A Look Back

 “The latest twist on spreading innovation: One school at a time”

By Carlos Moreno, Dana Luria, & Charles Mojkowski, November 2013, pp. 8-11

Inordinate time and attention spent on conventional — yet timid and tepid — changes; a culture of compliance rather than risk-taking; and inadequate leadership preparation for innovation are some of the top factors limiting school improvement efforts, according to this 2013 Kappan article.

Also at fault? External organizations that overlook the big picture when tasked with helping schools navigate the improvement process. Instead of seeking to implement specific, required practices, school developers should take a broader view, the authors argue. External organizations must “emphasize the helping role over the expert consultant role,” build the on-site capacity for innovation, and craft an approach that addresses each school uniquely.

“Policy makers find it difficult to resist the impulse to control for compliance when they discover something that ‘works’ elsewhere. They give principals and faculty members mixed signals, telling them to innovate, but within tight boundaries,” note the authors, who based the article on their own experiences working in school development. “Innovating — continually identifying and adapting programs and practices, as distinguished from an occasional one-off adoption of a new program or practice — requires an organizational culture and climate that encourages risk taking and entrepreneurial behavior.”

 Conversation Piece

 This issue examines how schools can make changes that make a difference for students. Use these questions to reflect on the issue with your colleagues.

  • Why do you think it’s so difficult for schools to make big changes?
  • What change initiatives at your school or district have been most successful? What do you see as the keys to their success?
  • What changes have been least successful? What were the reasons for the failure?

If you could make one change in your school or district, what would it be? What ideas in this issue might help make that change stick?

PDK members have access to discussion guides related to specific articles in each issue of Kappan. Log in to the member portal and access the discussion guides at https://members.pdkintl.org/PDK_Member_Discussion_Questions.

“If the COVID-19 pandemic has taught us anything, it is that new ideas are needed in education and that many approaches are more doable than we would have imagined.”

— Andrea Rose Sachdeva and Liz Dawes Duraisingh, Reimagining the Role of Research in Schools, ASCD, May 2021.

Research connections

Sustainable educational change

What does it take to achieve lasting educational change? In a 2020 position paper, researcher Mireille D. Hubers outlines the four markers of sustainable second-order educational change. Second-order refers to changes in which a school organization seeks “transformational change,” such as use of data-based decision-making, implementation of inquiry-based learning, or adoption of new technology. And although often attempted, second-order change is no easy task and “deemed to be one of the biggest challenges in education,” Hubers notes.

To aid practitioners through the process, Hubers uses her paper to set a clear definition of sustainable second-order educational change as “1) substantial changes made that affect the core of educators’ everyday practice; 2) a longitudinal process that begins when educators contemplate making changes and ends when satisfactory achievement on the other characteristics is reached and overt learning efforts are stopped; 3) a process of individual and organizational learning as well as changes in behaviors; resulting in 4) significant positive effects on student outcomes.”

More research is needed to determine what strategies aid in success, Hubers notes. It’s just as important for researchers to study failed attempts at change. “It is impossible to come to a true understanding of successful educational change if we do not understand why change efforts are sometimes not successful,” she writes.

Source: Hubers, M.D. (2020). Paving the way for sustainable educational change: Reconceptualizing what it means to make educational changes that last. Teaching and Teacher Education, 93, 103083.

Continuous improvement methods

Stemming from frustration with the dominant “What Works” approach to school improvement, educators and researchers alike are turning to continuous improvement methods. The tenets of this emerging set of ideas and practices were highlighted in 2020 by a group of researchers from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. While “What Works” favors large-scale, research-based strategies, the hallmarks of continuous improvement include “good practice over best practice, local proofs over experimental evidence, adaptation over faithful implementation, and a focus on practitioners’ problems over researchers’ solutions.”

Source: Yurkofsky, M.M., Peterson, A.J., Mehta, J.D., Horwitz-Willis, R., & Frumin, K.M. (2020). Research on continuous improvement: Exploring the complexities of managing educational change. Review of Research in Education, 44 (1), 403-433.

“If you define yourself as someone fixing education, there’s nothing short-range you can do to fix education directly. It’s labor intensive. You have to change the way people act. You have to convince people and change people.”

— Deborah Meier, Mother Jones, September/October 2008.

Organizational change

Change-making is tricky business. Even the most seasoned leaders, at times, make changes based on limited or inaccurate information. A 2022 article in Organizational Dynamics provides a review of evidence-based practices for managing organizational change. Ongoing actions — including goal setting, vision communication, and feedback and redesign — are crucial, as are phased actions timed to a specific point in the change process. Successfully implementing both action types requires a deep understanding of the organization itself. “Your actions as an evidence-based change manager will be increasingly effective as you become more reflective, critical, and curious about your own organization, its process, and stakeholder experiences,” the authors note.

Source: Rousseau, D.M. & ten Have, S. (2022). Evidence-based change management. Organizational Dynamics, 51 (3), 100899.

Do state takeovers work?

A 2023 review found little evidence to suggest that state takeovers of school districts provide an effective route to improved academic performance. Researchers at the Brookings Institution studied 35 takeovers that occurred between 2010-11 and 2015-16. They found no evidence of improvements in math or reading scores. In fact, findings suggest that reading achievement dipped early on. In addition, takeovers were found to be more harmful to student achievement when undertaken in majority-Black communities.

Source: Schueler, B., Lyon, M.A., & Bleiberg, J. (2023, October). Do state takeovers of school districts work? Brookings Institution.

This article appears in the March 2024 issue of Kappan, Vol. 105, No. 6, p. 5-6.