The New Imperatives of Educational Change

Achievement with Integrity

Dennis Shirley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781138926936
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317404569
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The New Imperatives of Educational Change is a clarion call to move beyond the standardized testing and marketplace competition that have become pervasive in school systems to focus instead on creating the conditions that will encourage all students to become critical and independent thinkers. Dennis Shirley presents five new imperatives to guide educators and policymakers towards a re-thinking of what it means to teach effectively and to learn in depth. The evidentiary imperative requires educators to attain a better grasp of what data actually reveal about international trends in student learning. The interpretive imperative encourages mindful deliberation before acting on evidence in order to promote the integrity of a school community. The professional imperative describes new international research findings on promising pedagogies and curricula that propel learning in new directions. The global imperative argues that we all must look beyond our national boundaries to improve the flourishing of all young people, wherever they may be found. Finally, the existential imperative reminds us that students look to their teachers as role models who can dignify learning with meaning and embellish life with joy. Visionary in its scope and practical in its details, The New Imperatives of Educational Change is an indispensable road map for all teachers, principals, and system leaders.

1
IMPERATIVES OLD AND NEW

In an ideal world, students and teachers would thrive in classes full of purposeful learning. But in schools as they are today, too many educators report the opposite. In studies I have conducted in North America, they have frequently complained about high levels of constraint upon their professional judgment. One principal in a policy environment that emphasizes competition describes how “much of what we do every day is to market ourselves. We need to keep parents happy so we have good accountability results. I have become, in many ways, more of a marketing manager than an educator.” Another principal in a district that now requires that she spend much of her time evaluating teachers complains about how “It’s pulled me in a lot of different directions.” In addition to all the time taken up with evaluations, she says,

You have parental involvement activities that you’re trying to plan for. You’re meeting with different groups to try to get new instructional practices in place. It makes it difficult to do all of the things you’re trying to do. It becomes an impossible job.

These concerns reflect the long-term trend over previous decades toward higher levels of pressure on educators, increased accountability, and greater uniformity. Ironically, it was market competitiveness that promised innovation that often provoked this standardization, because schools can’t be ranked with one another without a common set of measures. Likewise, educators’ efficacy can’t be compared on systems of teacher quality without shared evaluation protocols and tests. The more competitive education has become, the more that uniform assessments have been needed to measure performance.

As if this push for compliance and conformity was not enough, educators have also found themselves faced with contradictory expectations to turn out students who are critical thinkers and creative problem solvers. But an excess of metrics has marginalized creativity in teaching and therefore also in learning. These constraining imperatives act as commands for professional compliance. They impose on teachers questionable pedagogies and curriculum materials that are unsuited to the learning demands of today’s complex societies.

These old imperatives of educational change are the result of policies that have been in place for over a quarter of a century and that have been codified into law, then mandated upon schools. They are:

1 An ideological imperative that has emphasized market competition, testing, and standardization as levers to improve schools—despite the absence of evidence to support these directions.

2 An imperial imperative that has projected this ideology onto other schools and systems as the best way to move forward, even when those other systems were already succeeding by employing different ways to organize their work.

3 A prescriptive imperative that has mandated the daily work of educators from higher levels of school bureaucracies.

4 An insular imperative that overloaded educators with so many policy demands that their ability to learn from other schools and systems elsewhere has been seriously impeded.

5 An instrumental imperative that has defined students and teachers in relation to their economic contributions, with a concomitant disregard for values of compassion, solidarity, or service.

These five old imperatives of educational change directed educators toward attaining one common objective: testing for fidelity. Pedagogy, curriculum, and assessments became tightly aligned with one another. Electives, project-based learning, and interdisciplinary programs of study were replaced with mandated curriculum carefully geared to the tests. Teacher education programs and teacher salary schedules were transformed. The old imperatives aggressively marketed frontal instruction, standardized curricula, and pervasive test-based competition.

As official government policies, the old imperatives spread like wildfire. They are contrasted with the five new imperatives in Figure 1.1.

In the countries most infatuated with the old imperatives, student achievement results have remained at lackluster levels or have declined precipitously. Parents, students, and professionals have become increasingly alienated. One out of every five students in New York State declined to take the state’s standardized examinations. Students and teachers in Chile led massive street protests against their country’s privatized system. Professional associations around the world communicated that their members were fed up. The critics were supported by the OECD’s findings that “school choice—and by extension, school competition—is related to greater levels of segregation in the school system.”¹ True believers in the old imperatives advocated pushing on harder, but in many ways they overplayed their hand. This book will show that a new agenda with an accompanying set of new imperatives is now emerging instead.

Figure 1.1 Old and New Imperatives of Educational Change.

Chapter 2 examines data from three countries—England, the US, and Sweden—that institutionalized the old imperatives to the greatest degree. It argues that it is time to replace an old ideological imperative that has undergirded policies for years with a new, evidentiary imperative. To do so it is necessary to explore the rise and spread of an ideology of educational change that prioritized markets, testing, and standardization. This ideology promised innovation and improved learning results, but the opposite occurred. Results either stalled or declined, in some cases precipitously.

The ideological imperative has been pursued not only in the absence of supportive evidence but also through selective and manipulative use of the evidence that exists. For instance, in an impactful report by McKinsey & Company on successful educational systems, high-achieving Finland was completely omitted.² With its emphases on equity, inclusion, and social democracy, the Finnish model contradicted McKinsey’s push for markets, choice, and accountability.

Germany is often held up as a nation to emulate because of its rising results on PISA. In a dramatic display of the old imperial imperative, Germany’s improving results have been erroneously credited by US experts to the same policies that have actually contributed to the troubling outcomes for England, the US, and Sweden.³ These have forced the German data into a market fundamentalist framework. In Chapter 3, a critique of these misattributions opens the way for a more nuanced interpretative imperative that goes beyond imposing ideology onto other nations. Instead, the interpretive imperative seeks to understand Germany and other systems on their own terms, from the inside out.

On one occasion, I asked a Finnish educator what American educators would have to do to attain Finland’s high PISA results using similar strategies. “It’s easy,” he said, “All you have to do is to share our history!” But who would sacrifice their own culture, in order to improve their country’s PISA results? Since cultures and histories vary around the globe, we can no more teleport strategies from one place to another than we can give up cultural practices that are as pervasive as the air we breathe. We can study data and develop interpretations, to be sure. But direct imitation rarely works—if ever.

This does not mean, however, that there is no hope for educators. The third new imperative of educational change, and the subject of Chapter 4, is the professional imperative. In what does this consist, and why does it matter?

For decades educators have struggled to evolve beyond the status of what Amitai Etzioni described as a “semi-profession.”⁴ For Etzioni, teachers could not be defined as true professionals because they lacked administrative control of their work, relied primarily on outsiders for increasing their knowledge base, and were unable to close ranks to create a unified guild. Educators were not like lawyers, doctors, or engineers. They were like social workers and nurses.

Etzioni was a sociologist. He was not troubled by a lack of professionalism in education. In fact, he argued that once educators learned to accept the lowly status of their work, “the dysfunctional consequences of attempts to pass will tend to disappear. The semi-professions will be able to be themselves.”⁵

From today’s vantage point, Etzioni’s injunction for educators to acquiesce to semi-professional status was disastrous. The economy of today increasingly rewards knowledge workers who are able to work with large amounts of abstract information rapidly, efficiently, and with versatility.⁶ Such skills are not innate. They have to be taught to students over many years through carefully scaffolded pedagogy with outstanding curricula. These skills will not be acquired from those who are not flexible knowledge workers themselves. Students will only learn the skills and dispositions of knowledge workers from teachers who themselves are knowledge workers.

In 2003 Andy Hargreaves argued that the “key reform imperatives” of that time were “preparing people neither for the knowledge economy nor for public life beyond it.”⁷ For Hargreaves, it wasn’t enough to prepare students to be knowledge workers, because this could blind them to the inhumane and socially unjust conditions of market economies. Instead, students needed to learn beyond the knowledge economy, so that they would have the humanistic social skills to restore community, enhance cosmopolitanism, and preserve an endangered ecosystem.

More than a decade was lost ignoring this clarion call for change. In the interim, a prescriptive imperative reigned. Under this imperative, educators’ judgment was diminished and the hierarchical and administrative control of educators was intensified. This was the opposite of a professionalizing agenda. So we have to make up for lost time. How we move from prescription to professionalism is the third new imperative of educational change.

The good news is that there is an increasing consensus of what this entails. In 2012 Hargreaves and co-author Michael Fullan published a new conceptual framework for educators entitled Professional Capital.⁸ This disaggregated educators’ professionalism into three components:

1 the human capital, or economic value, of what individuals know;

2 the social capital, or relational trust, that builds collaborative capacity amongst colleagues; and

3 the decisional capital, or the ability of individuals to make good judgments when faced with incomplete or conflicting evidence.

Shortly after Professional Capital appeared, the OECD published updated findings from its 2009 and 2012 Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS), the world’s largest surveys of teachers.⁹ Andreas Schleicher, the OECD Director of the Directorate for Education and Skills, then developed a TALIS index of teacher pro-fessionalism, with the following three components:

1 the “knowledge-based best practices” of the individual;

2 peer networks;

3 autonomy, with reference to decision-making over such matters as curriculum, assessment, and student discipline.¹⁰

It is striking how much the professional capital framework and the TALIS frameworks harmonize with one another. Human capital is...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Introduction: The Tipping Point for Educational Change
• 1 Imperatives Old and New
• 2 The Evidentiary Imperative: Studying Results
• 3 The Interpretive Imperative: We Have to Think!
• 4 The Professional Imperative: New Frameworks for Change
• 5 The Global Imperative: Optimizing Convergence
• 6 The Existential Imperative: The Ends of Education
• 7 Achievement with Integrity
• Acknowledgments
• Index