Introduction
Differing Paradigms
Ecological Paradigm
A Personal Odyssey
J. Myron Atkin
Rodger W. Bybee
George DeBoer
Peter Dow
Marye Anne Fox
(John Goodlad)
Jeremy Kilpatrick
Glenda T. Lappan
Thomas T. Liao
F. James Rutherford
Introduction
Differing Paradigms
Ecological Paradigm
A Personal Odyssey
J. Myron Atkin
Rodger W. Bybee
George DeBoer
Peter Dow
Marye Anne Fox
(John Goodlad)
Jeremy Kilpatrick
Glenda T. Lappan
Thomas T. Liao
F. James Rutherford
|  | Beyond McSchool: A Challenge to Educational Leadership
(continued)
John I. Goodlad, Institute for Educational Inquiry
Advancing the Ecological Paradigm
Time and space restraints prevent me from mounting to my own
satisfaction a comprehensive argument for rejecting as failed and
unpromising for the future the corporate model of systemic school
reform. One is faced, then, with the alternatives of either buttressing
in some way the ecological, grassroots movement or of exhorting a
plague on both houses and seeking a third possibility. Some people
would claim that a third already exists in the growing interest in
charter schools of choice. I am not yet ready to treat this
development as a third movement for two reasons. First, it is at this
stage more a rejection of the systemics enmeshing schools in
bureaucratic standardization than it is an affirmation of renewed
schooling. In this sense, there is a rejection of the corporate
paradigm. Second, this rejection pushes the desired school
conditions to be attained toward the ethos of renewal that
characterizes a substantial array of current local initiatives within the
system against which many advocates of school choice and charter
now rail. Consequently, I do not see here a new paradigm but,
rather, concern of considerable import regarding primarily the same
organizational matters with which those working within the ecological
paradigm deal or must ultimately deal.
The continued existence of politically driven reform persuasion must
be credited with stimulating local initiatives and funnelling a measure
of financial support to them. An accompanying criticism arises out of
what often appears to be nonproductive messing around, sometimes
characterized by uncompromising disagreement, recrimination, and
disillusionment. The notion that well-intentioned people will come
together in democratic civility, resolve their ideological differences,
and come together around an agenda turns out to be naive. Yet, the
increasing evidence, coming in from all regions of the country,
supports much school-based renewal that must not be shrugged off
as scattered examples of charismatic leadership. It behooves us to
look deeper for common explanatory elements.
It turns out that there now is a critical mass of individual schools
across the nation loosely tied to initiatives that are, in turn, attached
to specific names--hence, "Sizer's" Coalition of Essential Schools and
"Levin's" Accelerated Schools Project. Look a little closer at these
and several other initiatives frequently cited as warranting
commendation and perhaps even replication and one finds in their
strategies essentially the same principles of change drawn from a
stream of inquiry spread over several decades that leads to the
paradigm of school renewal that I have contrasted with the corporate
reform model.
Look still deeper and one finds in each ideas that apparently connect
with the daily business of teaching and keeping school. Howard
Gardner's concept of multiple intelligences, Theodore Sizer's nine
programmatic principles, and James Comer's design of
school-community action scarcely overlap, but their belief in and
respect for those whom their ideas attract and engage do overlap
considerably. The more the ideas can be unpeeled for meaning and
implications, the less necessary the presence of their creators, even
though the desire for personal association with these leaders must
never be underestimated. What has been grossly overestimated in
post-Nation At Risk school reform is the galvanizing power of
panaceas tied to purposes poorly reflecting human aspiration.
Perhaps this is why we have had such a succession of them and so
much failure that the drumbeat of local apathy and schools'
ineffectiveness must be sustained.
An observation deserving of further inquiry is that school-focused
initiatives and their leaders such as those mentioned above, frequently
cited in the reports of well-intentioned state and federal reform
committees caught up in the corporate geist, rarely are the
beneficiaries of public funds emanating from such activity. The
beginnings of these promising initiatives and, frequently, their
continuation have depended on the private philanthropic community.
The downside to this is that the foundations are besieged with
requests and, understandably, have a time line in mind for expecting
public funding to take over. Until recently, this time line for the work
funded to become institutionalized was almost uniformly
underestimated. Even the most promising, well-conceived initiatives,
exhibiting a robust first half-life, reach a point where ideas quite
widely accepted but only modestly implemented struggle for
supremacy over long-standing regularities that are not only powerful
in their preservation of established routines but also vigorously
defended by people threatened by change. This usually is where
more rather than less discretionary money is required--for such
costly necessities, for example, as maintaining two programs, one
being phased out and the other phased in. It is difficult for foundation
program officers, often sympathetic to the needs, to justify to their
boards work that appears to be routine. It is here that public funds
could and should enter for maximum return, but the record is
woefully thin.
Even in the presence of supplementary money to push forward with
the new, the old regularities are powerful obstacles, for such reasons
as the comfort of habit, ennui-producing fatigue from juggling new
and old simultaneously, and the self-deception of cultivating belief
that the intended changes actually have occurred. The answer to this
familiar phenomenon is clear but not easily attained: the ideas and the
conditions that accompany them must be institutionalized, not just as
new and better regularities but as a continuing process of renewal
involving collective reflection, conversation, decisions, actions, and
evaluative revisitation.
There is a considerable literature on this process, some of it under
the rubric of critical inquiry. Success necessitates the deliberate
development of a growing corps of leaders who are believers and
skilled in the process, a corps that must expand exponentially as that
robust first half-life approaches the predictable phase where either
renewal becomes an institutional way of life or scarcely questioned
regularities once more take over and become the norm.
A Personal Odyssey
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