School Improvement as a Way of Life

By Michael D. "Mike" McKibbin

This is an excerpt from the first chapter of a book about school change that I wrote as part of a writing team for "The Structure of School Improvement".

Richly connected to its social milieu, tightly clasped by tradition and yet the medium of modern ideas and artifacts, the school floats paradoxically in its ocean of social forces. It is a cradle of social stability and the harbinger of cultural change. Throughout history, its critics have found it both too backward and too advanced. It falls behind the times and fails to keep us in simultaneous cadence.

Its missions are elusive. Basic education is prized, but so are creativity, problem solving, academic excellence, and vocational skills, sometimes by the same people, sometimes not. Liberals and conservatives alike seek to make the school the instrument of social policy. It is the sword of the militant and the warm bosom of the humanist. Its students are varied. Talents and handicaps mingle, sometimes in the same minds and bodies.

The inner city and rural hinterland make their claims on creaky old schoolhouses, while shiny suburban schools grope for a coherent mission. Powerful self-concepts march through the front door of the school while timid souls slip in by the back stairs. Cultural differences are mixed together, with problems of identity and adaptation surfacing chaotically to be dealt with.

Technologies strengthen the school's potential and threaten to replace it. Its personnel receive very little training but are asked to manage one of the most complex professional tasks in our society. They have little status but awesome responsibility for both individual children and for the health of society as a whole.

Because education exerts great influence on the young, society places great constraints on its schools so that they will reflect the prevailing social attitudes and will fit current views about how its children should be trained. Its very size draws attention. (In the United States there are more than 2,000,000 education professionals and about 8 percent of the gross national product is directly or indirectly consumed by the enterprises of education.) The public watches its investment carefully, scrutinizing educational practices, both traditional and innovative (Joyce & Morine, 1976).

Efficiency is highly prized, but innovations are watched with apprehension. Our societal patterns of schooling, established in the early 1800s, have become familiar and comfortable, and we want our children to have an education that has continuity with our own. Thus most citizens are cautious about educational innovation. People like the familiar old schoolhouse as much as they criticize it. They tend to believe that current problems in education are caused by changes (perceived as a "lowering of standards") rather than because the old comfortable society has changed a great deal since the days when the familiar and comfortable patterns of education were established, and many schools have become badly out of phase with the needs of children in today's world.

Social institutions tend to deteriorate unless they are continuously rejuvenated, and when patterns of education become routine, life in schools becomes less vital. Schools need constant attention to revitalize them and the lives of the children and teachers who live in them. The public faces a continuing dilemma: to preserve familiar, traditional practices, making them as effective as possible, and yet keep up with the times in order to meet the challenges presented by social change. The results is that schooling exists in a social tug of war between proponents of tradition and change, and thus much that is known about what makes schools more effective is not being used.

Effectiveness, as such, is not controversial. In our society we may debate about what kind of education is best for our children, but there is total agreement that schooling should be rigorous and effective. Even people who are not particularly dissatisfied with the current state of education usually believe that schooling can be improved. How to increase the effectiveness of schools is a more frustrating topic, and the more critical people are about the present state of schools, the more frustrated they become.

In the past, school improvement has lacked coherent structure. Change has been attempted in additive ways, rarely with an insight into the synergistic nature of the complex process called schooling. Past educational and/or political attempts at school improvement have treated pieces of the school puzzle as if they were each separate entities. "Teacher proof" material, open classrooms, reducing the curriculum to basic skills, and competency testing are but a few examples of the underlying quick-fix school improvement strategies of the past. Yet, these attempts have served only as Band-Aids and ephemeral inoculations which over time have failed to improve our schools. Such lack of success has resulted in a "blaming the victim" syndrome in which students, parents, teachers, or administrators are alternately held responsible for the failed attempts at improvement. More recently, researchers and practitioners have taken a more holistic view of schooling. We have begun to understand the ecology of good schools and to tease out the structure or pattern of relationships among the various components of schooling which together have an effect greater than the sum of its parts.

Schools, like other social organizations, are not disposed toward change and from that emerges an important paradox which provides a clue to the solution to the problem. The paradox is quite simple: schools seek stability as a seemingly necessary condition of survival. Yet his condition of equilibrium is also the root cause of the school's inability to improve, for as society changes and/or pedagogical knowledge increases, schools need to assimilate and accommodate to new realities. How then can a school create a reasonable level of stability and constantly be open and able to change?

Our first step is to identify and elucidate the set of decisions that bring a school program into existence. We must learn to seek out alternative courses of action that are possible in each decision area, and understand how various combinations of decisions can produce differentiating schools. Our approach assumes that it is possible to make realistic analyses of educational processes, that important aspects of the process can be coordinated one with the other, and that schools should be produced by conscious decision, wherever possible, rather than shaped only by the force of events. In essence, our focus is on creating environments that promote continuous examination of school effectiveness at local sites so that specific, deliberated improvements can be made. Schools are social entities and, like the human spirit, require the challenge of improvement not only to soar but to maintain themselves. Just as the body grows supple through exercise and fades without it, the growing edges of the mind are sustained by challenge. Without stimulus to change, the structure of schools and individuals slide into rigid postures, and values reach toward the status of commandments. School improvement thrives only as life in schools is infected by adventure and tested by challenge.