Reforming the Wannabe Reformers: Why Education Reforms Almost Always End Up Making Things Worse.

Abstract

Mr. Pogrow uses his own experience and the history of education reform over the past 100 years to argue that the biggest problem in education is with the reformers themselves and with the academicians and researchers who develop the ideas and rationales for the reformers' pet reforms. For more than a decade, we have been buried in proposed reforms. Those responsible for this avalanche of reforms have taken the perspective that there are problems with the education establishment, problems with society, problems with the political structure, problems with current practice - in short, problems with everything except reformers and their proposed reforms. Reformers typically feel that their solutions would work if only people would get on board. When people do not jump on board, the reformers conclude that the practitioners are at fault or that the society is at fault for socializing individuals in ways that prevent them from appreciating the wisdom of the reforms. When the proposed reforms, lacking popular support, inevitably end up not working, the refrain is that the reforms were implemented in style but not in substance. Once again, the practitioners are at fault. I will argue that the biggest problem in education is with the reformers themselves and with the academicians and researchers who develop the ideas and rationales for the reformers' pet reforms. My conclusions stem from my own experience as a reformer, an academician, and the developer of the HOTS (Higher Order Thinking Skills) program(1) and from the history of education reform over the past 100 years. The State of Education Reform This appears to be a time when reform is blossoming. The Kappan and other major education publications have highlighted dozens of reforms. Examples of current widely advocated reforms include whole language, vouchers, heterogeneous grouping, teacher empowerment, authentic assessment, and team teaching. Lovers of reform are ecstatic; the traditionalists seem to be on the run. But this isn't the first instance of hyper-reform in the history of education. Another such period ran from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s. Almost none of the widely advocated reforms of that period - open space, individualization, community-based education - survived. Unfortunately, the fate of these earlier reforms is typical. The history of education reform is one of consistent failure of major reforms to survive and become institutionalized. David Tyack and his colleagues have found that education reforms typically do not last very long. Larry Cuban has noted that the few that do survive are shorn of their ambitious goals and ideals, becoming instead routinized incremental changes to what exists. The only innovations that survive are those that are highly structural in nature, that are easily monitored (e.g., the Carnegie unit), or that create new constituencies. Cuban refers to the historical success of attempted curriculum reform as pitiful.(2) Indeed, reports of research on the innovations of the late 1980s and early 1990s are starting to appear and are generally disclosing failure.(3) Does the consistent failure of all but the simplest reforms suggest that educators are stupid, lazy, unimaginative, and uncaring? No! The record of innovation in education is the same as that in other areas. In Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Peter Drucker draws on a wide range of human experience to determine the fundamental conditions under which new ideas become successful and enduring innovations in any field. He finds that, historically, the vast majority of innovative ideas and changes throughout human experience have failed to take root. Most remain just interesting ideas. Drucker arrives at the following conclusions regarding the fate of new ideas: * ideas that become successful innovations represent a solution that is clearly definable, is simple, and includes a complete system for implementation and dissemination; * successful innovations start small and try to do one specific thing; and * knowledge-based innovations are least likely to succeed and can succeed only if all the needed knowledge is available. …