Dilemmas of Planning Backwards: Rescuing a Good Idea

Abstract

Some ideas make too much sense. One is the idea that we can improve schools by holding them accountable for the right outcomes. This is the idea behind the work of the National Goals Panel, behind various proposals to institute national testing systems, behind manystates’ school restructuring plans, and behind most district superintendents' reform and improvement efforts. It even plays a role within schools themselves, being the idea that grips many principals preparing for next year, and at least some teachers preparing for next week. It is a good idea, inasmuch as it seeks to reorient schools from a focus on their own smooth running to a focus on children’s learning.’ The problem is that its intuitive appeal may distract us from its inherent dilemmas. This is especially so given-the public policy habits that haunt us: our tendency to privilege perspectives at the top of whatever policy chain we think we are dealing with, and our tendency to discount the practical powers vested in what we take to be the chain’s links. We fool ourselves into thinking that these practical powers are the inconsequential noise of an otherwise predictable mechanism: the buzz of a hierarchy passing-down the word, the hum of a market mechanism sorting out the winners. The effect is a great seepage of policy effort and, in the case of school reform, recurrent cycles of failure.* Meanwhile, we cheapen our own sense of what it means to acquire or elaborate the vision behind worthwhile goals, to wield power effectively, to respond predictably within a complex system, and to undergo real change rather than some convenient imitation of it. How can we save a good idea? How can we rescue the possibility of genuine directedness and accountability in schooling? We might begin by applying an alternative policymaking strategy advocated by Richard Elmore, one he calls “backward mapping.“3 It starts counterintuitivelyat the outer edge of policy’s influence, with an effort to describe the behavioral reality a potential policy will seek to affect. Then it proceeds to imagine-from the outer edge inward, but at only the key junctureswhat organizational ef-

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