January/February 2002
Supporting real instructional improvement
requires more than fiddling with organizational structures
By Richard F. Elmore
For the last 15 years, I have been studying the geological accumulation
of education reforms in U.S. schools—the sedimentation of the last two or
three geological eras. In a book I wrote with Penelope Peterson and Sarah
McCarthey on the structure and restructuring of schools, the main finding we
report is that changing structure does not change practice. In fact, the
schools that seem to do the best are those that have a clear idea of what kind
of instructional practice they want to produce, and then design a structure to
go with it.
My favorite story, which is now increasingly confirmed by the aggregate
analysis of block scheduling—the current structural reform du jour of
secondary education—involves a high school social studies teacher I
interviewed recently. I asked him, “So what do you think of block
scheduling?” He said, “It’s the best thing that’s ever
happened in my teaching career.” I asked, “Why?” And he said,
“Now we can show the whole movie.”
That captures my take on structural reform. We put an enormous amount
of energy into changing structures and usually leave instructional practice
untouched. Certainly that message has been confirmed by Fred Newmann’s
work at the Center on Organization and Restructuring of Schools, and other
research. We’re just now getting the first generation of aggregate studies
on block scheduling, which, shockingly, show no relationship between its
adoption and any outcome that you can measure on student performance. Of
course, this is exactly what one could have predicted, given the previous
research on structural reforms.
The reasons for this are pretty straightforward. Notice that I
didn’t say structural changes don’t matter. They often matter a lot,
especially when you’re talking about U.S. high schools, which are probably
either a close third or tied for second as the most pathological social
institutions in our society after public health hospitals and prisons. There
are problems in high schools that cannot be solved without making dramatic
changes in structure, but in the vast number of cases there is no instrumental
relationship between any change in structure, any change in practice, and any
change in student performance. That is the big problem with the usual
approaches to school improvement. We are viscerally and instinctively inclined
to move the boxes around on the organizational chart, to fiddle with the
schedule. We are attracted and drawn to these things largely because
they’re visible and, believe it or not, easier to do than to make the hard
changes, which are in instructional practice.
The pathology of American schools is that they know how to change. They
know how to change promiscuously and at the drop of a hat. What schools do not
know how to do is to improve, to engage in sustained and continuous progress
toward a performance goal over time. So the task is to develop practice around
the notion of improvement.
Weak Theories
We can talk about what’s wrong with the state accountability
systems that are springing up everywhere. But the fact is that school
improvement strategies are being driven by performance-based accountability
systems. These systems involve setting standards about what constitutes good
practice, a solid curriculum, and acceptable student performance. They entail
various kinds of stakes for students and for schools—and virtually none
for teachers and administrators. (Interestingly, the stakes tend to fall most
heavily on the kids, who have the least representation in state legislatures.)
The problem, however, is that the organizations we work in aren’t
built to respond to this kind of performance pressure. We may know what to do
theoretically, but I have serious doubts that we know what to do at the level
of practice. For example, I’ve been in enough high school math classes
over the last five years to know that there is no developmental theory of how
students learn algebra. The kids who don’t make it and don’t respond
to the kind of instruction they’re receiving are simply not included in
the instructional model. And teachers in the classrooms I’ve observed take
no responsibility for the lowest-performing students. That’s because the
prevailing a theory of learning suggests that teaching mathematics is not a
developmental problem but a problem of aptitude. Some people get it, some
don’t. (In this regard, literacy is perhaps an exception.)
People do not believe that these problems can be solved by inquiry, by
evidence, and by science. They do not believe that it is necessary to have a
developmental theory of how students learn the content and how the pedagogy
relates to the development of knowledge and content. Nor are most teachers
interested in addressing the intellectual challenge that some students learn
the content and some don’t. As a result, we are asking schools to make
improvements in the presence of an extremely weak technical core.
Also, schools are not organized to support problem-solving based on
cooperation or collaboration. The ethic of atomized teaching—teachers
practicing as individuals with individual styles—is very strong in
schools. We subscribe to an extremely peculiar view of professionalism: that
professionalism equals autonomy in practice. So when I come to your classroom
and say, “Why are you teaching in this way?” it is viewed as a
violation of your autonomy and professionalism.
