Breaking the Cycle of Reforming Again and Again (Thomas Hatch)
In a recent article in International Education News, Professor Tom Hatch, Teachers College, Columbia, offered a reasonable and do-able way for policymakers, parents, and voters to outflank the seemingly inevitable cycle of school reform that researchers, policy analysts, and historians of education have documented for decades. Hatch sets out ideas that prompt questions about which reforms best fit the particular setting. These ideas are anchored deeply in historical and contemporary policy making. The questions Hatch proposes flow from these ideas and can (and must) be asked of policy makers, researchers, political officials, and donors or anyone proposing the next best reform in school governance, organization, curriculum, and instruction.
Such questions need to be asked openly. And answers need to come from those who have the authority and money to put proposed reforms into practice.
…. Building on Cuban’s work with his colleagsue David Tyack in Tinkering Toward Utopia and further analyses by David Cohen and Jal Mehta in “Why reform sometimes succeed”, my colleagues and I have been looking at some of the reasons that so many policies and reform initiatives fail to produce the fundamental changes in schools and classrooms that they seek. In a nutshell, this work suggests that too often the goals, capacity demands, and values of reform proposals do not match the common needs, existing capabilities, and dominant values in the schools and districts they are supposed to help.
Admittedly, this is a simple heuristic, but it provides one quick way to anticipate some implementation challenges and to explain how reform initiatives evolve. Although this example is drawn from the US, the basic approach to identifying CONTINUE READING: Breaking the Cycle of Reforming Again and Again (Thomas Hatch) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice