The Three Stories of Education Reform.

Abstract

The main enemies of large-scale reform are overload and extreme fragmentation, Mr. Fullan points out. The three stories he outlines here serve to lend coherence to an otherwise disjointed system. 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. 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. …

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