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Vision and Its Foes: Beneath the Surface of School Reform

Author(s): Joe McDonald Source: Coalition of Essential Schools, October 1993. Ordering Information

There is a conspiracy of vision amid efforts to remake American schools for the twenty-first century. First among the conspirators are teachers, principals, and university based school reformers who are busy building and supporting exemplars of redesigned schools (Meier, 1992, 1993; Sizer, 1992; Wood, 1992; Fiske, 1991). Most of them labor, wittingly or not, under the abiding influence of their century leaping mentor John Dewey. One sees the influence especially in their commitment to democratic values as the ideological foundation of American education, and in their learner centeredness.

Also in the conspiracy are cognitive scientists who have redefined learning and teaching in terms radically at odds with the common practices of American schools (Jones & Idol, 1990; Cohen, McLaughlin & Talbert, 1992; Gardner, 1989, 1991; Perkins, 1992; Bruer, 1993). They are well positioned to dispute the powerful influences on current school design of their predecessors in psychology: the behaviorists with their passion for mincing teaching and learning, and the early theorists of intelligence with their passion for discriminatory measurement (Resnick & Resnick, 1991; Wolf et al., 1991).

A third group of conspirators comprises organizational theorists, drawing inspiration from change under way in some American corporations (Senge, 1990; Bolman & Deal, 1991; Mauriel, 1989; Fullan with Stiegelbauer, 1991). Many of their prescriptions are animated by economic anxiety, the United States having a long history of associating economic concerns with school. They suggest in this post- industrial era what their predecessors suggested in the heyday of the industrial behemoth: that what is good for business is good for the schools and vice versa (Callahan, 1962; Marshall & Tucker, 1992).

The vision uniting these diverse conspirators embodies a fundamental shift in the very idea of what is supposed to happen in school. The learner does not simply receive knowledge but reconstructs it within a context of prior knowledge, skills, values, and beliefs -- in short, by thinking about it. And the intelligence he or she brings to this thinking is different from what it was formerly presumed to be. First of all, every learner has lots of it, especially when working in groups and with tools. And "it" is not a single thing, but multidimensional.

These basic conceptual changes affect in turn the role of the teacher, who becomes less the "deliverer of instruction" and more a cognitive coach working across domains as well as within them, a guide to worlds that extend beyond classrooms and beyond the teacher's own expertise. They affect also the organizational contexts for learning. "Direct instruction" in isolated, departmentalized classrooms yields to the construction of a community of learners and teachers, sharing common standards, striving for connections, staying open intellectually, cultivating and respecting diverse viewpoints. And this community operates within a larger educational system that is based on shared accountability rather than hierarchical responsibility.

Of course, vision alone is never enough to create change. And there is always the chance that this vision -- like its predecessors of the 1960s and 1930s -- will float above most American schools and never come to ground. If so, the fault will likely lie in the folly that Seymour Sarason identifies (1971, 1990), namely, that most proponents of good educational ideas consider schools the mere nodes of a complex system rather than complex systems in their own right. Whether school reform is launched from the outside or the inside of schools, it typically follows a linear strategy; hence, the effectiveness of some intervention is presumed to be intrinsic to the intervention itself, rather than a function of whether its impact is managed to good effect inside a turbulent world.

This is true even of many so called systemic initiatives. These typically struggle to delineate and integrate policies bearing on the school -- but, in the process, end up treating the school itself as if it were a simple switch that could be turned on by a remote source. Similarly, reform initiatives launched on the inside of schools -- by principals or small groups of teachers, and with or without consultants -- typically put too much trust in stimuli: a new policy or structure or a dose of professional development.

Finally, both outside reformers and inside reformers often seem to forget that schools always exist within fractious communities. As George Counts put it in a sarcastic reference to the systemic initiatives of his own day: the Chicago public schools have always been, and probably always will be, for better or worse, in Chicago (Counts, 1928).

But what if it were otherwise? What if policy makers at all levels promoted the vision sketched above while respecting schools as they really are? Several colleagues and I at the Coalition of Essential Schools have studied this and other related questions over the course of nearly three years by means of a close study of ten public high schools.1 The schools are in nine states with contrasting policy contexts. They also offer contrasting settings -- four urban, five suburban, one rural. We selected these particular schools to study because they seemed to offer a valuable dual perspective on the problems of achieving a reform genuinely oriented to the vision presented here. First, their experience suggests that such reform is possible, despite all difficulties. Second, their experience also suggests that it is nearly impossible, contrary to all hype.

What the schools share is a serious intention to redesign themselves. Of course, they exercise this intention within a real world full of contrary influences that especially include the following three: 1) ambivalence on the part of some or most of the schools' clients -- both parents and students; 2) resistance by the hierarchical systems that enmesh most of the schools; and 3) certain deep dynamics of the status quo that can snare serious reform like an undertow snares a swimmer.

Of these three foes, the first can be overcome only through vigorous and politically skillful community outreach, which some of the schools in our study seem capable of undertaking and others not. The second can be overcome only through the thoughtful redesign of state and district policies, which is under way in some of the contexts of our study, though by no means all. But the third may be the hardest foe of all, since the deep dynamics that it is comprised of go generally unnoticed and unnamed even in such schools as those in our study. And one cannot overcome what one has not yet noticed and named.

In what follows, I name what I take to be seven dynamics of the status quo suggested by our data. My purpose in naming them is not to suggest a definitive list but rather to encourage other researchers and reformers to presume the existence of some such set of deep- system dynamics and to do their own work of naming and illuminating. Although I also mention in the case of each of the seven dynamics one or two promising strategies for dealing with them -- again suggested by our data -- I believe that most of the work of inventing such practices still lies ahead. So my second purpose here is to encourage such invention, especially by the people who run schools and work in them. Finally, I have a third purpose, one that undergirds this paper's concluding section, in which I use these seven dynamics to construct a template to serve the design and evaluation of educational policy.

Seven School Dynamics Constraining Deep Change

A centripetal tendency to central authority against shared leadership.

One sees this tendency not only in schools but throughout the educational system. So there is the abundance of "systemic" initiatives in states and at the national level that all propose to employ a larger, more centrally placed lever. Energies run toward the "center" at the expense of what is mistakenly seen as the periphery; namely, actual relationships between teachers and learners. The tendency is exacerbated in times of change, since only enormous leverage is perceived to be capable of shifting an enormous weight.

Complicating the picture at the school level is a tacit treaty that grants too much management authority to the principal and too much curricular and standard-setting authority to isolated teachers (Johnson, 1990). Again, this tendency may ironically be strengthened in times of change, since only the principal in most contexts can wield enough power to marshal the outside resources that change demands and to face off the outside threats it generates. But how can the principal be strong enough on the outside without throttling the development on the inside of middle-leadership structures? The problem, of course, is that the vision sketched above of a community of learners and teachers requires such structures. How else, for example, can a school achieve genuinely shared standards?

Our data suggest that even the rare principal who is aware of this dilemma and who manages it successfully may nonetheless face opposition from the school's "best" teachers, since the definition of "best teaching" may rest on a presumption of isolation -- wherein one sets standards that heroically exceed the norm, shutting out the world beyond one's classroom in order to focus energy exclusively on the kids. From the perspective of such teaching, the vision above may imply an abandonment of academic freedom.

The most promising strategies we have seen in our study sample for confronting this dynamic involve accountability mechanisms requiring collaboration across classrooms and subjects. In the schools we studied, these mechanisms have proved more effective in achieving shared leadership than have mechanisms for shared governance. Typically, they involve performance assessment systems invented by the schools themselves, sometimes combined with "descriptive reviews" or other mechanisms to focus on the needs and experiences of students who might otherwise elude notice (Weaver, 1992). In some of the schools, these systems have grown quite elaborate and seem to be driving other changes (McDonald et al., 1993).

Yet, where they operate, these systems have also tended to alienate some subset of the faculty, among them some of the most successful practitioners of isolated teaching. In some cases this alienation has led such teachers to leave the school, and in at least one case, it has provoked considerable concern among parents and students.

An effective way to deal with this situation, according to our evidence, is to acknowledge the tension, share with all concerned the rationale for change, and then insist on the change despite the possible loss of good people. But, of course, these tasks typically require what is called a "strong" principal -- and, indeed, most of the schools in our study have had one. Thus, shared leadership is purchased, ironically, by an exertion of central authority. That may not be problematic so long as the principal who originated the change, and cares about shared leadership, remains in the job. Our study suggests that this may not be long, however; in two years, the principalships in half of our ten schools have changed hands.

An overreliance on group instruction at the expense of individual learning.

Even space and time in school are defined in terms of groups: classrooms and class hours. Being in school typically means being unremittingly part of a crowd. Of course, one of school's necessary functions is to teach children how to be part of a crowd, and certain kinds of "crowds" -- for example, discussion groups and cooperative task groups -- are essential for particular kinds of learning.

But students also need opportunities for genuinely independent inquiry and for self-directed application and synthesis of the concepts they acquire (Gardner, 1989, 1991). It is not enough to consign these experiences to homework and seat work, since they require more time and resources than homework allows for and more space and personal freedom than seat work permits. The writer of a recent essay excoriating the excessive controls of school reveals that he got an idea for the essay while opening a can of chili (Brown, 1992). If they are to function as intellectuals in school rather than as empty vessels, students too need some opportunity to intersperse concentration and productive distraction, to open cans of chili.

We did not find much chili-cooking in the high schools of our study (outside the cafeteria kitchens, that is); nor, in general, did we find much of the off-task informality of behavior and decor one finds in some independent and alternative high schools -- or indeed in many ordinary elementary-school classrooms. That is a pity, since in the best circumstances such environments help create a sense of intellectual community independent of the instructional schedule. Ideally, what one wants is intellectual ownership -- that a high school student might occasionally think of the study of math, for example, as an interest and commitment extending beyond the time she must sit in her math classroom or at her desk or kitchen table working on highly directed homework. But this presumes that the school allots time and space for anything else, and that somehow this allotment manages to suggest that the intellectual focus of school does not stop at each classroom's threshold, that the rest of the school's space and time are not reserved for the distinctly unintellectual. By and large, the schools in our study did not handle this challenge very well.

Nonetheless, we found among them other promising practices relevant to dealing with this second dynamic. Several schools had collapsed the instructional schedule into large blocks of time managed by small teams of teachers, wherein students enjoy greater opportunity to do more than sit attentively at small desks. Some of the schools also encourage, or even require, community-based learning, allotting time and other resources to it. Finally, most of the schools in our study encourage project-based learning, which is undergoing a resurgence as well in other innovative schools (Olson, 1993).

Some of the project work we saw happened within courses, but -- in a particularly encouraging development -- some happened outside, too. In several cases, projects fulfill graduation requirements that exist on top of Carnegie unit requirements. In another case, while projects afford students the opportunity to gain "honors-level" distinction for courses, the project work itself happens entirely outside the courses' purview. In all cases, the project work in these schools has tended to foster teaching relationships and learning formats different from norms of classroom-based teaching and learning. In a few places it has also led to the introduction of new units of time and space -- project and tutorial "periods," offices for teachers, project rooms where resources and supports for learning are generalized and students establish their own work priorities and routines.

The habit of maintaining custody of students through close supervision.

The custodial imperative is strong in practice and often in law: schools must hold students in custody while they teach them. The imperative is derived from reasonable concerns for safe and from sensible awareness of the role that good direction plays in learning. Yet it is often entangled with compulsive attitudes about human behavior and with misconceptions about how people learn. Thus, the close supervision of life in many schools -- over studying, playing, eating, going to the bathroom, and especially working, thinking, and expressing oneself -- ends up hobbling learning rather than enhancing it. Indeed, it often proves counter-productive in maintaining custody, since many children held too tightly overall look continuously for places to spring loose. Finally, it impedes the growth of a learning culture by suppressing two of the most important tools of intellectual growth, namely, curiosity and conflict. In the interest of maintaining custody, schools function in myriad ways to prevent the kind of straying from task that is curiosity's currency, and to prevent as well the expression and exploration of disagreement.

So a school's people are packed safely into their respective places: the student seated silently at his little desk, the teacher standing behind her big desk, the principal shuffling papers at his still bigger desk, and the assistant principal conducting "hall sweeps" with a walkie-talkie. In such circumstances, some simple and necessary rituals of a learning culture -- for example, regular and spirited faculty meetings, school convocations, and forays into the outside world -- may be viewed as threats to the custodial status quo. Any more radical departures from the norm may be seen as utterly impossible.

The project-based learning experiences mentioned above in association with the second dynamic lend themselves to resisting this third dynamic, too. Especially powerful are opportunities to pursue a project outside the school walls during school hours. Indeed, any community-based learning experiences -- for example, community service requirements and internships -- are helpful in promoting the idea that schools can teach indirectly as well as directly, and that mechanisms can be invented to keep students safe and productive even in the most difficult environments. Helpful in another way are the advisory and governance systems we saw in a few of our study's schools, designed to foster personal responsibility and a sense of community.

The tendency to turn inward and to discount outside perspectives.

This tendency is expressed in various, and even conflicting, ways. So there is disdain for parents, and also fear of them. They are openly welcomed, but as guests, not "family." And parent involvement is (in private) depicted negatively by many teachers, even as reformers are clamoring for new and better programs to support it. Similarly, businesses are invited to "adopt" schools, but find themselves frozen out of any influence on the adopted school's operations.

As for researchers, there is a persistent perception among school people that researchers are hopelessly out of touch with the realities of schooling, though schools also exhibit a tendency to inflate the value of research findings. This paradox is a derivative of the quest for nostrums -- much encouraged by the cottage industries of school improvement and "in-service" professional development -- and ultimately self-sealing. "We tried that already" is the chant of an enterprise prone to frequent and superficial innovation, one used to the translation of even radical ideas into shopworn practice.

Finally, in still another manifestation of this dynamic, there is a perilously shortsighted tendency to discount the importance of educational policy, particularly at the state or national level. This is part of the closed door syndrome, the confidence that nearly every teacher carries within that if worse comes to worst, she can always close her door and do whatever she pleases inside her own classroom. Of course, the reliance on this safety valve is a powerful disincentive to build genuine collegiality, to maintain common standards, to engage in team teaching, and to otherwise participate in the construction of the vision outlined above.

Among the ten study schools, we have seen a number of promising strategies aimed at undoing the various dimensions of this dynamic. One involves attempts to ensure that a significant number of people who work in a school live in the community that supports the school and are in other respects connected with that community. Once again, community-based learning experiences are powerful here, too, insofar as they dispute the idea of the school as a self-reliant institution. Also effective are efforts to link the inside and the outside of schools through telecommunications, though these are in a very early stage of development in our study's schools.

One promising strategy we have observed is counterintuitive. It involves a reconceptualization of the school's relationship to outside expertise. Conventionally, schools "receive" new knowledge about curriculum, methods of instruction, and so on from intermediate agencies who provide policy interventions, textbook changes, "technical assistance," and "inservicing." By contrast, all ten schools in our study are relatively experienced in inventing their own knowledge about these things. They are members of a network, the Coalition of Essential Schools, one that is increasingly led by people who work in schools, one that increasingly generates its own cross-school consulting expertise. One result is that a significant proportion of the study's schools seems to be in charge of their own professional development in a way that is quite rare.

That is not to say that the schools regard themselves as selfsufficient. In fact, we have observed a contrary effect in these schools, which is why I say that this strategy is counterintuitive. Because these schools feel more confident in assessing their own needs and more aware of their own capacity to address them, they are also more deliberate about soliciting outside consultation when that consultation is appropriate. Indeed, this is the key difference: that these schools hire consultants rather than inservice providers. In an exceedingly promising development, there are even signs that one or two of the schools are having an impact on state policy by demanding that it align with the schools' innovations.

The assumption that the school's essential function is meritocratic.

Much of what is demanded by economic circumstances, specified by new conceptions of intelligence and learning and suggested by new views of an optimally functioning organization runs counter to the idea of school as sorting mechanism. But the idea is deeply ingrained in practice and easily survives rhetorical assault. "All students will achieve at high levels," says the school, in accordance with the state's new goals; but in the hearts of principals, teachers, and parents, conditions are added: ".?.?. in proportion to their abilities .?.?. within the traditional hierarchy of achievement .?.?. consistent with their family background .?.?. given their probable career paths" and so on.

As in all winnowing organizations, the worth of individuals is defined by very narrow criteria -- one's GPA, one's willingness to bake cookies for the senior bake sale, one's capacity for speaking and thinking like the majority or elite group. In some of the most socio-economically homogeneous communities in the United States, schools act as if their function were to manufacture status differences. Undergirding this is the widespread attachment to a theory of intelligence as a unitary, maldistributed, and easily measurable "gift" from the gene pool: each kid is so many ounces smart and so many ounces dumb.

