As usual, Marc Tucker offers some incisive commentary on how to improve American schools. What is not so typical about his recent blog post, “The American System for Improving Our Schools,” is that his formula for improvement does not involve any new teaching methods, grant proposals, or changes to teacher preparation. Marc Tucker wants education officials and researchers to explore how our current educational system actually works.
Once we understand that, and add in a basic understanding that every reform does not work in every district or even school, Tucker believes, we will be able to actually implement reforms that have a chance to work. Too often, right now, reforms are tried without their having any real chance of success because those who implement them have not considered the specifics of the environment to which they will be added.
Here is Tucker on the current method of reform:
The result is a teeming assortment of unrelated initiatives, unrelated to each other and unrelated to any overall analysis of the needs of the system endorsed by the people responsible for our schools. Many of the interventions that get funded operate at cross-purposes with one another. Any harmony among them is entirely accidental. The effectiveness of these interventions is often not evaluated at all. And, of those that are, very few employ a rigorous methodology. Few are systematically implemented and very, very few get to scale.
Here is Tucker on the crux of why the US doesn’t have more success with reforms:
I submit that the most serious impediment to running a first class education system is our seeming inability to focus on the design of the system itself. The gold standard education research methods are singularly unsuited to the task. It is not possible to randomly assign state populations to state education systems. Education systems, it turns out, cannot be studied in the same way that most health treatments can.
Here is Tucker on how other countries go about their more successful process of reforms:
They are generated by the people who run the system in a systematic effort to shore up weaknesses in the system. Whether seeking significant changes or incremental refinements, the interventions are designed to fit into the system, not to upend it, circumvent it or ignore it. The people responsible for this function typically start off by doing a systematic review of the best practices in the world, not with a view to picking one best practice and replicating it, but rather with the intention of putting together their own unique design, based on an analysis of their own needs and context, the best of what they have seen and their own ideas. Once the design is formulated, they find some very good teachers to try it out, modify it until it works the way they want it to, and then implement it at scale.
For more information, please visit: http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/top_performers/2013/10/the_american_system_for_improving_our_schools.html
