Fighting for Change in Your School

How to Avoid Fads and Focus on Substance

Harvey Alvy

• Publisher: ASCD
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781416624134
• eBook ISBN: 9781416624165
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Leadership in Education

In this indispensable book for K–12 leaders, Harvey Alvy offers a thoughtful roadmap and guidance to help educators select, implement, and assess school- or districtwide initiatives that actually work. The book is filled with a wealth of resources—action checklists, principles to guide educators, and in-depth questions and protocols—for engaging in collaborative professional development activities that strengthen teaching and learning practices and improve student achievement.

Alvy discusses in detail the six "red flags" that educators confront daily and a set of countervailing strategies (six practical guidelines) to pursue meaningful reforms, initiatives, and innovations:

Red Flags

• The Narrative Trap
• Overpromising and Overloading
• Minimizing the Enormous Difficulty of Implementation
• Eyes off the Prize
• Historical Amnesia
• The Business "Solution"

Guidelines

• Building a Collaborative Learning Community
• Effectively Using Human, Fiscal, and Material Resources
• Respecting the Change Process
• Sustaining a Coherent School Mission and Vision
• Embracing Timeless and Eclectic Teaching Practices
• Championing and Empowering the Underserved

Selecting and implementing reforms, initiatives, and practices wisely is key if we truly want the best for our students--and skipping the necessary planning and forethought can be catastrophic. Fighting for Change in Your School: How to Avoid Fads and Focus on Substance is the book every educator needs to ensure the former and prevent the latter. The time to address these challenges is now.

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Chapter 1

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Pursuing Reforms of Substance: The Time Is Now

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You can use an eraser on the drafting table or a sledgehammer on the construction site.

Frank Lloyd Wright

Principle #1: If a reformer or vendor tells you, "All the research supports 'New Reform X,' and the reform will be easy to implement in your school or classroom," it's time to head for the hills.

The main goal of this book is to help teachers and administrators select and promote meaningful and lasting reforms that improve teaching and learning by avoiding harmful educational fads. Addressing this goal is an extremely difficult challenge but also an urgent matter with high stakes, as it directly affects student achievement, teacher success, fiscal and resource accountability, and the public's confidence in schools. No one can predict with certainty whether a proposed innovative reform or a reintroduced classical practice will lead to classroom success—it is hard to read the tea leaves—but we at least know that we can't keep doing what we're doing. We need to be more thoughtful in how we make decisions.

Addressing the main goal of this book begins with figuring out why educators have implemented so many unproductive reforms. In Chapters 2 through 7, we'll examine six "red flags" that have inhibited reform as well as six attendant guidelines for how to avoid each one. The guidelines include research findings, recommendations, examples, and strategies for advancing successful reform efforts. The main goals of each guideline are to disrupt red flags and further reforms of substance.

Collaboration will be critical for reforms to achieve results. Teachers, administrators, parents, community stakeholders, potential reformers, academics, state and federal education officials, consultants, policymakers, and foundation experts can all use the material in this book to effect educational change.

What Is Educational Reform?

Tyack and Cuban (1995) define reforms as "planned efforts to change schools in order to correct perceived social and educational problems" (p. 4). At the same time, they insist that change "is not synonymous with progress. Sometimes preserving good practices in the face of challenges is a major achievement, and sometimes teachers have been wise to resist reforms that violated their professional judgment" (p. 5). Sirotnik (1999) maintains that most reforms are "about whatever is politically fashionable, pendulum-like in popularity, and usually underfunded, lacking in professional development, and short-lived" (pp. 607–608), noting that too many reformers focus on "mandates and accountability schemes" while overlooking context, commitment, and the resources necessary to implement change. Sirotnik contrasts reform with renewal, stressing that reforms have a beginning and an end (e.g., teaching leads to students' scores), whereas "renewal is not about a point in time; it is about all points in time—it is about continuous, critical inquiry into current practices and principled innovation that might improve education" (p. 608).

Far too many of today's reforms are outdated and reduce success to little more than test scores. A system that does not thrive on continuous improvement and innovation can't meet the needs of students who will continuously need to reinvent themselves in the future: According to the U.S. Department of Labor, 21st century graduates will experience more than 10 jobs during their lifetime—some of which do not yet exist—compared to the two or three jobs that 20th century workers typically held (Darling-Hammond, 2010).

It is unfortunate that the term reform has such a negative connotation for many educators these days—a line of thinking some trace to the U.S. Department of Education's famous 1983 report, A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform. There is no reason that the term should continue to be associated with regressive policies that offer few advantages for today's students. Returning to Tyack and Cuban's definition of reform as an undertaking "to correct perceived educational and social problems," we might constitute reform to mean stakeholders partnering to address the academic, social, economic, and health inequities that many students face both inside and outside of school. Seen in this way, the links to reforms of the progressive era of the early 20th century related to child labor laws, women's rights, safe factories, and fair business practices become clear (Goodwin, 2013). Put simply, reforms are a positive moral enterprise—collaborative and holistic "barn raisings" that require contributions from educators and community members.

