The
Three Stories of Education Reform
By Michael Fullan
— Illustration © 2000 by Jim Hummel
IT
TAKES ABOUT three years to achieve successful change in student performance
in an elementary school. Depending on size, it takes about six years to do
so in a secondary school. 1 While this is good
news, there are two serious problems with this finding. First, these successes
occur in only a small number of schools; that is, these reform efforts have
not "gone to scale" and been widely reproduced. Second, and equally
problematic, there is no guarantee that the initial success will last. Put
in terms of the change process, there has been strong adoption and implementation,
but not strong institutionalization.
The
main reason for the failure of these reforms to go to scale and to endure
is that we have failed to understand that both local school development and
the quality of the surrounding infrastructure are critical for lasting success.
I pursue this argument in terms of what I call
"the
three stories of reform."
The
first is the "inside story" -- what we know about how schools change
for the better in terms of their internal dynamics. The second is the "inside-outside"
story -- what effective schools do as they contemplate the plethora of outside
forces impinging on them. The third is the "outside-in" story --
how agencies external to the school organize themselves to be effective in
accomplishing large-scale reform at the school level. Taken together, these
three stories provide a powerful and compelling framework for accomplishing
education reform on a scale never before seen.
The Inside Story
Many
of us have found that the existence of collaborative work cultures (or professional
learning communities) makes a difference in how well students do in school.
Until recently, however, we did not know very clearly how these cultures operate
to produce such effects. Thanks to Fred Newmann and Gary Wehlage and their
colleagues Karen Louis and Sharon Kruse, we now have a much better idea of
what is going on inside the black box of collaborative schools. 2
I call this the inside story.
Newmann
and Wehlage and their colleagues found that some schools did disproportionately
well in affecting the performance of students. The essence of their finding
is that the more successful schools had teachers and administrators who 1)
formed a professional learning community, 2) focused on student work (through
assessment), and 3) changed their instructional practice accordingly to get
better results. They did all of this on a continuing basis.
What's
new about this finding is that it both unlocks the black box of collaboration
and reveals a new role for student assessment. In What's Worth Fighting
For Out There? Andy
Hargreaves and I concluded that teachers must "become more assessment
literate." 3
This inside story makes this role clear. By assessment literacy internal
to the school, we mean two things: 1) the ability of teachers, individually
and together, to interpret achievement data on student performance; and 2)
teachers' equally important ability to develop action plans to alter instruction
and other factors in order to improve student learning.
Put
another way, even if there were no external pressure for accountability, teachers
and principals would need to become assessment literate in order to be successful.
In collaborative schools, pedagogy and assessment feed on each other, through
the interaction of teachers, to produce better results.
The
clarity of this finding is significant, but one fundamental problem remains.
The researchers who reported these results examined schools -- whether collaborative
or noncollaborative -- once they were "up and running." We know
nothing about how these particular schools got that way, let alone how to
go about producing more of them. The particular pathways to collaboration
in new situations remain obscure. Indeed, Hargreaves and I argue that, even
if you knew how particular schools became collaborative, you could never tell
precisely how you should go about it in your own school. There is no magic
bullet; research can give us promising lines of thinking but never a complete
answer. To some extent, each group must build its own model and develop local
ownership through its own process.
As
local groups draw on the inside story, there is an additional distinction
that can be quite helpful, namely the difference between "restructuring"
and "reculturing." Restructuring is just what it seems to be: changes
in the structure, roles, and related formal elements of the organization.
The requirement that each school should have a site-based team or a local
school council is an example of restructuring. If we know anything about restructuring,
it is that 1) it is relatively easier to do than reculturing (i.e., restructuring
can be legislated) and 2) by itself it makes no difference in the quality
of teaching and learning.
What
does make a difference is reculturing: the process of developing professional
learning communities in the school. Reculturing involves going from a situation
of limited attention to assessment and pedagogy to a situation in which teachers
and others routinely focus on these matters and make associated improvements.
Structures can block or facilitate this process, but the development of a
professional community must become the key driver of improvement. When this
happens, deeper changes in both culture and structure can be accomplished.
In
short, the inside story is that there is no substitute for internal school
development. We have an increasingly clear idea about what is needed, but
we don't know how to do it on a wide scale. The other two stories help in
this regard.
The Inside-Out Story
While
the inside story says that schools would be well advised to focus on reculturing,
the inside-out story says that they cannot do it alone. Hargreaves and I have
made the case that the external context of schools has changed dramatically
over the past five years. The walls of the school have become more permeable
and transparent. Teachers and principals now operate under a microscope in
a way that they have never had to do before. This new environment is complex,
turbulent, contradictory, relentless, uncertain, and unpredictable. At the
same time, it has increased the demands for better performance and greater
accountability. In light of this new reality, teachers and principals must
reframe their roles and shift their orientations to the outside.
In
other words, the "out there" has now moved "in here."
Forces that previously were outside are now in teachers' faces every day.
The first lesson of the inside-out story is counterintuitive: most outside
forces that have moved inside threaten schools in some way, but they are also
necessary for success. In order to turn disturbing forces to one's advantage,
it is necessary to develop the counterintuitive mindset of "moving toward
the danger." 4
There
are at least five powerful external forces that schools must contend with
and turn to their advantage:
á
parents and community,
á
technology,
á
corporate connections,
á
government policy, and
á
the wider teaching profession
When
parents, the community, the teachers, and the students share a rapport, learning
occurs. The problem is what to do when such a rapport does not exist. In Patrick
Dolan's words, school people have to involve parents in as many activities
as possible and "work through the discomfort of each other's presence."
5 Effective
schools use their internal collaborative strength to seek out relationships
with the community. They see parents more as part of the solution than as
part of the problem. They pursue programs and activities that are based on
two-way capacity building in order to mobilize the resources of both the community
and the school in the service of learning. 6
Technology
is ubiquitous; the issue is how to contend with it. In What's Worth Fighting
For Out There? Hargreaves and I concluded that the more powerful technology
becomes, the more indispensable good teachers are. Technology generates a
glut of information, but it has no particular pedagogical wisdom -- especially
regarding new breakthroughs in cognitive science about how learners must construct
their own meaning for deep understanding to occur. This means that teachers
must become experts in pedagogical design. It also means that teachers must
use the power of technology, both in the classroom and in sharing with other
teachers what they are learning.
Corporate
partnerships are on the rise. If schools are to hold their own in this new
arena, they must know what they are doing. Getting out there means developing
the criteria and confidence to form productive alliances. Those who work in
internally collaborative schools are less vulnerable and so more open to forming
outside relationships.
Government
policy has also become increasingly demanding. Policy on accountability and
assessment is a good case in point. Assessment literacy, which I referred
to above, has an inside-out dimension. To put it directly, teachers must become
experts about the external standards that are now inside the school. On the
political side, they must move toward the danger by entering the fray and
by participating in the debate about the uses and misuses of achievement results.
They must also take advantage of external standards to help inform what they
are doing. It turns out that collaborative schools are active and critical
consumers of external standards. 7 They use standards to clarify, integrate, and raise their own
expectations, and they want to know how well they are doing so that they can
celebrate their successes or work to get better.
Finally,
the current preoccupation with developing the teaching force brings another
set of external forces into the schools. School improvement will never occur
on a wide scale until the majority of teachers become contributors to and
beneficiaries of the professional learning community. Again, effective schools
see themselves as part and parcel of this wider movement. Of course, they
create conditions for continuous learning for their own members. But they
do more than this. They engage in partnerships with local universities or
become members of other reform networks. They see themselves as much in the
business of teacher education as in the business of school improvement. They
have explicit criteria for hiring, they pay attention to induction, they support
learning opportunities for their members, they look for reform-oriented union
leadership, they provide a laboratory for student teachers, and so on. In
short, effective schools take advantage of new developments in the teaching
profession, but they also give as much as they get through active participation
in helping to reshape the profession as a whole.
To
summarize the critical importance of the inside-out story, schools need the
outside to get the job done. These external forces, however, do not come in
helpful packages; they are an amalgam of complex and uncoordinated phenomena.
The work of the school is to figure out how to make its relationship with
them a productive one.
What
does the outside look like to schools? Essentially, it is a sea of excessive,
inconsistent, relentless demands. Policies are replaced by new ones before
they have had a chance to be fully implemented. One policy works at cross-purposes
with another one. Above all, the demands of various policies are disjointed.
Fragmentation, overload, and incoherence appear to be the natural order.
One
key to understanding the inside-out story is the realization that collaborative
schools do not take on the greatest number of innovations; they do not engage
in the greatest number of staff development days. Rather, they are selective:
they select and integrate innovations; they constantly work on connectedness;
they carefully choose staff development, usually in groups of two or more;
and they work on applying what they learn. 8
In
other words, the ultimate effect of schools that get their act together inside
and that participate outside is that they "attack incoherence."9 They deal with the outside, partly
to take on negative forces, partly to ferret out resources (some of which
might be negative forces converted into supportive ones), and partly to learn
from the outside. In a nutshell, the inside-out story is one of the mobilization
of resources and the making of coherence.
The Outside-In Story
If
you are on the outside and the first two stories are not happening the way
they are supposed to, what can you do? Here is where the story gets complex.
We know a great deal about individual school success; we know far less about
school system success -- how large numbers of schools in the same system can
improve. As we try for large-scale reform, as we have been doing over the
past few years, we are beginning to understand more clearly the elements of
this third story. Two excellent studies of reform at the district level are
those by Richard Elmore and Deanna Burney and by Anthony Bryk and his colleagues.
10
When
you think of the "outside," you can refer to school districts, whole
states, or sets of intermediate agencies in between. In this article, I map
out the main conceptual components of the outside system, but I do not provide
an analysis of different levels. (I do this in Change
Forces:
The Sequel, where I also address the complexities of transferability of innovations.
