School Improvement for Real

David Hopkins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9781134580682
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

As societies continue to set educational goals that are, on current performance, beyond the capacity of the system to deliver, strategies for enhancing student learning through school and classroom intervention have become increasingly important. Yet, as David Hopkins argues in his book, many of the educational initiatives recently developed under the umbrella of school improvement are inadequate or unhelpful. Simply blaming teachers and delegating financial responsibility, he maintains, has little positive impact on classroom practice. This is the bleak context within which school improvement has to operate today.

School Improvement for Real offers a genuine alternative: a strategy for educational change that focuses on student achievement by modifying classroom practice and adapting the management arrangements within the school to support teaching and learning. It outlines an approach to school improvement that has a medium term, systemic orientation, providing both principles and suggestions for better practice. The author's experience in the field of school improvement ensures that the text is informed by a practical wisdom that is so often lacking from the more typical managerial texts on improvement and effectiveness.

1 Educational reform and school improvement

Those of us who spend much of our professional lives labouring in that part of the educational vineyard known as ‘school improvement’ have recently been celebrating. For decades now we have been the poor relations of the field, tolerated, talked to at parties, but not really regarded as being a main player. But as western societies have in recent years grappled with the challenges of economic growth and social dislocation, our particular contribution to educational change has increasingly been recognised as important and helpful. As societies continue to set educational goals that are, on current performance, beyond the capacity of the system to deliver, those whose work focusses on strategies for enhancing student learning through school and classroom intervention are taken more seriously.

Many of the educational initiatives that have been recently spawned under the school improvement umbrella are unfortunately, however, simply tinkering at the edges. Governments whose policies emphasise accountability and managerial change fail to realise that if teachers knew how to teach more effectively they would themselves have done so decades ago. Blaming teachers and delegating financial responsibility have little positive impact on classroom practice. Similarly, school headteachers or principals who restrict their influence to bureaucratic intervention and ignore the ‘learning level’ should not be surprised when student achievement scores fail to rise. Even those consultants and others who do offer training on ‘thinking skills’ and ‘learning styles’ are missing the point when they fail to recognise that many of their prescriptions have a short shelf life. Even when there is a subsequent attempt at implementation following a ‘one-off’ workshop, ‘tissue rejection’ is usually the result.

At the same time that pressure on schools and school systems has increased, so too has the context of schooling changed dramatically. In most western educational systems there has been a move from a somewhat paternalistic approach to education to a situation where schools are not only encouraged, but are increasingly required, to take responsibility for their own development. The emphasis on self-improvement has increased in the past decade as a consequence of the trend in most western countries of decentralising the responsibility for the implementation of educational reform. Alongside this increase in political pressure for institutional renewal, there has been a steady realisation that traditional strategies for educational change are not working. In recent years it has become starkly apparent that as strategies for educational reform, neither centralisation nor decentralisation work and that a better way must be found.

This is the rather bleak context within which school improvement has to operate at the turn of the century. It is a situation that is predisposed towards short-term remedies for profound problems, in organisational settings not always conducive to enhancing levels of student achievement and learning. The emergence of school improvement from the shadows is therefore a mixed blessing. As with any new idea, much is expected of it, particularly from those desperately seeking for simple and rapid solutions to complex challenges. School improvement’s time in the sun will be short lived unless it can persuade its new found friends that it is not a ‘quick fix’ response to educational change.

The purpose of this book is to outline an approach to school improvement that has a medium-term and systemic orientation, and to describe the principles on which it is based. It is only through viewing school improvement holistically and by adopting a strategic and inclusive response that the challenge of enhancing the level of student learning and achievement will be met. This specific approach to school improvement – termed here as ‘real’ or ‘authentic’ school improvement – is defined in some detail in this and subsequent chapters. Initially it is best regarded as a strategy for educational change that focusses on student achievement by modifying classroom practice and adapting the management arrangements within the school to support teaching and learning.

In this first chapter the various challenges to this strategy for school improvement inherent in the current context are described, and the response that constitutes the argument of the book, that to be successful one has to develop an authentic and principled approach, is outlined. In particular in this chapter:

• the current international educational policy context is outlined
• some limits to these reform strategies are suggested
• the case of educational reform in developing countries is briefly considered
• some contrasting definitions of school improvement are reviewed
• an overview of the book as a whole is provided.

The international policy context

The last ten or fifteen years of this century have been a time of great challenge as well as considerable excitement for educational systems around the world. Governments everywhere have been embarking on substantial programmes of reform in an attempt to develop more effective school systems and raise levels of student learning and achievement. Schools in many countries have been subject to a barrage of legislation and policy that has meant changes in curriculum, assessment, governance and financing. England has perhaps had more of this than most countries, but the phenomenon of large-scale reform by central governments is world wide (Levin, 1998).

A general strategy has been to centralise educational policy while at the same time placing the responsibility for implementation on the school. This tension has made the task of implementing change both complex and challenging. The balancing of centrally directed change and locally developed improvement has proved most difficult to achieve in practice. To the cynic this looks as if governments have created a situation where they can have their cake and eat it too! If policies fail to meet aspirations, the fault can then be attributed not to the policy maker, but to the schools, teachers and local authorities that have failed to put them into practice.

Within this larger scheme, reforms have tended to focus on:

• Curriculum: governments have instituted more restrictive curriculum requirements including increased emphasis on science, technology, and so-called basic skills such as literacy. Traditional subject divisions have been reinforced in many cases.
• Accountability: governments have increased testing of students and have made the results public, and in some cases put in place extensive external inspection of schools.
• Governance: while governments have centralised curriculum and assessment, they have also decentralised many decisions from intermediate bodies such as school districts or local authorities to individual schools, and have given parents an increased role in school governance, all of which has put new pressures on professional staff.
• Market forces: governments have tried to introduce market elements to schooling through increasing the opportunity – or requirement – for parents to choose schools (or, in some cases, for schools to choose parents and students).
• Status of teachers: in a number of countries the status of teachers and their organisations has been attacked directly through unilateral changes by governments to the status of unions or to collective bargaining arrangements.

(Hopkins and Levin, 2000: 18–19)

It is almost inconceivable that countries and educational systems with very different political cultures and stages of economic development should all be pursuing what is to all appearances a very similar policy agenda. Some commentators have reacted positively to such a policy consensus and have posited an international process of ‘mutual learning’, where educational systems having carefully analysed the challenges facing themselves and through learning from each other’s experiences have adopted a similar range of policy options. I am not so sanguine. It is more the case of what Halpin and Troyna (1995) have called ‘policy borrowing’ for largely symbolic purposes. ‘Faddism’ – the adoption of any current vogue, irrespective of its ‘fit’ to a particular problem or challenge, just to be seen to be doing something – is a well documented response to the pressure for external change at the school level (Slavin, 1989). ‘Policy borrowing’ seems to me to be the same phenomenon raised to an international or systems level.

In summary and in reflecting on the international ‘policy epidemic’ of the past decade or so one is struck by the radical shifts in policy on the one hand, and by the continuity of experience in schools on the other. The old adage of the ‘more things change the more they stay the same’ comes to mind. The conundrum here is not only how policy can affect practice, but also how schools can pursue an improvement agenda within a centralised change context. The thesis of this book is that those reform strategies that do positively impact on student learning and achievement, and the organisational culture of the school, are based on principles derived from the theory, research and practice related to effective school development. In beginning to build this argument and develop the theme, some of the reasons why it is difficult for centralised reform to impact positively on the daily life of schools are explored in the following section.

The limits of current reform strategies

It is an irony of quite breathtaking proportions that the dramatic increase in educational reform efforts in most western countries over the past decade is having insufficient impact on levels of student achievement. Admittedly there are pockets of success, such as the claims made for the English National Literacy Strategy by Barber and Sebba (1999). A recent analysis of trends in examination results in English secondary schools however, suggests only a modest year-on-year increase even in those schools that are ‘improving rapidly’ (Gray et al., 1999). On the other hand the failure of recent reforms to accelerate student achievement in line with policy objectives has been widely documented (e.g., Sebring et al., 1996; Rinehart and Lindle, 1997; Hopkins and Levin, 2000).

A clear indication of the pathology of central policy change was given a few years ago by Milbrey McLaughlin (1990) in her reanalysis of the extensive Rand Change Agent study originally conducted in the United States during the 1970s. In the paper McLaughlin (1990: 12) puts it this way:

A general finding of the Change Agent study that has become almost a truism is that it is exceedingly difficult for policy to change practice, especially across levels of government. Contrary to the one-to-one relationship assumed to exist between policy and practice, the Change Agent study demonstrated that the nature, amount, and pace of change at the local level was a product of local factors that were largely beyond the control of higher-level policy makers.

McLaughlin (1990: 12) comes to the salutary conclusion that ‘policy cannot mandate what matters’. Here are three reasons why educational reforms do not in general have the desired impact.

