Cultivating the Conditions for Successful Reform
Changing student learning outcomes for the better requires building the infrastructure for instructional – and institutional – improvement
In prep for my doctoral research, I’ve started down a few rabbit holes around the matter of why so often education “reform” fails to succeed. As Tyack and Cuban noted (now nearly 30 years ago!) in their history of the previous 100 years of reform, “change where it counts the most – in the daily interactions of teachers and students – is the hardest to achieve and the most important.” So why does such a yawning gap persist between the ambitions and the accomplishments of many instructional reform efforts? And what are the inhibitors and enablers of successful reform?
A few trends illuminate why reforms often fail:
Reforms are more likely to fail when they aren’t given enough time, coordination, or sustained attention to take root. Woulfin and Gabriel (2022) capture this well, in the context of reading reform specifically: “as multiple waves of reading reform crash upon the U.S. education system and its educators, many elements of these reforms are only implemented at a shallow level before they recede once again.” Particularly for educators who have been at it long enough to have heard this song before, investment and motivation to change practice may be lacking when it’ll be “on to the next thing” in the blink of an eye.
Reforms are more likely to fail when they lack a clear theory of action around how they’ll positively impact instructional practice. As Elmore noted in the mid-90s, this is a key flaw of so-called “structural reform,” i.e. implementing block scheduling or restructuring the organization of teacher teams or departments. Though structural reformers may presume that restructuring efforts will inevitably result in improvements to instruction, without a clear thru-line to instructional practice, old habits, systems, and pedagogies are likely to persist. Such reforms, even when requiring a fair amount of effort and intentionality to accomplish, wind up only superficially changing teaching, if changing teaching at all.
Reforms are more likely to fail when they pay insufficient attention to adult learning. Cohen and Hill (2001) – in a robust study of what made a difference for the small percentage of teachers who truly embraced math reform in California in the 90s, and whose students experienced the benefit – found the key differentiator was teachers’ “opportunity to learn.” When the conditions were met to cultivate adult learning, teacher practice changed, which in turn, positively changed student outcomes. But too often reforms come and go without truly providing educators the support they need to make the shifts to their practice that will make a difference for students.
Reforms are more likely to fail when they apply technical solutions to adaptive challenges. Technical solutions tend to involve band-aid fixes that ignore the broader context or conditions that impact student learning, particularly around the impact of racism and inequality within the classroom (Carter, 2013; Garner et al., 2017). As Durán & Hikida (2022) argue, “instruction is inseparable from other structural dimensions of schooling that are deeply influenced by material inequalities and racism.” Reforms that misdiagnose the cause of low or unequal outcomes, and that do not confront issues of race and racism, may wind up reproducing or exacerbating gaps in outcomes for marginalized students rather than disrupting them.
Reforms are more likely to fail when they lack an understanding or appreciation for the schooling conditions in which they’ll be implemented. This point builds off several that have already been named, but is worth pulling out into its own category, particularly in terms of what makes reform so challenging in the most systematically underserved schools. Charles Payne (2008) is incisive and illuminating here, particularly in terms of how he discusses the “dimensions of demoralization” that impede reform, noting: “bringing good ideas into schools with severely damaged social infrastructure is tantamount to bringing a lighted candle into a wind tunnel.” Particularly in the era of post-pandemic schooling, “damaged social infrastructure” is perhaps the greater threat to reform than the enormity of “learning loss” as it constricts the capacity of schools and those working within them to embrace or even attempt reforms that could improve student learning.
When reforms do succeed, they often share several factors. Cohen and Mehta (2017) detail several key characteristics of successful reform, as follows:
Successful reforms provide a solution to a palpable problem that educators see and experience in their classrooms – or, if illuminating a challenge educators may not at first recognize they have, they provide a clear solution that can be implemented to solve the problem.
Successful reforms satisfy demands coming from the broader social, economic, political context. When schools feel pressure to accomplish the reform – because parents, community members, or other stakeholders expect them to – reform is much more likely to be enacted.
Successful reforms invest in the support and guidance that educators need to successfully enact the reform. Skill and capacity building, commensurate in scope with the ambition of the reform, is key.
Successful reforms are consistent with the norms, values, and beliefs of the educators and school communities in which they’ll be enacted.
