Archived: Preface

A r c h i v e d I n f o r m a t i o n

Systemic Reform - October 1996

Preface

The reform of education has been a major focus of policymakers at the local, state and federal levels since the publication in 1983 of A Nation at Risk. Reform efforts have targeted all stages of education, from pre-school to school-to-work transition, and have addressed nearly every aspect of the public elementary and secondary education system: curriculum and assessment, teachers' preparation and their professional lives, school organization and management, technology, and parental and community involvement. To increase the knowledge base for identifying, implementing and sustaining successful reforms in these areas, in 1991 Congress requested the Office of Research at the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI) to investigate education reform. In response, OERI identified and funded 12 studies of different aspects of current education reform, including a study of the systemic education reform movement.¹

The Policy Center of the Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE), in conjunction with the National Center for Research on Teacher Learning (NCRTL), was awarded the contract to conduct the Systemic Reform study. As used in this study and in developing approaches in a number of states, systemic reform embodies three integral components: the promotion of ambitious student outcomes for all students; alignment of policy approaches and the action of various policy institutions to promote such outcomes: and restructuring of the public education governance system to support improved achievement. This research, which built on studies of systemic reform undertaken earlier by CPRE in nine states, and on other studies of teacher learning and school organization and change, was designed to (1) expand our knowledge of state approaches to education reform, (2) examine district, school and teacher response to state reform policies in a small number of reforming schools and school districts, (3) identify challenges at the state, district, school and classroom levels to reforming education, (4) study the capacity of the educational system to support education reform, and (5) provide guidance to policymakers at all levels of the education system as they design and implement education reform policies.

The Systemic Reform study was conducted in three stages. In the first year of the study, we reviewed the emerging literature on systemic reform, and commissioned four papers that addressed issues related to the preparation and professional development of teachers and others in support of systemic reform, paying particular attention to the policy linkages between curriculum reform and teacher learning. These papers became the focus of a two-day national conference targeted to education policymakers and practitioners, and were used to refine the overall design of the second and third stages of the study. In the second stage, project staff conducted intensive case studies of twelve reforming schools located in six reforming school districts in three states that were undertaking systemic reform--California, Michigan, and Vermont. The third stage of the study entailed the preparation of state-level case studies and cross-site analyses that examined the scope, substance and coherence of state reform policies; teacher, school and school district reform activities in the context of these state policies; and the capacity of all levels of the system to support education reform.

The study's findings and methodology are contained in this three-volume technical report. Volume I begins with a summary of the literature review and commissioned papers (Chapter 1), the study methodology (Chapter 2), and the education reform strategies and policies in the three study states (Chapter 3). In Chapter 4, we look across the schools, school districts and states in the sample to describe the strategies these sites used to develop a vision of reform, align relevant policies and support restructured governance systems, and the challenges they faced in implementing these strategies. Chapter 5 uses surveys of, and interviews with, teachers in our sites to characterize their instructional practices in mathematics and language arts in relationship to reform policies and opportunities for professional development. In Chapter 6, we present a framework for thinking about the concept of capacity and capacity-building strategies and policies in support of education reform, and examine how our sites used systemic tools to enhance the capacity of teachers and their schools. Chapter 7 identifies some common lessons for policymakers who choose to take a standards-based approach to instructional improvement, and suggests a set of research questions about both the role of capacity-building in systemic reform and broader aspects of education reform.

Volume II contains the case studies of California, Michigan and Vermont. These include more detailed information on state policies, and describe and analyze reform efforts in our small sample of reforming schools and school districts in each state. The findings reported in Chapters 4 through 7 of Volume I are based on data contained in these case studies, as well as the teacher survey. Volume III contains a description of the study methodology and copies of the interview protocols and teacher surveys used in the data collection.

¹ Theses twelve studies are Assessment of Student Performance. Curriculum Reform. Early Childhood Education, Parent, Community Involvement in Education, School-Based Management, School-to-Work Transition, Student Diversity, Students at Risk, Systemic Reform, Professionalism of Educators, Technology and Uses of Time.
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[Systemic Reform]

[Acknowledgments]