All Systems Go: The Change Imperative for Whole System Reform

America has been trying to turn around its schools for a quarter century, with tragic results. One simplistic quick-fix nostrum after another has seized the political limelight and been “driven” through the system as if it was all that was needed: decentralized site accountability, small high schools, high-stakes testing. While all these efforts embodied ideas with merit, the belief in one-size-fits-all fixes might itself be the real problem.

Michael Fullan has built an international reputation over the past decade for his work in England, Canada, and many other countries for helping educators, communities, and business and political leaders cooperate for systemic change in education. He has shown that unless you align school, district, state, and national agendas, innovation within schools cannot be sustained. He has shown that teachers and principals are more than ready to lead the innovation, but they must be part of larger learning communities aimed at building collective capacity across schools and school systems, rather than heroes and heroines fighting a dysfunctional system. He has shown that a few well thought out strategic priorities that encapsulate what we believe collectively about the fundamental aims for education are vital to establish a direction toward which everyone can work together. He has [Page viii]shown that accountability matters but only in the context of nurturing the overall esprit de corps within a school and community and tapping the huge reservoir of latent responsibility that exists with a nation's educators, parents, and community leaders. Put in the negative, beating educators with the you-need-to-be-more-accountable stick accomplishes little and may actually lead to less real accountability rather than more.

In short, Fullan has shown that real change is possible but only by taking a truly systemic approach. No single quick fixes. No good guy–bad guy politicizing to mobilize public anger. No fear mongering about America's declining competitiveness in the world. Just clear strategy, broad engagement (especially including educators themselves), and a consistent message that this can only be done by all of us working together across all levels of the educational system.

Where a whole-system approach has been taken seriously over the past decade, there have been significant improvements in student achievement. In the UK, with focused leadership starting with Tony Blair and Michael Barber, former director of the prime minister's educational reform effort, literacy and numeracy achievement rose from about 62% to 75% (as measured by proficiency of 11-year-olds) from 1997–2001, an improvement that Fullan himself was asked to evaluate.

Building on the experience in England, Fullan became special advisor to Premier Dalton McGuinty in Ontario and helped to design and guide a whole-system strategy for the Ontario school system. Focusing on a small set of core priorities and using capacity building and partnership as a core strategy (specifically avoiding punitive accountability), literacy and numeracy have increased 13% at the elementary level since 2003, students passing mandated secondary literacy has risen from 65% to 81%, and high school graduation rates in a diverse province have gone from 68% to 77%. Ontario has recently added early learning (full-day integrated schooling) for all four- and five-year-olds.

Results like these in England and Canada, and in other countries like Finland, Singapore, and Korea, have become recognized around the world, and today many other countries are following similar paths. Huge challenges remain in all these settings but for many the journey is well underway.

Can this be done in America? Fullan describes the current work in a few U.S. school districts, but the examples are isolated. [Page ix]Indeed one of the primary features of the U.S. is wide disparities in educational attainment against a backdrop of steady decline overall. While we have many outstanding schools and districts, our overall performance as a nation in public education has fallen from the top in world rankings a half century ago (highest high school qualification in the world in 1960). Today, America consistently ranks in the bottom half of advanced (OECD) countries in educational achievement. The decline has continued unabated through the past decade: the U.S. was still number one in post-secondary graduation rates in 1995; it was number 14 by 2005. All of this has occurred despite a quadrupling of total funds spent on education since 1980 and spending more per pupil than any other school system.

In essence, we have thrown more money at more ineffective reform agendas than any nation. In so doing, we have shown a virtually inexhaustible penchant for using supposed educational reform to feather political nests and, as with other crucial national issues, a tragic inability to subordinate special interests to common good.

Beyond statistical comparisons to other countries, the consequences have been devastating at human and societal levels. For over a decade it has been more likely that a young African American boy growing up in an American city will go to prison than to any form of post-secondary education. A recent study found that only 35% of Boston's high school graduates who had enrolled in college in 2000 had actually completed either a two- or four-year college program seven years later. A recent McKinsey study estimates that the enormous educational disparities in America impose the “equivalent of a permanent national recession.”

Thus, there is no shortage of evidence of the cost to America of how our present educational system operates. Yet, it was precisely evidence and statistics like these that motivated past quick-fix reforms. So, they are not likely to suffice to mobilize the sort of cooperative whole-system effort Fullan proposes.

What could? I believe two things.

