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Find more Kappan articles in the WASHINGTON COMMENTARY: Movers and Shakers, Then and Now WHAT truly shakes up the education field? How does real change begin? I asked myself all sorts of questions like these after reading the results of a recent Education Week survey that rated which people, groups, reports, and media have the most influence on education policy. The survey really raised more questions than it answered. I agree with Alex Russo's observation on his website that there is a difference between influence and prestige, and the results of this survey really said more about prestige. The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), for example, is our only national indicator of overall student achievement. Thus it has a lot of prestige. The survey respondents picked it as the most influential resource, but I can't think of any significant policies that can be attributed directly to NAEP. What I consider the most important influence on public policy in the last half century -- the judicial system -- didn't even make the list. Nor can I see any way that Bill Gates deserves to be named as the most influential person affecting policy. The small-school movement existed long before the Gates Foundation endorsed it, and not much state policy with regard to small schools has showed up since the Gates money made its appearance. Meanwhile, federal policy has fizzled out. When the Gates Foundation realized that just being smaller did not guarantee successful schools, it moved on to such other issues as systemic district reforms. Some governors took up Bill Gates' call for high school reform, but we don't know yet if stiffer high school graduation requirements will produce the kind of fundamental changes that he called for last year. More than 10 years ago Congress (also listed high on influence) decided to invest in building-level, comprehensive school reform. This move encouraged and sustained dozens of reform initiatives, such as Success for All, Accelerated Schools, America's Choice, and the Talent Development High School. But recent research on both elementary and secondary comprehensive reforms has found that only a few of the models improved student achievement and then only moderately. Most had not produced any change whatsoever. So, what does make a difference in education policy? Unlike the business sector, which can "order" change ranging from total quality management, to downsizing, to outsourcing and, consequently, can change the culture of an organization or a sector, the public sector changes policies slowly and only with great difficulty. Often, the changes are the result not of clear and forceful action but, rather, of political compromise. Even with all its perceived clout, the No Child Left Behind Act is mired in controversy and resistance and does not seem to be as much of a vehicle for improving student outcomes as its supporters anticipated. There aren't any ready answers to these questions. But I do know of some examples of how change comes about. Many years ago, I sat in a hotel room in Las Vegas, listening to the female members of the National Association of State Boards of Education hatching a plot. They wanted to break the monopoly control of the organization by white men and decided to outmaneuver them by promoting the candidacy of an executive board member who was not only female but also black. This was a bold political move, and it worked. In this little group were a future state legislator and a future state superintendent. A few years later, I heard about another small group of change makers: state superintendents who wanted to wrest control of their organization from a backward-looking tyrant of an executive. At a fly-in meeting in an East Coast airport, they decided on a strategy to remove executive board members, one by one. In a short time, they had enabled a more progressive organization to evolve. The National Institute of Education, the precursor to many iterations of the U.S. Department of Education's research branch, initiated a major innovation at the federal level -- a policy group. Many of the people in this original think tank later fanned out to other organizations, foundations, or policy positions. And they made change happen. Marc Tucker, whose reports have done much to advance such initiatives as the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards and this fall's call for major changes in the organization of schooling and teacher preparation, was a ringleader of this group. During the late 1980s, another group formed with some of these same people, including Tucker, as well as David Hornbeck, who conceived the unprecedented plan for reforming the Kentucky school system; Tom Payzant, a highly successful superintendent in San Diego and Boston; Rick Mills, long-term chancellor of the New York state school system; and Vicki Phillips, who in recent years has been a successful reform superintendent and state superintendent in Pennsylvania. Known as the Alliance for Restructuring Education, this group introduced a new vocabulary to education policy, one that described aligning standards with assessments, using sound organizational strategies to run education systems, and including comprehensive student supports as essential. They were talking about these things before the standards movement had gotten off the ground, and they designed good assessments as part of the process. (The New Standards assessments were a product of the Alliance.) The North Dakota Study Group sounds like a book forum for rural educators, but that's because the name is something of a misnomer. This is a group of educators that normally meets only once a year for a weekend of talk and reflection focused on values and ideas about education in a democratic society, a passionate and lively time that would please John Dewey. The group formed from the group of researchers in the 1970s that had promoted constructivist rather than didactic teaching and learning in a comparison study of education in the early grades. Deborah Meier, who led the small-school movement in New York City against difficult odds, is a stalwart member of the North Dakota Study Group. Before any of the examples I've mentioned existed, there was the Ford Foundation, which began a fellows program to support promising leaders for education, youth development, social service organizations, and other facets of society. The program allowed them to gain expertise and find ways to use it. I recall that one Ford fellow, Jonathan Sher, virtually halted the rural school consolidation movement that was needlessly destroying many rural communities in the name of efficiency. (It often turned out that consolidation was not very efficient.) The question now is: What gives these people and groups chances to change the sluggish field of education? I find some themes in their work. They came together around a specific goal or purpose. They had flexibility and no desire to create bureaucratic structures. They were and are people of ideas, people who are passionate about changing systems to benefit kids. They looked on policy making as an opportunity, rather than as an excuse to say "no" or "but you don't understand." Somewhere out there in the vast American education system, one hopes that there are plenty of people like this who do not depend on money, power, or programs to give them ideas or to empower them to act. We surely -- and sorely -- need them. ANNE C. LEWIS writes on national issues in education policy from the Washington, D.C., area and other locales (e-mail: anneclewis @earthlink.net). |
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