Archived Information

CPRE Policy Brief: Building Capacity for Education Reform - December 1995

Continuing Challenges

As states, districts, and schools use elements of standards-based reform to enhance education capacity, our research suggests that they will face several continuing challenges such as those described below.

Placing Learning at the Center

The most critical challenge is to place learning at the center of all reform efforts--not just improved learning for students, but also for the system as a whole and for those who work in it. For if the adults are not themselves learners, and if the system does not continually assess and learn from practice, then there appears little hope of significantly improving opportunities for all our youth to achieve to the new standards.

For this to happen, however, requires a fundamental change in orientation from traditional "top-down" mandates to one in which all work is designed and evaluated with an express goal of enhancing capacity to improve student learning. Organizations, such as universities, museums, professional associations, and professional development providers, can play a major role in accomplishing this goal. But their impact on improved learning for all students will depend on what happens within the system itself. Our data suggest that what is needed is a coherent and strategic approach to capacity building, one that takes into account the needs and goals of the individual learner, school, and district, and state, not just for the immediate initiative, but for the long term. Only in this way can systemic reform's promise of "top-down support for bottom up reform" be fully realized.

Allocating Needed Resources

Resources are obviously a critical aspect of organizational capacity. Implementing standards-based reform under current fiscal constraints will require creativity and thought similar to that observed in our study sites.

A key target in addressing resource needs will be expanding available time to school personnel--time for teachers to collaborate in planning and assessing their instruction; time for teachers and administrators to participate in learning opportunities outside the school; and time for reforms to mature without falling prey to policymakers' readiness to halt reform if student test scores do not rise immediately. As additional or reallocated funds become available, using them to provide time for professional development would seem a wise investment. Allowing schools and districts to reconfigure schedules to provide time for collaboration and learning is possibly the most cost-effective means of providing at least some of the additional time required.

Another critical way to extend resources and build long-term support for reforms is through partnerships with professional associations, mathematics and science centers, universities, and museums. Utilization of such resources and development of on-going partnerships can be effective ways of extending material and intellectual resources available for school reform and a means of developing the base of support needed to maintain reform direction over the long haul.

Managing Multiple Influences

Teachers may learn about education reform through a wide variety of experiences: involvement in subject-area workshops, networks and curriculum design; school restructuring efforts; grade-level networks; national projects; scoring student essays or math portfolios; bilingual and multicultural education efforts; and district-sponsored workshops.

While potentially beneficial to teachers, multiple professional development opportunities pose several challenges to schools and policymakers. First, when teachers are involved in many different activities, it is sometimes difficult to link them into a coherent whole in the classroom or at the school site. Second, on the district level, one school may be focused on science, another on early literacy, and another on mathematics. What is the effect when students move from one school to another or move on to the middle schools?

California has tried to address these two potential problems by imbedding a consistent view of teaching and learning in all of its reform efforts--frameworks, grade-level documents, and teacher and school networks. Teachers report that this consistent vision helps. However, our data suggest that a more proactive strategy, particularly at the district level, is required to overcome fragmentation inherent in the variety of opportunities and providers. Finally, there is the challenge of quality control. How can the education community ensure that all these learning experiences are of high quality?

Attending to Public Capacity

Differing approaches to public involvement in and understanding of reforms can have a critical impact on success of the reform agenda. The demise of the CLAS assessment in California provides a vivid example of what can happen if the public is left out of the reform equation. How the public is involved and to what end also seem important. Often in reform literature the need for public involvement is expressed simply in terms of garnering political and public support (i.e., getting "buy-in") without attending to the substantial public learning inherent in such an endeavor. Not only do school people need to increase their knowledge and skills and sometimes alter dispositions and self-perceptions; so must parents and the general public. This implies that as the school system's orientation changes to one of fostering learning for all concerned, educators must take the same approach to the general public.

Public forums of the sort organized by Vermont educators, or the "visioning" committees established by one of our districts, may be one way of gaining input while educating the public about direction and goals of reforms. Media may be another. However, according to the Public Agenda Foundation (Johnson & Immerwahr, 1994), parents ultimately listen to their children's teachers. This suggests that the brunt of public (or at least parent) learning may rest primarily with the school. Another form of capacity needed by teachers and schools, therefore, may be the ability to talk to and involve parents in improvement efforts.


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[Using the Reform Process to Build Capacity] [Table of Contents] [Conclusion]