The Challenge of School Change

School Administrator, April, 1998 by Dan Woll

The Challenge of School Change is a collection of articles edited by Michael Fullan, dean of education at the University of Toronto. Fullan has written often and influentially on this subject.

The latest work offers many useful viewpoints, but the inconsistency in the quality of writing among the essays is a problem. Some articles, such as Andy Hargreaves' contributions, offer enlightening observations about seldom-discussed but important topics such as contrived collegiality and the impact of feminist scholarship on educational leadership. Priscilla Wohlstetter's article on site-based management is outstanding in its clarity and will be useful to any practitioner involved in a shared decision-making project. Fullan himself offers cogent selections on the complexity of change, leadership for change and the role of hope and emotion in change.

Unfortunately, Fullan did not require all of his contributors to meet the same standard of relevance and readability. Some articles leave the reader with the feeling that the best one can do today is to place children and teachers in close proximity and let the chips fall. The recondite scholarship that Helen Gunter flourishes in her piece on chaotic reflexivity will exasperate pragmatic educators, who are not interested in "a different type of knowledge" available to those who "stop investigating on the basis of objective reality."

The best articles revert to a theme Fullan espoused in The New Meaning of Change. He wrote, "The capacity to bring about change and the capacity to bring about improvement are two different matters. Change is everywhere, progress is not." He would have been well advised to keep his own counsel and limit this anthology to the works that focus on progress and specific learning rather than on change as an end in itself.

(The Challenge of School Change: A Collection of Articles, edited by Michael Fullan, IRI/SkyLight Training and Publishing, 2626 S. Clearbrook Drive, Arlington Heights, Ill. 60005, 1997, 318 pp. with index, $22.95 softcover)