School Reform No Match for the Status Quo

It looks as if public K-12 education is going to get a lot of media coverage between now and Nov. 7, as both of the anointed presidential candidates are making it a centerpiece of their campaigns. And will it matter? Not a bit. Will it help our schools? Unlikely.

Behind all the election-year smoke and mirrors a hard truth remains: The institution of public education is characterized by what can be termed “a deep structure” that protects the familiar ways of keeping school.

Throughout any culture, certain assumptions about schooling are widely shared and taken for granted. In American schooling, these include a top-down decision-making structure, the physical similarity of classrooms, and the overall control orientation of policies, programs, and pedagogy. Also, there is a similarity of curriculum and schedules, faith in test scores, the labeling and sorting of students, and accepted inequities in the allocation of educational opportunities and resources.

The deep structure is held in place by a number of extremely strong inhibiting forces. These are the conventional wisdom, media messages about schools and teachers, organizational characteristics of the institution, fiscal realities, parent and community expectations, and even some aspects of the culture of teaching.

When a reform or innovation is proposed that challenges some aspect of the deep structure, one or more of these inhibiting forces acts to defeat that reform. Maybe it will take a year, maybe several, but sooner or later the new way of doing things will be “pulled back” to a more familiar pattern. You can visit a school today where a new program is being implemented, and there may even be tremendous optimism and energy behind it. If it represents a challenge to some aspect of the deep structure, I’ll make you a bet. Go back in 10 years or even five and you won’t find a trace remaining.

An example of this in Orange County was the television production facility available to students in grades four through six in Irvine during the mid-to-late 1970s. Fiscal realities were the primary inhibiting force that killed it. Experienced Orange County teachers can tell of many promising programs that were adopted locally with great fanfare but are no longer with us: If you know a teacher, you have only to ask.

When educational reforms are mandated by politicians in the form of new state or federal laws, they also may fail because of “the magic feather fallacy.” It seems that the further a person is from the classroom, the more likely he or she is to believe in the magic feather: Wave it, and change will happen. Name a thing, and you make it real. Pass a law, and the problem will be solved.

There is a great temptation to go for a quick fix: the formulation of public policy that doesn’t actually change anything. In fact, it’s a way of preserving the status quo. Policymakers talk about change in general terms, school people talk in specifics. Everyone talks past each other and nothing happens. The magic feather fallacy is certainly evident in current talk in Sacramento and Washington about curriculum standards, assessment of student learning and teacher preparation.

In an election year, it’s even more insidious and we are all to blame. Campaign rhetoric offers sweeping solutions based on just about anyone’s ideas--except those of teachers, whose ideas are the ones that should count, grounded as they are in firsthand knowledge and day-to-day realities. And we listen and nod and think those politicians’ promises about “fixing our schools” sound pretty good.

We’ve bought into the idea that schools are broken, even though year after year the Gallup Poll shows that most parents actually are fairly pleased with their own child’s school experience (it surely must be all those other schools that are chronically chaotic, dangerous places). The messages we get day after day convince us, against the evidence of our own experience and much solid research, that American public education is almost beyond hope. Campaign rhetoric plays on this anxiety, and it doesn’t do any constructive good in the long run.

Real educational reform is truly difficult to achieve, particularly when the new program or practice runs counter to the deeply embedded and broadly accepted components of the deep structure of schooling. If it is to have even a remote chance of becoming a permanent change, it needs consistent, long-term support from all constituencies--including permanent funding. This is the level of commitment we should demand of our state and federal candidates for public office when they want to talk about improving our public schools.