Redirecting Reform: Challenges to Popular Assumptions about Teachers and Students

Abstract

No one can reform our schools for us, Mr. Clark and Ms. Astuto aver. Systemic reformers will have to be resisted systematically, for they are distracting us from the job at hand. THE EDUCATION REFORM MOVEMENT OF THE 1980s AND 1990s HAS PRODUCED DISAPPOINTING RESULTS. POLICY MAKERS WHO HAVE LABORED OVER FEDERAL, STATE, AND LOCAL REFORM INITIATIVES BLAME THESE RESULTS ON THE RELUCTANCE OR INCOMPETENCE OF PRACTITIONERS. Educators who work at the school and classroom levels blame policy makers for their lack of understanding of the real life of schools. Many of the parties involved blame the victims, or, more accurately, they would blame the if they had not been told that it is inappropriate to do so. (By victims we mean both students who are unprepared to cope with conventional school regulations, procedures, and requirements and their parents.) Everyone wants to blame the delivery systems that fragment the social, medical, psychological, nutritional, and educational resources and services provided for children. Whoever or whatever is to blame for the failure of reform, many of the reform initiatives that are currently most popular could be dismissed as ridiculous on their face if they were not devised and supported by powerful and apparently credible advocates and if the consequences of their failure were not so devastating for a generation of American youth. Education reform in the U. S. must not fail. City school systems cannot be dismissed as unworkable. Youngsters from low-income households cannot be consigned to poverty-ridden schools and bleak futures. Despair over the state of American schools is unthinkable. The root cause of the failure of reform is the limited imagination that has informed the reform proposals. For example, the establishment of state-level testing with sanctions for districts that do not meet the minimum standards) is essentially a paper transaction that threatens a handful of underproducing districts. Not surprisingly, these are almost always districts with high concentrations of children living in poverty. For such districts, a proposal to convert their schools into youth service centers that would be open 5-4 hours a day, 365 days a year, serving three healthy meals to students and providing social, psychological, and medical services would be an authentic proposal for reform. Instead, school districts are counseled to adopt outcome-based programs that are in alignment with the standardized tests being used to assess the effectiveness of schools. Why do we focus on implementing site-based management systems for high schools while we retain the daily schedule of six to eight 50-minute class periods, which ensures that most high school teachers will never get to know about the lives of the 150 to 200 students whom they see each day? Does anyone believe that such an organizational structure provides the time for English teachers to tutor their students in writing? Or that it provides responsible adult role models for youngsters who have few such models in their homes or communities? Or that it provides an opportunity for individualized instruction and counseling? Do we really believe that schools are so different front other organizations that testing to weed out |rejects' is an effective system for improving the quality of the school's core processes? What sort of reform is this, anyway? Why are we overlooking commonsense options that are supported by the experience of research and practice? We believe that the current reform movement is rooted in a set of nested assumptions that constrain the range of changes proposed for -- or implemented in -- our schools. For the past two years we have been. attempting to identify the assumptions of policy makers, educational researchers, administrators, and teachers that govern the reform proposals they consider feasible. Our hunch was that many of these assumptions should be challenged; we believed that the axiomatic standing they had been granted in the reform movement was unwarranted. …