Professional Learning Communities at Work TM. Robert Eaker
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States Department of Education ultimately came to the same conclusion. In 1990 the agency reported that “stagnation at relatively low levels appears to describe the level of performance of American students” (Alsalam & Ogle, 1990). As the disillusioned undersecretary of education wrote shortly after his resignation, “Despite all of the talk of reform, despite the investment of tons of billions of extra dollars, public education in the United States is still a failure. It is to our society what the Soviet economy is to theirs” (Finn, 1991, p. xiv).
The Unfulfilled Promises of the Restructuring Movement
The demise of the Excellence Movement prompted a new, two-pronged approach to school improvement. The first part of the strategy called for national educational goals and standards. In 1989 President George Bush convened the nation’s governors for a summit meeting on education—only the third time in the nation’s history that governors had been asked to meet to consider a single topic. (Theodore Roosevelt once called the governors together to discuss the environment; Franklin Delano Roosevelt assembled them to discuss the economy.) The result of the Bush summit was the identification of “Goals 2000”—six national goals for education, which stipulated that by the year 2000:
1. All children in America will start school ready to learn;
2. The high school graduation rate will increase to at least 90%;
3. American students will leave grades four, eight, and twelve having demonstrated competency in challenging subject matter, including English, mathematics, science, history, and geography, and every school in America will ensure that all students learn to use their minds well, so they may be prepared for responsible citizenship, further learning, and productive employment in our modern economy;
4. U.S. students will be first in the world in mathematics and science achievement;
5. Every adult American will be literate and will possess the knowledge and skills necessary to compete in a global economy and exercise the rights and responsibilities of citizenship; and
6. Every school in America will be free of drugs and violence and will offer a disciplined environment that is conducive to learning. (United States Department of Education, 1994)
Congress later amended this original list to include two more goals:
7. By the year 2000, the nation’s teaching force will have access to programs for the continued development of their professional skills and the opportunity to acquire the knowledge and skills needed to instruct and prepare all American students for the next century.
8. By the year 2000, every school will promote partnerships that will increase parental involvement and participation in promoting the social, emotional, and academic growth of children.
In 1991, two years after the Bush summit, the National Center on Education and the Economy joined forces with the Learning Research and Development Center at the University of Pittsburgh to design a national exam system. Then, in 1994, Congress created the National Education Standards and Improvement Council to review and endorse state and national standards. At about the same time, however, articulating national standards began to become an increasingly political activity. Critics asserted that the standards movement represented a federal takeover of the schools and an attempt to indoctrinate students to the liberal agenda. As a result, when the second Education Summit was held in 1996, the standards movement was transferred from the federal to the state governments, from the White House to the State House. Subsequently, the task of developing national standards was left to professional organizations and curriculum specialists.
While the movement to establish national educational goals and standards advanced, a parallel movement tried to give individual schools more freedom to develop the best methods to achieve those goals. The failure of the Excellence Movement had been widely attributed to the fact that it represented a “top-down” attempt to mandate improvement. Early reform initiatives had tended toward standardization, increased reliance on rules and regulations, and detailed specifications of school practices at the expense of local autonomy. Impetus for the movement had come from elected officials and business. Control was centered in state legislatures. Practitioners had become mere pawns in the movement, and the vast majority of the reform efforts had simply been imposed on them. Ultimately, the paired concepts of establishing national goals and providing local autonomy to achieve these goals seemed to offer a viable alternative to the failed Excellence Movement. National goals could address a national crisis, while job-site autonomy and individual empowerment seemed to be consistent with best practice in the private sector.
This new emphasis on site-based reform came to be known as the Restructuring Movement, a term used so widely and ambiguously that it soon lost any specific, universally understood meaning. Nevertheless, the director of the Center on Organization and Restructuring of Schools noted that comprehensive restructuring typically included some common features: site-based management with meaningful authority over staffing, program, and budget; shared decision making; staff teams with frequent, shared planning time and shared responsibility for student instruction; multi-year instructional or advisory groups; and heterogeneous grouping in core subjects (Newmann et al., 1996).
The Restructuring Movement engendered considerable optimism as it grew to become synonymous with school reform in the early 1990s. The term itself seemed to encompass more than mere innovation or improvement, suggesting instead a comprehensive redesign and systemic transformation of the schools. The simplistic, more-of-the-same approaches of earlier reform movements had apparently been replaced at last by a strategy based on a more realistic assumption: monumental changes were necessary if schools were to successfully respond to the enormous challenges before them.
Another reason the Restructuring Movement generated such hope was the expectation that educators would rush to embrace it. Not only would local educators have greater authority to initiate and oversee changes in their schools, but they would also be given the autonomy to organize and administer programs and facilities. Freed from the shackles of top-down mandates and bureaucratic rules and regulations, teachers and principals could respond creatively to the issues they faced. They could use their knowledge of pedagogy more fully and better serve their students and schools. Resources would be used more efficiently, professional collaboration would flourish, classroom life would be more stimulating, and above all, schools would be demonstrably more effective. As Roland Barth (1991) wrote, “The advent of the restructuring movement brought a sudden confidence that teachers and principals, with the help of parents and students, can get their own schoolhouse in order” (p. 126).
But in spite of the Utopian ideals, the high hopes of the Restructuring Movement have yet to be realized. Studies of the movement’s impact to date have consistently found that school practitioners have typically elected to focus on marginal changes rather than on core issues of teaching and learning. When given the opportunity to make decisions for their school site, teachers have opted to focus on peripheral issues that do not directly address the quality of student learning (Newmann & Wehlage, 1995). In fact, teachers in restructured schools seem no more inclined to discuss conditions of teaching and learning than are their colleagues in traditional school structures. As one study concludes:
The connections between teacher empowerment and site based management and improved educational processes and outcomes are tenuous at best…. It remains to be seen if restructuring leads to radical changes that deeply affect teachers and students or if changes will stop at the classroom door, leaving the teaching-learning process largely unaltered. (Murphy, Evertson, & Radnofsky, 1991)
Our experience with schools around the country confirms the research finding that the school improvement agendas of restructured schools tend to drift to non-academic, administrative issues. In fact, faculties demonstrate a fairly predictable pattern in their consideration of school improvement issues. First, they focus on student discipline: How can we get the students to behave better in our school? Then they tackle parental involvement: How can we get parents to accept greater responsibility for their child’s learning? Finally, they address faculty morale: How can we ensure that the adults who work in our school feel good about their working conditions?
Certainly student discipline, parental involvement, and staff morale are important