Taken as a whole, the schools in our study would seem to be less meritocratic in their orientation than most high schools, some of them astonishingly so. Yet, buffeted especially by parental fears and expectations, most also harbor meritocratic practices. In this respect, they mirror the views of most Americans whose own experiences in schools and in the economy seem to belie the idea that all people really can be taught to use their minds well.

The most promising practice in confronting this dynamic that we have seen involves more than the simple substitution of heterogeneous classes for tracked ones. That can lead easily to parental backlash, despite all assurances of research findings on the value of heterogeneity -- and, indeed, this has happened in one of our study's schools. A better strategy is to strive for an optimal balance between heterogeneity and differentiation. The former emphasizes the value of diverse perspectives, intelligences, and skills; it highlights methods like seminar-based learning, problem-based learning, and cooperative learning. The latter acknowledges that students differ in all kinds of ways -- and especially in ways that do not show up on intelligence tests and do not cut across the entire spectrum of human capacity; it highlights methods like individual project work or intense instructional environments, as in advanced foreign language training or advanced computer science. The goal here is to reconstitute the school as a community of equal intellectual strivers, all of whom pursue some areas of specialization.

The tendency to define teaching as a narrative activity.

In this image of their work, teachers, like novelists, construct narrative bridges across the incomprehensibility of experience viewed close up. They build these narratives with material supplied by scholarship they've encountered, curriculum frameworks from various sources, stories they too were taught, and, of course, textbooks. They invest themselves in these stories and believe in the transformative power of them (McDonald, 1992).

For their part, learners yield themselves to the power of the stories, though it is also presumed that, like good readers, they will eventually turn a critical eye. Yet the turn of this critical eye -- the opportunity to reconstruct what has been "delivered" -- is often expected to happen, if it happens at all, in the student's own time and space, outside the teacher's purview. That's for homework, for private study in preparation for the unit test, for college. The result is a phenomenon much in evidence in today's schools: "But I taught him," the teacher says. "It's not my problem if he didn't learn."

The new vision for teaching outlined at the start of this paper needs a different metaphor from that of teaching as narrating. Cognitive scientists, among others, suggest scaffolding as a substitute, or coaching (Paris & Winograd, 1990; Sizer, 1984, 1992). In both cases, the new metaphor suggests that what matters after all is what the student constructs, not what the teacher intends. Both metaphors also imply an enormous shift in the strategies of schoolkeeping as well as teaching. Teachers now teach like storytellers partly because the setup of most schools suggests that they do. This involves some of the features discussed above -- the reliance on large group instruction, the custodial role of teachers, the centripetal habit of school that makes the teacher as powerful within a single room as the principal is powerful within his domain and the superintendent within hers. It also involves the idea of curriculum as something parceled out and covered, the didactically oriented furnishings of most classrooms, and the loneliness of teaching.

Addressing this dynamic in our study's schools has often involved the assiduous cultivation of alternative norms. One school has devoted years of work and training to seminar-based teaching. Others are nearly as devoted to other nondidactic methods like cooperative learning and project-based learning. Yet in all these schools, the narrative grip has been weakened rather than broken. The effect seems strongest where the cultivation of other methods has been combined with the adoption of longer teaching blocks and some team-teaching. It is harder to be a storyteller for two hours straight than it is for forty-five minutes at a time. And it is harder to tell joint stories than to tell one's own.

In fact, it may be that to plan together in any extended way, teachers must come to terms with the fact that human beings do not communicate directly from head to head and heart to heart, but always through media and always on the basis of a mutual construction of meaning conditioned by values. The insight then pays off in their teaching, where they leave more room for this mutual construction -- more pauses in the story.

The tendency to privilege teacher performance over student performance.

This tendency derives from the two preceding tendencies, but it is anchored also in a well-meaning conspiracy to encourage students and to preserve teachers' self-esteem. Thus the exhibition of student performance is reserved typically for only the best and most finished work -- the papers that get tacked to the bulletin board, the speeches that are delivered at the assembly, the project that makes it to the science fair. Lost amid this conspiracy are opportunities for students to struggle openly with difficult tasks among multiple coaches and the varied perspectives of other strugglers, for them to grasp thereby that minds construct their own understandings, and for them to tolerate thereby the fact that failure is an essential ingredient in the pursuit of intellectual achievement.