First, many reforms focus on the wrong variables. There is now an increasingly strong research base that suggests that initiatives such as local management of schools, external inspection, organisation development, or teacher appraisal only indirectly affect student performance. These ‘distal variables’ as Margaret Wang and her colleagues (1993) point out are too far removed from the daily learning experiences of most students. Those variables that do impact positively on student learning are, to use their term, ‘proximal’. According to their meta-analysis of variables that do correlate with higher levels of student achievement the three key proximal variables are psychological, instructional and home environment. The clear implications for policy are that any strategy to promote student learning needs to give attention to engaging students and parents as active participants, and expanding the teaching and learning repertoires of teachers and students respectively. Second, although the focus on teaching and learning is necessary, it is also an insufficient condition for school improvement. Richard Elmore, a leading American commentator on school reform explains it this way (Elmore, 1995: 366):

Principles of [best] practice [related to teaching and learning] . . . have difficulty taking root in schools for essentially two reasons: (a) they require content knowledge and pedagogical skill that few teachers presently have, and (b) they challenge certain basic patterns in the organisation of schooling. Neither problem can be solved independently of the other, nor is teaching practice likely to change in the absence of solutions that operate simultaneously on both fronts.

What Elmore is arguing for is an approach to educational change that at the same time focusses on the organisational conditions of the school as well as the way teaching and learning is organised. The more the organisation of the school remains the same the less likely it is for there to be changes in classroom practice that directly and positively impact on student learning. The importance of the dynamic between changes in classroom practice and the concomitant modification to school organisational arrangements is a major theme in this book.

Third, most reforms do not adopt a systemic perspective. The need for ‘systemic reform’ has been one of the rallying calls of recent policy initiatives. Yet much of what currently goes on under the label ‘systemic’ is neither systemic, nor does it have much impact on student performance. It is helpful to think about this problem along two dimensions – that policies need to be both ‘system wide’ and ‘system deep’. ‘System wide’ applies to the coherence and contingency across a policy spectrum, whereas ‘system deep’ refers to clarity and coherence at both the top and the bottom of the system – at the level of policy and in the minds of the majority of teachers.

‘System wide’ applies to the overall coherence of the policy framework. There needs to be ‘joined up thinking’ between policies, and they need to be informed by the same values base. A negative example is found in the ideology of the New Labour government in Britain. In an article in the recent Political Quarterly, Michael Freeden (1999: 50) argues that ‘the ideology of new labour can only be understood as an internal arena of competition, indeterminacy and uncertainty over the key meanings of the political values and concepts with which it engages’. This, Freeden argues, leads to core concepts being prone to multiple meanings, and ‘in a number of areas incompatible meanings of the core and adjacent concepts . . . still exist side by side’ (Freeden, 1999: 50). Although New Labour’s educational policies reflect only a mild form of this pathology they are still illustrative of this general trend.

The move towards ‘restructuring’ in the US provides another negative example, this time of ‘system deep’. As Elmore (1995: 357) again comments:

This current incapacity of policymakers to connect broad-scale policy fixes with the details of teaching and learning in schools is part of a long historical tradition in the United States. David Tyack (1991) has characterised the current interest in school restructuring as a contemporary instance of a long-standing process he calls ‘tinkering towards utopia’, in which competing political interests use the policy process to express their views about how schools should operate. These views often have less to do with the details of teaching practice and school organisation than with making schools responsive to particular political interests. Attention to teaching and learning in education reform is episodic . . . So the gap between best practice and ordinary practice, and the lack of closure between policy and practice, is a recurring problem that reveals a deep incapacity of schools to engage in cumulative learning over time directed at tangible results for students.

David Cohen (1995: 16) has similarly argued that systemic reform (the current buzz phrase in the lexicon of American educational reform):

seems to assume that instruction is a homogenous and unified system that can be driven by a small set of policy instruments – i.e., standards and assessments. But I have argued that instruction includes several related ‘systems’ – teachers’ knowledge, their professional values and commitments, and the social resources of practice. One difficulty for systemic reform has been that these elements of instructional practice are distinctively weak in the United States, and a second...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• A personal Introduction
• Acknowledgements
• Figures
• Tables
• 1. Educational Reform and School Improvement
• 2. The Foundations of Authentic School Improvement
• 3. A Perspective On Educational Change and School Effectiveness
• 4. School Improvement In an Era of Change
• 5. Powerful Learning and Powerful Teaching
• 6. Creating the Conditions for School Improvement
• 7. Instructional Leadership and Staff Development
• 8. Patterns of Development and the Process of Cultural Change
• 9. Differential School Improvement
• 10. The Policy Context for School Improvement
• References