First, we must believe that real change is possible. My own experience is that public school educators in America are among the most beleaguered professionals. For years, I have asked diverse audiences whether or not they think a crisis is needed for systemic change. My point has been to get people thinking about their implicit models of change, and specifically whether they believe [Page x]they can cultivate the aspiration and co-inspiration needed, in my opinion, to sustain change beyond simply reacting to a crisis. My experience in diverse audiences, however, is that the majority express the belief that, indeed, a crisis is needed, that no real change occurs without a crisis. I have always viewed this as an unfortunate commentary on our limited understanding of systemic change, of our reliance on desperation rather than aspiration. But the most unfortunate of all have been the groups of educators who often fail to raise their hands to either option. When I first encountered this, I asked the group in surprise, “Help me understand. I thought I asked an ‘either-or’ question: is a crisis needed for change, yes or no. How come most of you have not raised your hands for either option?” A quiet voice from the middle of the audience responded, “We don't believe that change is possible under any condition.”

This is where work like Fullan's could be pivotal.

As you read the many examples here of engaging the variety of actors needed to truly rethink and recreate our schools, of fostering collaboration among teachers and students to build collective capacity, of people achieving significantly higher performance and real innovation, it is hard not to start to believe there are viable paths forward. Fullan's stories remind us that no one wants to be part of a low-performing system, including educators and students. Transforming the fatalism that currently afflicts far too many starts with a conviction that change is possible with a clear framework and practical tools for engagement and moving forward. It will then take politically savvy strategies to mobilize the diverse blocks of power that need to work better together, which is exactly what Fullan shows can be done.

But I believe there is a second factor that goes beyond change strategy. At no time in history has there been a more powerful need for a new vision of the purpose of education. Today's schools were born in the early stages of the industrial era. That is why they were organized like an assembly line (Grade 1, Grade 2, Grade 3, etc.). That is why they were based on standardized timetables governing each part of the day (complete with bells and whistles on the walls), and fixed, rigid curricula delivered by teachers whose job was first and foremost to maintain control, much like an assembly-line foreman. The Industrial Age school arose as part and parcel of an industrial-age economy based on [Page xi]exploiting natural (and many would argue social) capital to create productive and financial capital. The Industrial Age is ending. Despite the fact that we burn more coal and produce more steel than ever before in human history, we also use one and one-third Earths today to support the consumer-driven global industrial machine—and the side effects of industrial growth, like climate change and the destruction of the oceans, are getting harder to ignore. The challenge of our time is not economic competitiveness. The challenge is to build not only “sustainable” but regenerative societies—ones that enhance natural and social capital.

This is a challenge that young people everywhere increasingly recognize, as indicated by the global movement among the young to reverse climate change, stop the destruction of species and ecosystems, and face honestly the widening gaps between rich and poor. The wheels are coming off the train of the global economic growth machine and young people sense this. But they have real questions whether or not their adult “leaders” do, as reflected in large numbers of young people who are pessimistic about the ongoing and largely unmet challenges like climate change, water, and the destruction of ecosystems. And they have real questions regarding what they can do, if anything.

No institution has a more crucial role to play in the historic changes coming than school because no institution has greater potential to impact how a society changes over the long term. How we educate our children shapes the future, because they in turn will be the ones who create that future. The growing gap between what they need to be able to understand (such as alternative cultures and social-technological-ecological systems) and to do (such as work collaboratively to solve complex interdependent problems) and what we have traditionally taught is the primary reason so many young people find school less and less relevant for their lives. And they are right.

This past spring, in a gathering organized by the St. Louis Chamber of Commerce as part of their “Sustainable St. Louis” campaign, a series of presentations were made by middle school and high school students. Many of the adults were shocked. Expecting to hear stories about what they were studying in their environment or civics classes, instead they heard stories of how the young people were busy transforming their communities. One 12-year-old girl told the story of how she and four classmates [Page xii]decided that their school needed to stop using fossil fuels and how they got a wind turbine installed. As she retold their saga of working with their science teacher to develop the initial analysis, with parents developing the engineering and financial details, and of then presenting their plan to their principal and eventually the mayor (twice!), the room of several hundred adults fell silent. She then showed a photograph of the operating wind turbine outside her school. As she stood calmly in front of the audience she posed a question. “We kids always hear that, ‘You are the future.’ We don't agree. We don't have 20 or 30 years to make the changes needed. We are ready now. Are you?”

In short, we must imagine a vision for school that is far more compelling than fixing a broken system. As it has been for all of human history (not just in the Industrial Age), education is how a society shapes its future. It needs to be where we reflect on and develop the sorts of capabilities that the society, the young people, will need in the future. Only when we recognize this need for real innovation will we tap the aspiration needed to give life to the sorts of strategies that Michael Fullan so ably illustrates can succeed.

The real question is, Are we serious enough to work together in favor of the schools our future is asking for? I have no doubt that the young people are.