In a book by Philip Jackson and his colleagues (1993), the researchers ponder in one passage the significance of the fact that, in a wall display, one teacher has hung a student's crudely drawn map of Sierra Leone amid his classmates' more carefully drawn maps of other African countries. Does it mean, they wonder, that the teacher doesn't see or value the difference? Their question is appropriate, since that may be, in fact, the case; but the question also illustrates the problem here. In fact, teachers cannot teach for understanding by encouraging and permitting the exhibition of impressive performance only. In an important sense, understanding is performance (Gardner, Perkins & Perrone, 1992) -- or at least one cannot work on it, either as teacher or student, in any other mode. So student performance must come out from the margins of school.

Getting it out will not be easy, however. Ironically, the current infatuation with performance-based assessment may hurt rather than help, since it implicitly fosters a judgmental climate, and suspicions of a judgmental climate are exactly what keeps performance marginalized. The teacher and sometimes the student fear that someone else, upon seeing an unimpressive performance, may privately think, "So, this is supposed to be good!" The solution, of course, is the cultivation of a performance-based culture for learning and teaching -- one within which assessment plays a role. Trying to get there by overemphasizing that role, however, may prove counterproductive.

On the other hand, a number of the schools in our study use performance assessment to good effect in addressing this dynamic (McDonald et al., 1993). The difference may be that they control the terms of its use rather than suffering its imposition. Most of the schools call these performance assessments exhibitions, the term favored by the Coalition of Essential Schools. One school has even preserved some of the term's eighteenth-century connotation through its use of Exhibition Days -- occasions when the school invites outsiders to come inside in order to observe and evaluate actual student performance (McDonald, 1993). The point is to accustom these visiting stakeholders -- as well as the school's own teachers and students -- to a face-to-face accountability grounded in the real understandings of real kids.

A Template for Policy

The dynamics described above are not elements in a deterministic scheme to thwart all attempts at genuine school reform in the United States. Nor am I at all pessimistic about the ultimate chances of such reform. I simply believe those chances rest upon -- among other things like luck, pluck, and the imagination of school leaders -- the willingness of all reformers to acknowledge the real features of the environment they address.

If I am right in assuming that the dynamics we discerned in our small sample of high schools are integral features of this environment, then they must be dealt with. In particular, any policy that aims to promote the vision of schooling outlined at the start of this chapter must be constructed with the dynamics in mind. To serve this purpose, I propose a template -- a simple list of seven questions, each tied to a dynamic -- to superimpose on some real or imagined policy implementation: How is this policy likely to affect the balance between central and shared leadership in schools? Will this policy likely enhance or disturb the over-reliance of schools on grouping? And so on.

Of course, the purpose of such a tool is not to serve the construction of some universal school reform policy, one capable in a single swipe of neutralizing all seven dynamics. It is merely to help the reformer anticipate the likely pattern of environmental backlash her reform will generate and to offer valuable counsel: "Better make a frontal assault here. Go easy there and you'll just get a minor but tolerable skirmish." Of course, some dynamics will always appear more salient than others in a particular case, but sometimes the low-lying ones need just as much attention.

Applying the Template

Let's try out the template on a real policy, one described recently in an Education Week article headlined "Mass. Leads Mounting Charge Against Ability Grouping" (Schmidt, 1993).2 The military rhetoric of the headline notwithstanding, the Massachusetts policy described here, while forthrightly derived from the vision I discuss above, is also sensibly circumscribed. It aims to discourage the grouping of students by perceived ability through the award or denial of state funds earmarked for dropout prevention and remedial education, but it focuses nearly exclusively on middle schools. According to statistics cited in the article, it is enjoying some success to date. Can the template suggest why this may be so, and what obstacles may lie ahead?

The policy has certainly stirred number 5, the assumption that the purpose of school is meritocratic, which appears the most salient in this application of the template. There is some evidence in the article to suggest, however, that the policy avoids direct confrontation with the theory of intelligence that undergirds this dynamic. By encouraging "heterogeneous grouping," for example, the policy may appear implicitly to endorse the validity of what are undoubtedly crudely conceived status differences: she's got this much ability, while he has that much more, yet they may profitably learn together in the same group.

