The Rules of School Reform

Max Angus

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781135714574
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Why do new legislative acts and regulations designed to improve schools have little impact on teaching? Why have so many attempts at school reform been so notably unsuccessful?; While seeking to answer these questions, Angus examined the complex issue of rules and regulations. He found a shell of rules around teaching that is guarded by unions and departmental officials. This shell is made up not only of official rules but also informal rules, some of which, even though unspoken, are highly influential. Collectively, these rules provide stability but also confine the extent of any change.; In "The Rules of School Reform" the author draws two separate but related conclusions that have serious implications for school improvement. Firstly, as long as the basic regulatory structures are left in place there is unlikely to be any enduring change to teaching. Secondly, should officials remove these structures, they will lose control of the system they are employed to manage. There is no escape from this dilemma. The author asks how can school reform succeed, unless we examine how established rule systems shape classroom life?

1
Introduction

Being free and unfree at the same time is perhaps the most common of our experiences. It is also arguably the most confusing. (Bauman, 1990)

The Argument

In the stacks of books written about educational change authors commonly wonder why attempts to change the way that schools function are so short-lived. Somehow or other, after a period of experimentation the system returns to stasis. The more things change the more they stay the same.¹ Various plausible reasons are posited and examined to explain the stasis but they seldom include the rules and regulations among the contributory factors.

In this book, I use the interplay of regulation, culture and power to explain why fundamental change has been elusive. The argument is complex and there are several twists and turns. This is because there are several paradoxes to explain. For example, although school reform is often predicated upon regulatory change, the body of official rules in school systems maintains the status quo. Further, I contend that teaching is governed by official rules even though there are relatively few that pertain explicitly to instruction and pedagogy. Another paradox is that even when given the opportunity, teachers rarely seek exemptions from the official rules. Finally, I maintain that although teachers have only a sketchy knowledge of the official rules it is also true that these same rules are a powerful instrument of control. I address each of these paradoxes.

In this chapter, I have three purposes. The first is to clarify what I mean by reform. On a number of counts the term ‘reform’ is problematic yet it is in the title of the book and I rely on it throughout. My second purpose is to explain the approach I adopted when investigating the nexus between regulation and reform. Finally, I will provide a brief synopsis of my argument.

What Is School Reform?

The term ‘school reform’ is almost a cliché. It commonly implies ‘improvement’ so that the terms ‘school reform’ and ‘school improvement’ are usually taken to be synonymous, This need not be the case. The benefits of a reform may be in the eye of the beholder, perceived rather than real. Many teachers have quite jaundiced views of school reform. Hence, although I continue to refer generally to reform, and have already confessed to being a confirmed reformer in my past, in my use of the term in this book, I am agnostic. This is not because I think the motives behind reform are irrelevant or that change is self-evidently good and therefore not a matter deserving of elaboration, but because the issue is outside the scope of this book. To take an example, the 1988 Education Reform Act was hugely unpopular among educators in Britain. I accept that there were many good reasons for this condemnation but have not been persuaded against using the Reform Act as an example of the indirect relationship between legislation and pedagogy because of this. It is a good example of this relationship. I have not sought to examine its merit as a reform.

The word ‘reform’ also commonly implies change on a grand scale that occurs over months, perhaps years. The term ‘school reformer’, unless defined inclusively, has a pompous, arrogant ring. The act of a teacher taking initiative as an individual, would not usually be paid sufficient attention to count as reform. In my definition, however, I include local and individual acts as school reform. Hence, I include among school reformers teachers, parents, even students, not just the politicians and bureaucrats who direct structural realignments.

Further, by my definition, school reform is a deliberate, planned intervention to improve some aspect of the operation of schools. I differentiate it from unsought-for change that impacts on a school. For example, a school time-table may need to be changed to fit into new public transport timetables. The change was not introduced to improve the school’s operation though it is possible that it inadvertently does so. School reform is also different from cultural change that affects society generally and that produces almost imperceptible modifications to schools: dress codes, architectural styles, racial attitudes, uses of leisure time, and so on. Schools are continually changing without any prompting from school reformers.

Most school reform that has been the subject of some kind of evaluation has been of the large scale, top-down variety. One reason for this is that this has been the dominant means by which government officials thought they could bring about change. Another is that this mode catches the public and professional interest. It is easier to study such work than the persistent efforts of individual teachers however impressive these might be. Reforms of the top-down variety also feature in this study, not because they are assumed to be inherently good and therefore deserving of study but because they frequently involve some adjustment of the official rules. However, I am also interested in school initiated reforms that have been designed to fit within the existing structure of rules.

A final point about school reform is that there have been very few attempts to abolish altogether the structures that hold traditional patterns of teaching and learning in place. Reformers have generally sought to change single structures—my story about open plan school design is a case in point —but there have been few systematic attempts to redesign from scratch schools within public education systems. It has been easier to establish schools outside the structures, as is presently occurring with charter schools, than reconfigure the systemic structures. Such so-called lighthouse schools, I predict, will eventually be reclaimed by the system and the structures that they sought to evade will spring back into place unless reform can be construed differently.

My Approach

It surprises me that the way in which the rules ‘work’ has been largely overlooked by researchers trying to understand the nature of school reform. I am not sure why. It may be that the study of rules is no longer fashionable; interest in this area seems to have diminished during the 1960s and 1970s. It is also possible, that researchers still study rules though they call them something else: the topic of power, for example, has attracted interest. It may also be the case that the research community has concluded that the notion of schools as rule-governed institutions is a myth and as a consequence rules cannot explain why school reform does or does not work. Such a conclusion, however, runs counter to everyday experience in which our actions are shaped by rules. I am more inclined to believe that because rules are all-pervasive they have become a taken-for-granted part of the school reform landscape. This has happened, in my view, because school reform has been bracketed as something separate from everyday experience when, in fact, for most of the time it is part of the humdrum of working life.

How to proceed with my investigation? One approach would be to take a rule and consider it in isolation from the body of rules from which it is drawn. For example, a particular piece of legislation, or a specific regulation or ordinance might be examined to see whether it has been observed, how it was interpreted, the scope of discretion exercised in its execution, the consequences of non-compliance and so on. There have been some helpful studies of this kind to which I will later refer. Most, however, tend to ignore or understate the significance of vast networks of rules that form the regulatory and cultural context (see Wilson, 1988).² Examining ‘Big R’ regulation, without reference to the other rules that come into play reveals only part of the picture. Therefore, my inclination is to examine systems of rules. The methods that I have employed in the study and the data sources are discussed in the appendix on methodology.

Swedish sociologists Tom Burns and Helena Flam have come closest to reaching a synthesis, which they called ‘system rule theory,’ to which I will refer in some detail later, but even this work is now only a partial synthesis as it does not take account of post-structuralist perspectives which have emerged recently in sociology (Burns and Flam, 1987). But it is more complicated even than that. The study of rules is not the sole preserve of sociologists. Rules have also been a topic of long-standing interest to philosophers and legal theorists. In fact, in practically all branches of the social sciences and humanities scholars have at some time or other become engaged by the relationship between rules and human conduct.

As I sought to understand the outcome of the National Schools Project, in addition to rule systems, I began to draw on the constructs of culture and power to explain the stability and uniformity of school practice. These constructs were not incompatible with system rule theory though they had separate disciplinary roots and provided entry points to structuralist and poststructuralist thinking. The exercise of power seemed to be at the crux of what I was seeking to find out but power need not be exercised solely through a ‘legal-rational’ rule system.

I became engaged by the idea of special rules about how rules are applied which I call meta-rules. These implicit rules about how to use collectivities of rules serve an executive function, according to my formulation. They, rather than the official rules that appear in handbooks, signal what needs to be done in general terms and how to approach the official rules. The metarules are embedded in the departmental ‘discourse’ that is used by teachers and officials to explain what they are doing and why they must do it. It is these meta-rules, containing a shared understanding and expectations of how the system is to operate, which provide the stability more so than any official edict. School reform, I contend, is governed ultimately by meta-rules.

An Overview of the Argument

The Problem

There are two main questions from which all the other questions raised are drawn. These are:

1. Why have so many aspects of school and classroom life been so robust in the face of attempts to change them? and
2. What role do official rules play in maintaining school systems which support teaching and learning in their current dominant forms?

The Official Rules

There is an extraordinary number of official rules that circumscribe what should happen in schools, so many that it is improbable that any single person could know all the rules that apply in even one system. The prospect of ever knowing the corpus of rules is made more difficult because of its organic nature: rules are constantly being added while others are falling into disuse. The condition of the corpus is partly explained by the multiple sources of authorship from both within and without the school system. The rules keep being generated because there is a strong belief among officials and teachers that problems can be solved by creating new rules. I contend that the state of the corpus of rules has important implications for school reform.

Regulation and Teaching

Juxtaposed against the extensiveness of official rules is an absence of official rules about teaching. However, despite this absence of rules relating directly to instruction and pedagogy, teachers are in fact constrained by the combined effect of numerous rules which are one or more steps removed. On the surface, the experience of constraints that are not immediately evident appears to be a paradox but with closer scrutiny impinging factors can be identified. I argue that regulation rarely intrudes directly into the instructional aspects of teachers’ work but functions like a shell around it providing an external limit of what is possible.

School Reform As Re-regulation

Most school reform involves some degree of re-configuring of the official rules even though this may not be overt. Generally, accounts of reform mention any initial regulatory changes and then, from that point onwards, ignore the interplay of rules. The new rules are presumed to mesh together smoothly with existing rules. This presumption is made without reformers or those investigating reforms taking account of the imbalance between the corpus of rules as a whole and the small proportion of rules which have been adjusted.

In studies where researchers have continued to scrutinize the regulatory system during the period in which a reform is implemented it has been observed that the official rules have been transformed during this process.

Rule Systems

In developing a theoretical basis for my argument, I found it necessary to differentiate between collections of rules in which official rules interact with informal rules and those which are limited to those with official status. In the case of the latter group, I use the term ‘rule regime’ to refer to collectivities of official rules related to particular tasks or fields of activities. Even with this restriction, such regimes can be extensive and difficult to map. I use the term ‘informal rules’ to refer to local rules that have no official status in an organizational sense but which signal how people are expected to relate to each other, undertake tasks and so on. These informal rules combine with official rules to form social rule systems. School reform is shaped more by these social rule systems than by any individual rule or literal interpretation of a set of official rules.

I argue that to ascribe to a single rule the power to produce an intended response in a complex social situation without reference to the web of related, existing rules, is an act of folly. This statement applies equally to formal and informal rules.

Culture and Regulation

In the symbolic world of teachers, official rules are an artefact of immense cultural significance. I explain how the official rules constitute part of school culture; they are not separate from it. Within this context, the distinctions between official rules and informal rules become blurred. It does not follow that because many teachers are not familiar with the detail of most official rules that they have no effect. Although an unknown individual rule may have no effect, this does not undermine the cultural significance of the corpus of rules.

I argue that it is misleading to present law and culture as two distinct entities because the law is an important aspect ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1: Introduction
• 2: Official Rules
• 3: Regulation and Teaching
• 4: School Reform As Re-Regulation
• 5: Rule Systems
• 6: Culture and Regulation
• 7: Power and Rules
• 8: Meta-Rules
• 9: Meta-Rules In Action
• 10: The Rules of School Reform
• Appendix: Methodology
• References