What Is the System in Systemic Reform?

Abstract

policy. State and federal policy is not the only way to pursue improved instruction-The Coalition for Essential Schools, Accelerated Schools, and the New Standards Project all do so largely outside the framework of policy-but systemic reformers have viewed government as their chief vehicle. The leading examples of changed state and national policy include the California and Vermont reforms, Goals 2000, the NSF State Systemic Reform Initiative, and the Kentucky reforms. Systemic reform focuses in two arenas: creating new policy instruments that seem necessary to enact systemic reform, and reducing the inherited tangles of regulation, bureaucracy, proliferating policy, and incoherent governance that would impede reform (Smith & O'Day).1 The new policy instruments are commonly thought to include: