Reposted with permission of the American Federation of Teachers
http://www.aft.org
Where We Stand
By Albert Shanker
"Lots of Bull but No Beef"
If people made fortunes with their schemes for reforming the schools, we'd
have a healthy crop of school-reform millionaires. Year after year, new
proposals appear. Some get enough support to be put into practice. But then,
sooner or later, they disappear, leaving the schools substantially unchanged.
This story of education reforms that come and go is not even a new one, as
Stanley Pogrow, a professor at the University of Arizona, points out in his
upcoming article, "Reforming the Wannabe Reformers"  (PHI DELTA KAPPAN, June
1996).
During the 1960s and 1970s, Pogrow reminds us, open classrooms and
community-based education were at the cutting edge of school reform. In those
days, we also heard that performance contracting would significantly improve
student achievement and that decentralization was the answer to the problems
of the New York City schools. Decentralization is probably the only one of
these reforms people still recognize; after limping along for years, it is
finally about to be put down. And Pogrow is pretty sure that our current
favorites--"whole language, vouchers, heterogeneous grouping, teacher
empowerment, authentic assessment, and team teaching"--will follow suit.
(Indeed, whole language has already lost much of the support it enjoyed in
the 1980s.)  Some of the reforms that fail deserve to, but some promising
ideas sink along with the bad ones.
What accounts for the low success rate among education reforms? It's not that
educators have a worse track record than people in other fields. Creating
innovations that work and also last is very difficult. The big problem with
the "reform/academic/research community" (Pogrow refers to it as REAR) is
that the reforms these people come up with seldom attempt to deal with the
details of classroom instruction. It's as though someone decided that a
horseless carriage would be a great idea and went around selling people on it
but never got around to figuring out how to make a carriage that would run
without a horse.
Members of the REAR community, Pogrow says, are strong on philosophical
principles and advocacy but weak on figuring out how to put their ideas into
the classroom. The statement "All students can learn" may be true--I believe
it is--but WHAT can they learn? and HOW do we teach it so that they can learn
it? Without answers to these questions, the statement is silly and empty.
Pogrow cites middle school reform, with its emphasis on child-centered
curricula, as an example of the reform/academic/research communitys
unwillingness to get down to brass tacks:
Thousands of articles and speeches have advocated the development of
child-centered curricula. I recently completed a three-year study to identify
exemplary middle school curricula.... The only exemplary math curriculum was
20 years old, and the only exemplary comprehensive science curriculum was
Canadian. There were no exemplary comprehensive language arts or social
studies curricula. While everyone has been philosophizing about what middle
school curricula should look like, no one has bothered to develop them,
despite 40 years of advocacy. The basic tools that are needed aren't there;
there is a lot of bull but no beef.
Pogrow calls what is needed, and usually lacking, "technology."  Technology
is not just equipment; it consists of "highly specific, systematic, and
structural methodologies with supporting materials of tremendously high
quality"--in other words, the details for putting a theory into action and
the means for doing so.  The Calvert School program, which offers a carefully
structured, day-by-day curriculum, complete with strategies for presenting
the topics, examples and questions for teachers to use, and the necessary
materials, is a "technology" in Pogrows terms.
How can we account for the failure by members of the REAR community to create
the "basic tools" their reforms need in order to work? Pogrow has a number of
answers. For one thing, according to the REAR view, applying a theory should
be left up to the practitioners.  This sounds as though it is respectful of
teacher "autonomy" and "professionalism." In fact, it is a set-up.  How do
you know a theory is worth anything until you grapple with the details of
putting it into practice? Besides, this (conveniently) leaves all the hard
work to the practitioners.  As Pogrow points out,
It is far more difficult to figure out how to implement theory than it is to
generate it.... Thus it makes no sense to expect practitioners to develop
their own techniques for implementing a complex reform idea.... This is not a
criticism of educators. No other field expects its practitioners to develop
the techniques that they practice.... In medicine, if individual
practitioners invent their own procedures, we call it "malpractice."
In fact, Pogrow continues, "The equivalent of expecting teachers to develop
the interventions they are going to apply [is] asking an actor to perform
Shakespeare--but to write the play first."
Pogrow's point is not that the REAR community is self-indulgent or that the
people who adopt its reforms are careless. He is saying that a reform
proposal can only be as good as the "technology" that underpins it. And if we
hope to break the cycle of reforms that fail, it's a message we must absorb.
Chuck Beams
Fidonet - 1:2608/70
cbeams@future.dreamscape.com
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* UniQWK #5290* Avoid reality at all costs.
--- Maximus 2.01wb
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