Too often, reforms conceived at the national, state, or district level are not contextually conducive to success in individual classrooms. When top-down efforts are the focus, reforms that begin in a single classroom or school may be overlooked. Consider a scenario in which several teachers in a school professional learning community encounter success using an intervention to improve the reading skills of underserved Title I students—peer coaching in reading groups, perhaps. If the success of this intervention is replicated, it may then spread throughout the school and eventually the district in a bottom-up manner. Small-scale reforms of this sort should be celebrated. Reforms can affect the entire educational system, a single group of students, or any magnitude in between. Change in one classroom or school can have a ripple effect as educators and students share skills with one another and use them in new contexts.

Fads, Enduring Ideas, and Innovations

Frequently, educators feel an urgent, sometimes desperate need to improve teaching and learning now. They sometimes feel pressured to make decisions without having all the facts or simply suffer from wishful thinking—there must be a solution out there! Fads thrive when educators look for the "quick fix" to help students.

Joel Best (2006), an expert on the psychology of fads, emphasizes that "institutional fads" in business and education can be very expensive and time-consuming and should never be treated as insignificant. According to Best, there are three distinct phases to the life of a fad: (1) the beginning, when it gains popularity; (2) the middle, when it peaks; and (3) the end, when it abruptly diminishes in popularity (think of fashionable diets, exercise products, and self-help books, for example).

One major recent contributor to fads is the increasing miniaturization of technology. As science quickly advances, each new device is smaller, more powerful, more convenient, and capable of performing more functions—thus rendering its predecessor a passing fad. Educators who implement fads in one school will often want to try them if they move to a new school. They also have a tendency to get emotionally involved and think ahead of themselves—Maybe this intervention will, as promised, finally raise the reading scores of every student in the class! If every other school is doing it, we need to get on board!

Enduring Ideas

In contrast to fads, enduring ideas remain influential over time even if their popularity fades somewhat. In education, one example is the concept of checking for understanding—a term originally coined by Madeline Hunter and associated with her lesson design. We may relabel the term (as feedback, for example), or slightly modify her lesson plan, but the basic concept of checking for understanding has been institutionalized as a critical reform and teaching strategy (Hattie, 2009; Schmoker, 2011a). Once the practice became widespread and even expected in schools, thousands of teachers who had previously conducted linear lessons regardless of students' levels of understanding found themselves modifying their lessons to better honor student voice.

Reforms will often endure because of their crossover or interdisciplinary appeal. The smartphone is not just an updated telephone; with thousands of apps available, it has the capacity to meet health, leisure, work, family, and social needs. Similarly, in education, Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe's (1998) Understanding by Design approach is used across disciplines to meet teachers' curricular, instructional, assessment, and professional development needs.

Innovation may be defined as a new and significant revolutionary product or methodological change. Of course, newness does not always translate to better results. It is not an exaggeration to say that billions of dollars have been spent on educational reforms and innovations that proved to be unsuccessful. This needs to end. The literature on educational change is replete with examples of superficial structural changes that well-meaning reformers believed would affect classroom practices but that have had little effect (Elmore, 1995, 2011; Frontier & Rickabaugh, 2014; Fullan, 2011; Payne, 2008; Tyack & Cuban, 1995). Examples include lengthening the school year, changing the governance structure, modifying the high school schedule, exchanging tablets for traditional textbooks, closing underperforming schools, mandating curriculum changes, and implementing high-stakes testing. Fullan (2011) insists that structural changes have missed the target; as he puts it, "The heart of the matter is instructional improvement linked to student learning" (p. 13).

The Dangers of Reform Overload

The number of reforms that teachers have to deal with simultaneously in their classrooms is simply overwhelming—and it's nothing new. When I worked as an administrator and teacher at international schools in Singapore, India, and Israel two decades ago, I would visit the United States each year to attend educational conferences and was always taken aback by the multitude of new front-burner reforms covering such disparate matters as "site-based decision making, inclusion, total quality management, brain-based learning, block scheduling, gender bias, charter schools, teacher empowerment, leadership renewal, technology, year-round schooling, state and national standards, coping with gangs and violence, administrative and teacher accountability, school-to-work transitions, distance learning, increasing foreign-language instruction, ESL immersion and multicultural education" (Alvy, 1996, p. 1). Practitioners admitted to me that when they closed their classroom doors, they decided which reforms to implement or discard based on student needs and their personal instructional comfort zones:

Teachers know, from their experiences, that reformers come and go and there is no "warranty" that a reform will work…. [Thus,] if we consider what we already know about good schools—and keep these ideas in the forefront of our thinking—we are less likely to accept reforms (and "fads") that may do more harm than good. (Alvy, 1996, p. 22)

Some really great ideas for reform can get lost in the shuffle when they are not piloted first and when their implementation is not preceded by sound decision making (Hess & McShane, 2014; Schmoker, 2014). For example, the development of state standards seemed like a harmless idea when first proposed by the National Governors Association in 2010. At the time, just about everyone agreed that higher national standards would help states and districts develop more rigorous curriculum documents. But almost immediately, while the teachers and students were still becoming acquainted with them, the standards were linked to state testing initiatives. The results were predictable: In 2013, New York State decided to test students in grades 3–8 on math and reading standards, and only "31 percent of students passed the exams…. [The previous year,] 55 percent passed in reading, and 65 percent in math" (Hernández & Gebeloff, 2013).

Educators and parents lose faith in the education system when policymakers carelessly implement reforms without considering their responsibilities to students and teachers. As Charles Payne (2008) notes, "Poor implementation is harmful not just to the particular teachers and students who are immediately involved; it also undermines the very idea that change is possible" (italics added; p. 155).

Of course, educators don't have crystal balls and can never know in advance if a particular reform will create meaningful change, but caution minimizes disasters. A driver may be unable to predict all winter roadway obstacles, but he or she would still be wise to travel with chains, a flashlight, sand, and a shovel. Likewise, educators may not know whether a reform will succeed, but making thoughtful piloting decisions, reading relevant research, and talking with practitioners will certainly increase the chances that it will.

Accepting What We Don't Know: A Difficult Place to Begin

School reformers need to take a deep breath and consider what they do and do not know. Too often, they swoop in with "answers" that are incompatible with local contexts. In his book The Checklist Manifesto (2010), Atul Gawande reminds us that professional expertise does not guarantee success: "Even the most expert among us can gain from searching out the patterns of mistakes and failures and putting a few checks in place. But will we do it? Are we ready to grab onto the idea? It is far from clear" (p. 158).

Educators must raise difficult issues and ask good questions to help distinguish between enduring initiatives and harmful fads. Gene Carter (2014) reminds us: "We need to get the questions right. That means … we have to be careful about developing solutions based on misdiagnosed problems" (p. 8). This is not always a comfortable process—as Levitt and Dubner (2014) note, it is very difficult to admit "I don't know. That's a shame, for until you can admit what you don't yet know, it's virtually impossible to learn what you need to" (italics in original; p. 20).

The Long Shadow of A Nation at Risk

So: Why do we keep on making the same mistakes, pursuing reforms that do not improve teaching and learning? Let's return to the issue of structural changes that minimally affect student achievement. At the end of 2015, the secretary of education, Arne Duncan, expressed regret that instructional time had been sacrificed at the altar of high-stakes testing:

I can't tell you how many conversations I'm in with educators who are understandably stressed and concerned about an overemphasis on testing in some places and how much time testing and test prep are taking from instruction…. We can and will work with states, districts and educators to help solve it. (Zernike, 2015)

Consider the following example of too hastily implemented structural reforms. In January 2015, New York governor Cuomo "called for test scores to determine 50 percent of a teacher's evaluation" (Taylor, 2015a). By December of that year, the governor had completely reversed his position, advocating instead for a four-year moratorium on using math and reading test scores as a component of evaluation and supporting t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1. Pursuing Reforms of Substance: The Time Is Now
• Chapter 2. The Narrative Trap and Building a Collaborative Learning Community
• Chapter 3. Overpromising and Overloading and Effectively Using Human, Fiscal, and Material Resources
• Chapter 4. Minimizing the Enormous Difficulty of Implementation and Respecting the Change Process
• Chapter 5. Eyes Off the Prize and Sustaining a Coherent School Mission and Vision
• Chapter 6. Historical Amnesia and Embracing Timeless and Eclectic Teaching Practices
• Chapter 7. The Business “Solution” and Championing and Empowering the Underserved
• Chapter 8. Conclusions: A Dialogue Among 3 Teachers and 10 Takeaways to Support Reforms of Substance
• Appendix A. Protocols for Discussions on Red Flags and Guidelines
• Appendix B. Questions to Promote Collaborative Discussions of Red Flags and Guidelines
• Appendix C. A List of Educational Initiatives, Ideas, Practices, and Trends from the Past 30-Plus Years
• Appendix D. Perennial and Recent Education-Related Either/Or Dilemmas
• Appendix E. The 15 Principles to Support Reforms of Substance
• References
• About the Author
• Related ASCD Resources
• Study Guide
• Copyright