11 The
key concept for the outside is the "external reform infrastructure."
What kind of infrastructure would best produce scores of inside and inside-out
stories of the kinds described above?
Bryk
and his colleagues identified four main elements of the external reform infrastructure
of large districts: policies focusing on decentralization, local capacity
building, rigorous external accountability, and stimulation of innovation.
The
first step is to realize that the goal is to help schools function as described
in the first two stories above. Clearly, you can't make schools operate this
way, but you can conclude that there is no chance whatsoever of large-scale
reform without some movement in these directions. Thus the first element is
to maintain and develop decentralization policies. This would involve retaining
(or strengthening) a school's site-based emphasis and reversing policies that
stand in the way of school-focused reform. Henry Healey and Joseph de Stefano
call this "clearing policy space" and "filling policy space"
with new policies that are more appropriate to local development. 12
While
the first of Bryk's elements says to trust decentralization, the other three,
in effect, say "but only to a point." We have known for some time
that decentralization per se does not produce large-scale change (or much
small-scale change for that matter). The trick is not to abandon it but to
strengthen it.
The
second element, local capacity building, means just what it says. Here the
investment is in policies, training, professional development, ongoing support,
and so on in order to develop the capacity of schools, communities, and districts
to operate in the manner outlined in stories one and two. Capacity-building
activities include such things as providing training for school teams and
local school councils, redesigning initial teacher education, and adopting
the panoply of new activities that will be needed to prepare teachers, principals,
parents, and others to function as members of professional learning communities
inside and outside the school.
The
third element, a rigorous external accountability system, must be built into
the infrastructure. We have already seen that schools do best when they pay
close attention to standards and performance. The external accountability
system must generate data and procedures that make this focus more likely
and more thorough. However, such a system must be primarily (not exclusively)
based on a philosophy of capacity building, i.e., a philosophy of using "assessment
for learning" and otherwise enabling educators to become more assessment
literate. No formal external accountability system can have an impact in the
long run unless it has a capacity-building philosophy. While this is the primary
goal, the external accountability system must also have the responsibility
of intervening in persistently failing schools. Balancing accountability support
and accountability intervention is a tough call, but this is precisely how
sophisticated the external infrastructure must become.
The
fourth element involves the stimulation of innovation. Ideas are important;
scientific breakthroughs about learning are on the rise; innovations are being
attempted around the world. Thus stimulating innovation must be a strong feature
of the infrastructure. Investments must be made in research, development,
innovative networks, and so on, so that the marketplace of educational ideas
is constantly being mined. In fact, the existing system is quite strong in
this respect. The goal is to maintain and enhance investments in innovation
as part of the broad infrastructure.
The Three Stories
in Concert
The
inside/out reciprocity that I have described here provides a powerful and
useful metaphor for the top-down/bottom-up combinations that are required
for school reform. The threestories framework is indeed compelling. Sustained
change is not possible in the absence of a strong connection across the three
stories. Internal school development is a core requirement, but such change
cannot occur unless the school is actively connecting to the outside. Schools
that do develop internally and do link to the outside are still not self-sufficient.
It is possible for these schools to develop for a while on their own, but,
in order for their development to be sustained, they must be both challenged
and nurtured by an external infrastructure.
What
happens as the three stories coalesce is that there is a fusion of three powerful
forces -- the spiritual, the political, and the intellectual. The spiritual
dimension has to do with the purpose and meaning of reform. Indeed, the moral
purpose of reform is to make a difference in the lives of students. I have
argued elsewhere that concern for finding spiritual meaning in reform is on
the rise.13
The purposeful interactions that occur within and across learning communities
serve to mobilize moral commitments and energies. Second, such mobilization
is power, so that the political capacity to overcome obstacles and to persist
despite setbacks is also enhanced. Third, good ideas in the marketplace --
hitherto not noticed or not implemented -- become more accessible as schools
and school systems increase their capacity to find out about, select, integrate,
and use new ideas effectively.
Recently
I have been using the following formula to describe school change: E = MCA2
-- where E refers to the rate of efficacy of the system, M refers to the motivation
for reform (will, purpose, commitment), C refers to the capacity for reform
(skills, know-how, available resources), and A2 refers to assistance times
accountability. When the three stories of reform work together, they activate
this change formula. Thus greater energy for reform is generated in a system
of integrated pressure and support in which capacity and accountability are
both increased.
The
main enemies of large-scale reform are overload and extreme fragmentation.
The three stories I've outlined here essentially serve to lend coherence to
an otherwise disjointed system. All those involved in reform, from the schoolhouse
to the state house, can take advantage of the growing knowledge base embedded
in this framework to combat these enemies of large-scale reform. The prospects
for reform on a large scale have never been better -- or more needed. But
it will take the fusion of spiritual, political, and intellectual energies
to transform that reform into a reality.