Consider what would happen if you were on an airplane and the pilot
came on the intercom as you were starting your descent and said, “I’ve always wanted to try this without the flaps.” Or if your
surgeon said to you in your pre-surgical conference, “You know, I’d
really like to do this the way I originally learned how to do it in 1978.” Would you be a willing participant in this?
People get sued for doing that in the “real” professions,
where the absence of a strong technical core of knowledge and discourse about
what effective practice is carries a very high price. Instructionally, we know
what works in many content areas. But the distribution of knowledge is uneven,
and we resist the idea of calibrating our practice to external benchmarks.
School systems are also characterized by weak internal accountability.
When I use that term, I mean the intersection between the individual’s
sense of responsibility, the organization’s expectations about what
constitutes quality instruction and good student performance, and the systemic
means or processes by which we actually account for what we do. How frequently
do we observe teachers? How do we analyze performance data? How do we think
about teachers’ performance? The schools in which these things are aligned
have very powerful approaches to the improvement of instruction. When they are
not aligned—and in most cases they are not—schools have extreme
difficulty responding to external pressure for improved performance.
Meanwhile, the usual remediation strategies we employ when kids fail to
meet the statewide testing requirements are to give them the same unbelievably
bad instruction they got in the first place, only in much larger quantities
with much greater intensity. This is what we call the louder and slower
approach.
Better Benchmarks
This brings me back to the notion of improvement versus the notion of
change. Improvement is a discipline. It requires picking a target that has
something to do with demonstrated student learning, one that’s ambitious
enough to put schools in “improvement mode.” If you’re a school
leader whose students are scoring consistently in the 95th percentile, you need
another performance measure because that one is doing you no good— except
to help your marketing. For improvement purposes, you need a new ceiling, a
goal to push for that’s quite a distance from where you are. You also need
some kind of external benchmarks.
If the only benchmarks you have come from your own
connoisseurship—your particular opinions and ideas about what good
practice is—then you’re in trouble. Real improvement comes when you
visit a classroom where somebody is doing the same thing you are—only much
better. That’s when the real conversation, the tough conversation about
improvement takes place. Whether you’re a novice or an expert, the
important thing is to focus on the next stage of improvement and to determine
where that increment of knowledge and skill is going to come from.
The norms and values that go with ambitious conceptions of learning and
improvement grow out of practice, not vice versa. School improvement
doesn’t happen by getting everyone to come to the auditorium and testify
to their belief that all children can learn—not if it means sending
everyone back to the classroom to do what they’ve always done. Only a
change in practice produces a genuine change in norms and values. Or, to put it
more crudely, grab people by their practice and their hearts and minds will
follow.
Finally, instructional leaders need to know and model the knowledge and
skills needed to do this work. This includes knowledge about performance,
knowledge about development in content areas, knowledge about the improvement
of instruction. Leaders need to create structures for how they learn in
schools. If you can’t model the norms and values you expect others to
adopt, it’s unlikely that any real improvement will take place.
Richard
F. Elmore is Anrig Professor of Educational Leadership at the Harvard
Graduate School of Education and the Faculty Editor of the Harvard
Education Letter.
For Further Information
R.F. Elmore. “Building
a New Structure for School Leadership.” Washington, DC: Albert
Shanker Institute, 2000.
R.F. Elmore. “Professional Development and the Practice of Large-Scale
Improvement in Education.” Paper forthcoming from the Albert
Shanker Institute, Washington, DC.
R.F. Elmore, P.L. Peterson, and S.J. McCarthey. Restructuring
in the Classroom: Teaching, Learning, and School Organization. San Francisco:
Jossey-Bass, 1996.
F. Newmann. “Linking Restructuring to Authentic Student Achievement.”
Phi Delta Kappan 72, no. 6 (February 1991): 458–463.
This essay was drawn from an address given by Professor Elmore at a recent
institute on leadership and policy hosted by The
Principals’ Center at Harvard University.
It has been edited for this issue.
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