It's Not Us Against Them: Creating the Schools We Need
by Raymond J. McNulty| Below is an excerpt from Chapter 1: Sense and Nonsense. Instead of worrying that kids don’t fit the system or that the test scores aren’t what they should be, perhaps we should wonder how the system can change to accommodate these learners. Instead of worrying about aligning all students to the same expectations, think about how education can enhance the unique qualities that each individual student has to offer. As educators, we have a job perk that few other professions offer. We get a chance each year to “do over” our previous year. We have the opportunity to try again each year to teach students the same, or fairly similar, material. We ask students to bring what they learn ahead with them. We expect them to change and adapt, but we are not necessarily called upon to do this ourselves. Thus, the system changes very slowly. Meanwhile, the students, and the world they live in, are changing rapidly. In the United States, we built a system to educate people to live in an industrial culture, and it was successful in its time. That system remains in place, which means we are now using a system that was designed to meet the needs of a world that no longer exists. |  |
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When people build a system to accomplish something, such as education or healthcare, it must be continuously cultivated. Systems fail when the people within them don’t manage them to meet changing demands. Without stewardship – not merely to sustain, but to renew – any system will fail despite the efforts of the people within it. Before I go on, there’s something I’d like to clarify about the word “change” and what it means in education. John Goodlad, a leading education researcher and theorist of school renewal and teacher education, once pointed out that the phrases “changing education” and “education reform” connote a reprimand and imply that everything about education is wrong or that educators are doing the wrong things. Most educators, however, are doing exactly what is expected of them – but it is within a system that is outmoded. (If educators are failing in any way, it is in that they have remained wary of taking action and have continued to allow themselves to be the objects of change.) John advocates using the term renewal to talk about the work of reinvigorating education so that it can respond and adapt more quickly to the rapid changes we see in the world. I agree. So, although I still use the word change, when I do, I’m thinking about the work of renewing education. Change is constant in our world and in our schools. There’s always pressure to change, but the type of change we’re accustomed to is sustaining change, which is the opposite of renewal. Sustaining change maintains the status quo; it aims simply to improve upon what we are already doing. Sustaining strategies may keep the people in system content, but they also create systemic sluggishness. Renewal – or transformative change – shifts an organization away from what it has been doing to new strategies and approaches. Transforming tactics lead to a culture of reflective analysis and self-evaluation, which support people in the system to solve organizational problems. A system must be flexible to be adaptable. There is no way to predict the future, but if you want to develop an enduring system, you must imbed in it a fundamental openness to renewal so it can evolve. Purchase this book in the online store. |
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