Changing Educational Change

By Thomas J. Sergiovanni

Few topics are of greater interest to policymakers, to policy scientists, and to educational consultants than is educational change. Most of these elites assume that somewhere within the depths of this discipline lie the secrets that, once understood, can lead a school, state, or nation on the path to school improvement. The stakes are high. Finding the right change strategy promises victory in the national and even international brain race.

But something is amiss with the discipline and practice of educational change. If it is to fulfill its promise, it must evolve from a policy science concerned with instrumentalities to a science and art of design, concerned with substance. Too much of the theorizing, researching, and policymaking on change in education is driven by the flat-out assumption that change is good and resistance to change is bad. Too often, leaders are thought to be successful if change succeeds and unsuccessful if change does not succeed. Little heed is given to what the substance of this change is.

Consider the now-popular use of standards as a school improvement strategy. Increasingly, schools are considered to be successful if they adopt state-mandated standards, invent clever strategies for aligning the curriculum with these standards, figure out how to teach this curriculum, and get good scores on state-provided standards-based assessments. The better schools are at implementing this chain of events, the more successful they are thought to be at improving. Speaking to the American context, Paul Barton, a former president of the Educational Testing Service, explains that any discussion of how well students are educated and how to "reform" education, turns quickly to testing. He notes that "among political leaders, testing is turning into a means of reform, rather than just a way of finding out whether reforms have been effective." The situation is similar...