominant rhetorics of international 'social movements' and the 'refracted' nature of policy agenda at national and local levels.

This book addresses issues which with many educators around the world are currently grappling. It will appeal to academics and researchers in the field, as well as providing an introduction to key issues and themes in Educational Change for graduates and practitioners.

Part I
Educational change

For better or for worse?

1
The coming of post-standardization

Three weddings and a funeral

Andy Hargreaves

I

We are entering an age of post-standardization. Having reached a plateau of improvement in tested achievement, and a crisis of demographic renewal in teaching and leadership, most Anglo-Saxon and other developed countries are leaving behind policies that force up standards and results at any price. England’s National Literacy Strategy and Primary School Targets, the US’s gruelling process of Adequate Yearly Progress, Ontario’s strategy to reach provincial tested targets within one electoral term that vary only by one year and 5 per cent from the English benchmark from which they were borrowed, as well as Australia’s Federal literacy test that takes the achievement and education agenda away from politically more left of centre states – these are the dying embers of a reform fire that is burning itself to a cinder.

In UNICEF’s 2007 survey of child well-being in some of the world’s richest countries, the English-speaking countries of the UK and the US perform particularly badly, ranking dead last and next to last out of more than 20 countries in total (UNICEF 2007). Prevalence of high-risk health behaviours is especially disturbing in these countries. Canada performs better overall – ranking twelfth on the list – but its results are paradoxical. Children do very well in educational wellbeing as measured by achievement tests and also in terms of excessive material well-being; but in health, family and peer relationships, and self-perceived well-being, Canadians too perform very badly. The lights are on in Canada, but nobody’s home.

So it is curious why educational reformers and strategists should, in the last 15 years, have been so enamoured of the policies of standardization, intrusive intervention and market competition propagated by the Disunited Kingdom and Disunited States, whose people spend more hours in the workplace than almost all their international peers (McKibben, 2007; Reich, 1999; Rifkin, 2004), who live and work in countries of rapidly growing gaps between rich and poor, and who seemingly contribute so little to the well-being of their children.

Unwilling to take responsibility for dampening the acquisitive and competitive ethic that drives the Anglo-Saxon economies, the Disunited States and the Disunited Kingdom shift the burden of blame and the remit for redemption on to schools and educators (Berliner, 2006). This occurs, first, through an intensified emphasis on increased attainment and higher standards that only adds to the ethos of anxious competitiveness that already exists, and second, through a multitude of initiatives to mop up the social consequences through earlier and earlier childhood intervention and increasing provision for extra tuition and after-school care. The insatiable economy eats up more and more family time, and through its teachers and child-workers, the state intervenes and intrudes earlier and more often into the lives of the children that are left behind. The result is like prescribing drugs to treat the side effects of previous ones – an untoward emphasis on competitive measured achievement, leading to an excess of initiatives designed to cope with the consequences of excessive material and educational competitiveness.

The result of the age of high-stakes and high-pressure standardization where short-term gains in measurable results are demanded at any price, is that many schools in Anglo-Saxon countries have begun to turn into ethical Enrons of educational change (Batstone, 2003). In Sustainable Leadership, Dean Fink and I pointed to the relevant evidence (Hargreaves and Fink, 2006):

• England’s National Literacy Strategy and national target setting strategy repeatedly failed to reach their goals, reached a plateau after quick-fix strategies had been exhausted, and produced increments in achievement that were criticized for being largely illusory – a consequence of test items becoming progressively easier.

• The so-called miracle of improvement in Texas schools demonstrated outstanding gains in achievement only on the state tests for which students were prepared, not on national tests for which they had not.

• Early gains in test scores were often secured by concentrating largely on ‘bubble kids’ who fell just below the passing mark, so that disproportionate attention to increases of just a few per cent among them created appearances of widespread systems gains for schools as a whole – with a concomitant neglect of more seriously underperforming students who fell far below the zone.

• Narrowing the curriculum to focus predominantly on literacy and maths in prescribed and tested programs closed the achievement gap in basic, tested skills, but not in the medium and higher levels of proficiency that give access to knowledge economy opportunities.

• In the UK and US, there has been an inverse relationship between improvements in tested literacy achievement and rates of reading for pleasure.

• The tunnel vision of curriculum that concentrates too much on separately taught literacy and numeracy has been eliminating arts, social studies and health education from the curriculum, making cultural philistines, geographic xenophobes and obese desk potatoes of the next generation. In California, this is now nicknamed the 3-2-1 curriculum: a daily dose of 3 periods of English, 2 of maths, and one of physical education.

