Reorganizing a District to support Education Outcomes

School Administrator, Feb, 1995 by James E. Berry

As school districts respond to reform initiatives, they have embraced outcome-based education to improve student learning. These same school districts, however, have been caught between the pressure to reform and the reality of OBE's implementation.

This will remain a problem until permanent bureaucratic patterns of behavior and the operation of schools are rethought.

When school-system support for implementing an outcome-based curriculum is ignored, what emerges is a hollow version of OBE and the failed promise of educational reform. For many districts, the adoption of outcome-based education has meant curriculum changes that masquerade as school reform.

District leaders need to understand that meaningful and lasting outcomes implementation comes in phases. These broad phases, which in each succeeding phase become more difficult to accomplish, need to be integrated as part of a process for achieving an outcomes-driven curriculum.

A school district must (1) identify the new learning outcomes; (2) shape the curriculum around learning Outcomes; and (3) align the system to support these learning outcomes. A district needs to follow through upon its initial commitment to reshape teaching and learning by creating an environment that supports staff members as they implement an outcome based curriculum. Aligning the system to support learning outcomes is where many school districts falter.

New Bureaucracy

A district that is serious about focusing its reform around student outcomes must rearrange the organization itself. The great irony of outcome-based school reform is that school systems have tried to implement outcomes without altering the formal system of organization.

Many school districts invest a great deal of energy and resources in the first two phases of outcome-based reform only to fall short of expectations and results. In these districts, the nature and condition of teaching and learning get addressed, but not the process for decision-making, responsibility for implementation, budgetary issues, personnel, changed administrative roles, board commitment, and a host of other issues that become organizational limitations and roadblocks to improved learning. School districts have not built into OBE the component for ensuring that a change in the curriculum will be sustained by the institution over time.

Schools that are improving know that the informal rules generated by teacher involvement in decision-making have changed how the traditional school system works. The old school bureaucracy is slowly evolving into a new bureaucracy that is trying to shake off the command-and-control hierarchical system.

The most innovative districts are reforming and restructuring within the familiar bureaucratic framework--shifting from a centralized bureaucratic structure to a decentralized bureaucratic structure--and then altering how people function in their new roles. These school districts are realigning the rules, roles, relationships, power, and bureaucratic characteristics that precluded the community, teacher, principal, parent, and student from participating in organizational decision-making.

Parallel Issues

Districts are not inventing new bureaucracies; they are reinventing what they have been in the past and what they are today. Each district must identify its own structure and address it as a parallel issue in outcome-based reform. The organizational support of OBE makes the outcome-based curriculum functional.

Reformers must understand more than one structural element of the organization. They must recognize a pattern of policies, procedures, structures, and behaviors that link together to form a system by which teachers teach and children learn. Many districts are ignoring organizational reform to do curriculum reform.

Outcomes implementation and organizational reform must happen in concert to improve the promise of outcome-based education. Perhaps the greatest outcome of OBE is that the school system will learn how to organize itself so it is capaple of responding to the next wave of reform.