This last characteristic is a bit paradoxical, as reform initiative that intends to change the status quo must be counternormative in some sense, right? I suppose, though, that this finding reinforces that incremental, rather than more revolutionary changes, are those most likely to be adopted. It also seems to reinforce the inherent difficulty in working toward anti-racist change that challenges biased beliefs, mindsets, and practices that educators may or may not even be conscious they’re espousing, enacting, and upholding.
Returning to elements of successful reform, Woulfin and Gabriel (2020) take a closer look at the “infrastructural” elements that enable successful reform, identifying three key pillars that must work together: (1) curriculum, professional learning, and leadership (see visual below). Rather than reform focusing on change happening on an individual level (i.e. each teacher increasing their knowledge about evidence-based reading instruction), they argue for “a system-level approach” that attends to the broader ecosystem in which teachers teach and students learn. When the three infrastructural elements of curriculum, professional learning, and leadership work together in ways that are coherent, transparent, and feasible to implement, reform is far more likely to result in improved teaching and learning.
A Visual Depicting Woulfin & Gabriel’s (2020) Interconnected Infrastructure for Instructional Improvement
This discussion leaves me wondering – how do we create the conditions for instructional improvement, while also attending to the institutional barriers that may impede student success, particularly for students from historically and persistently marginalized groups? As noted earlier, Elmore’s research warns against structural reform disconnected from fundamentally shifting the instructional core. Cohen and Hill’s work gets at this as well, finding that teacher professional learning opportunities that did not directly address core subject matter were less likely to impact teacher practice and subsequently student learning. As they warn, “disadvantaged students could be more disadvantaged by efforts to combat inequality if those efforts did not have an academic focus.”
And yet going back to the arguments of Durán and Hikida, if reform attempts to solve for pedagogical problems in the absence of broader structural or institutional change, will we ever truly deliver excellent and equitable outcomes for the very students who have so long been denied?
To accomplish this, I believe there’s an imperative to attend to the infrastructure for *institutional* improvement in a way that is supportive of the infrastructure for instructional improvement. In this model (see below), educators address and remove barriers to educational opportunity within the schoolhouse (i.e. disproportionately punitive discipline policies, lack of representation in culturally relevant texts and tasks; exclusion from advanced coursework, etc. ) while simultaneously improving what’s happening within the instructional core. In this model, all educators within a school ecosystem (teachers and leaders!!) work toward instructional change in ways that are explicitly anti-racist, naming and addressing the ways that racism and inequality impede student success, and working to transform both mindsets and practices. As such, a school’s commitment to anti-racism does not exist in a separate sphere from instructional improvement work, but rather goes hand in hand – one in service of the other – so that reform results in just outcomes, in full, for all.
A Visual Representing a Model of Institutional Improvement Operating in Support of Instructional Improvement to Facilitate Reform
References
Carter, P. (2013). Student and school cultures and the opportunity gap: Paying attention and to academic engagement and achievement. (pp. 143-155). In P. Carter and K.G. Welner (Eds.), Closing the opportunity gap: What America must do to give every child an even chance. Oxford University Press.
Cohen, D. K. & Hill, H. C. (2001). Learning policy: When state education reform works. Yale University Press.
Cohen, D. K. & Mehta, J. D. (2017). Why reform sometimes succeeds: Understanding the conditions that produce reforms that last. American Educational Research Journal, 54(4), 644-690.
Durán, L. & Hikida, M. (2022). Making sense of reading’s forever wars. Kappan. https://kappanonline.org/readings-forever-wars-duran-hikida/
Elmore, R. F. (1995). Structural reform and educational practice. Educational Researcher, 24(9), 23-26. https://doi.org/10.2307/1177268
Garner, B., Thorne, J. K., & Horn, I. S. (2017). Teachers interpreting data for instructional decisions: Where does equity come in? Journal of Educational Administration, 55(4), 407-426. http://doi.org/10.1108/JEA-09-2016-010
Payne, C. M. (2008). So much reform, so little change: The persistence of failure in urban schools. Harvard Education Press.
Tyack, D. & Cuban, L. (1995). Tinkering toward utopia: A century of public school reform. Harvard University Press.
Woulfin, S. & Gabriel, R. E. (2020). Interconnected infrastructure for improving reading instruction. Reading Research Quarterly, 55(1), 109-117. https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.339
Woulfin, S. & Gabriel, R. E. (2022). Big waves on the rocky shore: A discussion of reading policy, infrastructure, and implementation in the era of the Science of Reading. The Reading Teacher, 76(3), 326-332. https://doi.org.10/1002/trtr.2153