• Denied their powers of discretionary professional judgement, diverted from their core mission of deep and broad learning for all students, depleted by the overwhelming workloads required to achieve dramatic test gains in the time periods required, and demoralized by cultures of administrative culpability and political fear if results fail to materialize, the education profession has faced a crisis of recruitment and retention. These shortages also extend into leadership where large numbers of highly qualified administrators have not wanted to take on the ‘big job’ once they get as far as the assistant principal’s office.

All systems and strategies eventually reach their limit. Leaders become overconfident. Bullies get bored. Statistical improvement curves start to taper off. Evidence surfaces that results were misleading, announcements of victory were premature, promising experiments have not spread and early momentum cannot be sustained. New problems emerge, some a result of the strategies themselves, and existing solutions do not work for them. In the face of a fast-moving global economy, the demand for basic skills gives way to calls for more innovation and creativity (New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce, 2007). In organizations and in politics, generations turn over, and change agendas turn over with them. Today’s gurus become yesterday’s news. Governments change and the focus shifts elsewhere. This is when Kuhnian paradigm shifts begin to occur.

II

The first signs of a paradigm shift are when we start to use the word ‘post’: postindustrial, postcapitalist, postmodern. These epithets point to a world we are leaving behind with only clues and indications, but not yet clear patterns, of what is to come. What are these clues and patterns in an age of post-standardization?

First, there is erosion and eradication of existing patterns – the abolition of all educational testing up to and including age 14, in Wales (Welsh Assembly Government, 2006); the introduction of more flexible testing regimes for primary school pupils in the UK (Gilbert, 2006); the easing of regulations regarding what counts as Adequate Yearly Progress in the US; the formal agreement of a period of peace and stability between teacher unions and the Government of Ontario (Fullan, 2007).

Then, as the existing order shrinks, its remnants are reasserted with grim tenacity: the government’s and inspectorate’s (expanded) redefinition of failure in the UK to legitimize continuing political intervention; or the imported and imposed emphasis on tested literacy in already high performing Ontario, notwithstanding the province’s countervailing increases in professional support and networks.

At the same time, organizations and nations that lagged behind or resisted the reform agenda in the previous era, like Scotland, Ireland or the Nordic countries, are still pulled towards it, but in a more modest and circumspect way, as global change agents seek a reconciliation of old and new strategies for change.

Next, new initiatives as well as recycled innovations from former eras that re-energize those who bear the memory of them, begin to emerge and then proliferate in political cultures of increased experimentation. England establishes a government Innovations Unit; networks for interconnected school-based innovation abound in Australia, the UK, Germany, Alberta and British Columbia; self evaluation gains credence alongside external inspection; professionally shared targets start to replace government-imposed ones; interdisciplinarity is reinvented, creativity makes a comeback and evidence-based improvement emerges almost everywhere.

Internationally, high-level advisors and officials exchange promising ideas and sometimes carry them personally from one jurisdiction to another. Ontario’s Premier visits Britain’s Prime Minister; South Australia’s leading educational bureaucrat goes to work for the Minister of Education in Wales. Change gurus also circulate ideas about strategy around the world. Michael Barber leaves Tony Blair’s office to advise reformers and Foundations in the United States; Michael Fullan develops a model of tri-level reform with five jurisdictions across the world; David Hopkins promotes initiatives to develop cross-school systemic leadership with OECD after advising the UK Secretary of State for Education on these matters in his former post; and New York hires dozens of literacy coaches and strategists from Australia and inspection/self-evaluation experts from Britain to raise standards in the city. International organizations then adopt and advocate for the strategies and directions that show greatest promise, as in the OECD’s (2004) emphasis on redesigning the teaching profession to be able to teach in and prepare young people for high performing knowledge economies, the World Bank’s shift from increasing access and accountability to improving quality (Hargreaves and Shaw, 2006), and UNESCO’s (2005) world-leading emphasis on Education For Sustainable Development.

Meanwhile, a retiring Boomer generation of teachers and leaders precipitates a demographic shortfall of replacements (OECD 2004). In order to entice new candidates, and in line with the evidence of history, power and control begin to move back from the bureaucracy to the profession. The emergent generation who will be the demographic drivers of the profession over the next three decades bring new missions and dispositions to it in terms of assertiveness, change management and work–life balance (Goodson et al., 2006).

Eventually, from an initial period of chaos and cacophony in innovation, with its attendant feelings of overload, emerging directions become clear, new orthodoxies evolve, and fresh professional language and discourse begin to justify and activate them. Britain’s John Dunsford, Exec...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Educational change
• Part II Educational change
• Part III Educational change
• Part IV Educational change
• Epilogue
• Index