Surviving the Latest Educational Fad

School Administrator, June, 1999 by Randy J. Dunn

Every so often a smooth talker like Rich LaCapio descends from that mountain, all smile and tailored suit, to spread the state education agency's latest innovation with a zealot's pride and an iron fist.

This year it's been something called "Academic Standards," and it will make us do the dance of St. Vitus before it floats off into the netherworld of educational time, as all fads do.

"It makes perfect sense," Rich stated knowingly, as his cadre of assistants from the state education agency passed around stuffed, glossy packets to all of us school administrators in the audience. "We want each school, under the principal's leadership, to form collaborative teams to review their goal statements, align the old outcomes with the new standards, create benchmarks across the age-grade levels and, finally, develop a high-stakes assessment that brings it all together for the student. Of course, you will want your improvement teams to revisit both your instructional methods and curricular materials to determine their appropriateness under our new system."

Then, we surmised, the agency would place any of us who couldn't or wouldn't comply on an academic watch list.

In the coming months, we filled our more planning matrices than any government bureaucrat buried in the bowels of the Pentagon. Workshops were held in nice hotels, and our teachers collaborated all over the place, so much so they barely had time to worry about classroom innovation. No worry, though. As the school district's leadership team fondled its new Tinker Toy, the school board members and administrators were seized by an even more immediate demand: budget cuts.

Out the window went the assiduously maintained planning documents. With them went quite a few of the folks who populated the teams. Of course, nobody has heard from Rich since, except over free drinks in conference hospitality rooms, when we haul out his memory for a hoot--not unlike what we do when telling tales of our graduate student days. Then we go back to the reality of our schools.

A Familiar Ring

You'll have to excuse us veteran educators if we don't get too giddy each time the next new dogma comes along. You see, we've been transformed before. We've done learning styles, learning objectives and learning outcomes, at least until the latter phrase became too liberal for some. We've been "Hunterized" and "Gardnerized," and we've been before high-heeled priestesses exhorting us to care for the whole child. Some of us have providentially found a new paradigm.

Almost always, we've been willing to give each new creed a hearing--even a chance--until its impatient police begin torturing the innocent into false confessions. The thing of it is, ironically, when the right idea has an opportunity to age, become friendly and familiar and finally ooze deep into a school's culture, it might actually do some good. But many of us aren't in one system for that long.

Even when the idea is right--and that doesn't often occur--most big education bosses still get it wrong. "Deep change ... results from approaches to change that match the unique cultural requirements of schools and that match the unique operational requirements for new teaching and learning," says Tom Sergiovanni, a professor at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. But changing a culture, he went on to say in a recent lecture to the National Council of Professors of Educational Administration, "requires that people, both individually and collectively, move from something familiar and important into an empty space ... to build a new set of meanings."

The significance of this "empty space" is too often disregarded. A key fallacy holds that individual attitudes and knowledge, when mystically altered across classrooms and schools, leads to real, systemwide change. Hence, the need for a zealous conversion. However, individual action is more powerfully shaped by creating organizational contexts--with transformed roles, different responsibilities and fresh relationships for people--than forcing new attitudes and behaviors upon them by administrative fiat.

With today's demand for instant accountability, schools have become nearly desperate to take any action and wait for the results. Parents, politicians and community activists demand that we do something with these kids--in Compton, Calif., East St. Louis, Ill., Gary, Ind., and the Bronx, N.Y., in my school district and your school district. To spark positive action, any upward movement, we face tremendous pressure to grab at solutions for difficult situations.

What we often grab at are the fads. Now if you take any one of those ideas on how to run a school, it may make some sense. But if treated as a silver bullet, a single tool applied in the extreme, things become goofy.

Playing Along

No matter, when the authorities from the state capital get that scary gleam in their eyes, you may have to snap to. The ones put in charge of the new way usually aren't the Mother Teresa type. Most of this stuff is personal to them, and they don't hold up well under prolonged questioning, especially in a public venue. Don't let them deceive you with their warm and fuzzy verbiage. It's all a part of the deployment strategy. This is no drill.