Restructuring, of Schools

Since the mid-1950s, the United States has legislated billions of dollars to improve education and secure America's competitive edge in the modern world. The publication of A Nation at Risk in 1983 provided evidence that earlier attempts at school reform had not succeeded. In a renewed effort to correct what was wrong with American education, restructuring became the new buzzword for educators interested in boosting student performance that would link 1980s research findings with policy and practice. The focus of restructuring was to place the student at the center of the learning environment by addressing individual needs within the school organization. Innovative efforts included site-based management, interdisciplinary team teaching, flexible scheduling, and portfolio assessment.

Historically, a bureaucratic model has provided the frame for the development of the nation's school system. Under this model, large comprehensive schools, especially at the secondary level, were built to offer students variety in course choice and activities. Principals and administrative staffs typically manage the schools in a top-down manner through formalized goals and procedures. Subjects and teachers are divided into departments and students are often placed according to ability and career objectives. The concept of restructuring has provided opportunities to look beyond the bureaucratic model in search of new possibilities.

In an effort to provide stakeholders with a greater voice and meet the rising needs of the increased accountability that accompanied the 1990s, states began instituting site-based decision making while districts experimented with a wide variety of comprehensive reform models that included best practices. At about the same time, a new movement began that encouraged large inner-city high schools to make significant departures from conventional school organizations and practices to a new model that viewed teaching and learning as processes that cannot be controlled through standardized practices. This model was a call for increased collaboration among teachers to examine and solve the challenges they and their students were facing. In essence, it called for restructuring the way schools met the needs of its stakeholders. Key to any restructuring effort was the attention given to size—the size of the classes and the size of the school.

Findings resulting from efforts to change the way schools are led and organized documented that school restructuring can improve student learning, but for it to be most effective it should focus on four key factors: student learning, authentic pedagogy, school organizational capacity, and external support. By the mid-1990s, efforts to study the long-term effects of restructuring began when agencies such as the Center on Organization and Restructuring of Schools gathered data from public schools involved in the process. It soon became obvious that major departures from conventional practice were taking place in student experiences; the professional life of teachers; leadership, management and governance; and the coordination of community services.

Supported by the U.S. Department of Education and collected by the Center on Organization and Restructuring Schools, the initial conclusions concerning restructuring were derived from four national studies: School Restructuring Study (1994), in which data were drawn from 24 significantly restructured urban public schools, evenly divided among K–12 and located in 16 states; National Educational Longitudinal Study of 1988 (1992), in which data were drawn from a nationally representative sample of over 10,000 students that began in 1988 and followed participants from Grade 8 through Grade 12 in 800 high schools; Study of Chicago School Reform (1994), which included survey data from 8,000 teachers and principals in 400 elementary and 40 high schools; and the Longitudinal Study of School Restructuring (1994), which included 4-year case studies of eight schools that had embarked on different forms of restructuring in four different communities.

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