Meanwhile, the policy seems to acquiesce to number 2 -- the focus on grouping as the basic organizational principle of teaching. It makes the pragmatic argument that mixed groups offer a better deal to the least "bright" students in terms of "reaching their full potential," as well as to the state in terms of its interest in preventing dropouts. The policy is working well at the middle-school level, but it is probably headed for trouble in that bastion of meritocracy, the high school. It might fare better there, however, if its basic argument were revised to something like the following: Current grouping practices are based on crude and invalid measures. As such, they severely constrain all individual learners' opportunities to excel. What is wanted is less grouping overall, with more opportunity for students to follow a relatively independent course, with most remaining large groups designed to provide the benefits of diverse perspectives.

Of course, were the state to direct the policy in the way I suggest, it would likely stir up three other dynamics. No. 3: How will schools maintain custody if not by means of grouping? No. 6: How can teachers actually teach to diverse groups without aiming at the middle and losing their audience at the extremes? And No. 7: What will students do in school if they are not always paying attention to their teachers? I stand by my advice, nonetheless, since I think it is these three dynamics -- quiescent though they may now seem in Massachusetts -- that really block efforts to detrack schools. In fact, any detracking policy that does not stir them up risks doing nothing much of lasting value, in my view.

Of course, whenever the state does stirring of any kind, it risks the wrath of dynamic number 4 -- that the school will close its doors to the meddling world outside. What does this policy do to prevent this? Well, it smartly eschews mandate, since, as the article reveals, it would first have to seek authority to mandate in this area. So it works with the carrot and stick of funding awards and denials, and also with the bully pulpit. The state's lead person on the issue is clearly conversant with the research in the area and seems savvy as well in how to use it to affect the climate of opinion. For example, references in the article suggest that he has cultivated the support of the state's child advocacy groups and perhaps also of the teacher education establishment. There is no suggestion, however, that he is at work on the most difficult constituency of all, namely, parents.

In the matter of the policy's impact on dynamic number 1, the centripetal tendency in leadership, the record is mixed. The state is involved here, albeit in a restrained role, and only the federal government is more remote from where the real action is. But it so happens, according to the article, that a federal court is currently hearing a complaint by the NAACP against tracking in the Amherst- Pelham school district. The combination of a little muscle from the state plus the threat of a lot of muscle from a federal court has induced centripetal tendencies as well at the school level. The article quotes a couple of principals who are clearly "mounting" their own "charge" for heterogeneous grouping, perhaps making it the defining issue of their principalships. It also quotes one principal -- from the Amherst-Pelham district -- who has obviously staked out a spirited position for himself on the other side of the issue, which is portrayed throughout the article (and perhaps implicitly by the policy) as two-sided.

Of course, certain elements of this issue -- those involving equity -- are perhaps best viewed as two-sided: either schools treat all their students equitably or they do not. Other elements are best considered multifaceted: over the entire course of schooling, what is the optimal balance among independence and group contexts, small groups and large groups, common perspectives and diverse perspectives, task-oriented groups and process-oriented groups, and so on?

So that is how one applies the template. One first considers which of its seven dynamics seem most salient in a particular case and why, and then which seem most quiescent and why. In the process, one mentally jiggles each of the dynamics in order to imagine the probable effect on the others. Is the application useful in the Massachusetts case? Only those who know the case can say for sure; it is much easier to do policy analysis on the few circumstances one can glean from a newspaper article than it is on actual circumstances. But it can only help visionary policy making for those involved in it to try any exercise, however imperfect, that may help them gain a school's eye perspective.

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Footnotes

1. The study was conducted between 1991 and 1993. The findings reported here are from early analysis of the data. My colleague David Allen made major contributions to the preparation of this paper.
2. The analysis here is based exclusively on the Education Week report and is meant merely to be illustrative.

The Coalition of Essential Schools gratefully acknowledges the IBM Corporation and the UPS Foundation for their support of its research on Exhibitions.

This article is a slightly revised version of a paper presented at the conference of the National Research Center on Student Learning, University of Pittsburgh, November 5-8, 1992.

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