Of School Reform 1.0 versus 2.0
My school reform friends get frustrated with me because they think I'm a naysayer. Why? They note that I've long been a critic of anachronistic salary schedules, tenure laws, school districts, licensure regimes, and the rest. They wonder how I can think that and then criticize so many attempts to impose new evaluation systems, licensure arrangements, pay models, and turnaround strategies. The fact that they're befuddled is a measure of just how easy it is for us to talk past each other when it comes to school improvement.
They're right that I'm eager to disassemble big pieces of yesterday's "one best system." But I've never understood why that means we ought to rush to impose a new "one best system." Given that schooling is the most human of endeavors, and that successful educational ventures therefore depend hugely on commitment and fidelity of execution, I'm inclined to give educators, entrepreneurs, parents, and problem-solvers a whole lot of elbow room to devise, refine, and grow their solutions.
For instance, insisting that states or districts use this observational protocol or that reading and math weighting when it comes to teacher evaluation is not only a subjective call that deserves a lot of scrutiny at best, but also wind up hindering the emergence of smart school and staffing models that don't happen to conform. (Example: blended or differentiated staffing models in which teachers don't own 28 students for a year turn out to be hugely incompatible with the kinds of teacher evaluation we've seen adopted in Florida or New York.) In Teacher Quality 2.0, Mike McShane and I argued that these kinds of 1.0 reforms have a place but that we need to take great care that they don't squelch version 2.0. I think we have fallen far short on that front.
I get why my friends are frustrated with my stance. It's the same issue that cropped up last week when I wrote about Duncan's tenure at the Department of Education. Many reformers believe that the status quo is unacceptable and that there's no time to allow for a messy cacophony of stops and starts. I get that. It's not an unreasonable view. But, for reasons I spell out at length in The Same Thing Over and Over, I think it misdiagnoses the problem and leaves us stuck with schools, systems, and structures that generally aren't equipped to fulfill our ambitions.
Anyway, this simple disagreement about how prescriptive we should be and how focused we ought to be on imposing the "right solutions"— versus how willing we should be to dismantle the old regime and let educators, entrepreneurs, and communities feel their way forward— represents a giant fault line in the reform community. How can we incrementally improve an anachronistic system while providing lots of room for Of School Reform 1.0 versus 2.0 :: Frederick M. Hess: