Tinkering Change vs. System Change

At an conference, John Holt, author, educator, and home schooler, responded to a question about home schooling by saying that he had given up hope for public education. He no longer--this was in 1970s--believed that school systems could be reformed. He opined that reforms simply give educationists something to chew on, and nothing changes. This affected me deeply. My first reaction was anger, a sense of betrayal. How could this man, whose How Children Fail headed my reading list for wannabe elementary teachers, abandon struggle? Then, more I thought of my own experience as a high school teacher and as a professor, more I realized that reform efforts I had been engaged with--inquiry learning, humanistic education, open classrooms, schools without failure, and cooperative learning, to name a few--had had little impact on day-to-day lives of teachers and students and little staying power in schools. As French proverb says: Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose. (The more things change, more they stay same.) Let me make a distinction between two kinds of change: tinkering and change. Tinkering includes reforms intended to address a specific deficiency or practice. Examples could be how report card is structured; whether school opens in August or September or whether we have year-round school; whether we require all students to take four years of math, science, and English in order to graduate from high school; whether we require prospective teachers to have X number of hours of methods course work vs. Y number of hours of course work in content areas. And so on. Such changes reflect energies and preferences of individuals who support and plan them, and they end when perpetrator moves on to other things. school as an institution remains largely untouched and unchanged. Such tinkering can be contrasted to what Shakespeare termed change in Tempest (a sea into something rich and strange) and what some writers refer to as or systemic change. Marc Tucker's report in June 2007 Kappan on work of New Commission on Skills of American Workforce is a case in point. He begins with a catalog of what's wrong with public education, and then, after noting that nothing we have tried has worked, he writes: The only thing we have not tried is changing basic system we have for elementary and secondary education (p. 730). System change, or change, or sea change, is to overall structure and mission of an institution. Another illustration from June 2007 Kappan can illustrate difference between tinkering and sea change. Sarah Butzin's Point of View article refers to the dirty little secret that poor and minority children were being passed along and left behind. Assume for sake of illustration that she has shown a light on an uncomfortable truth: that teachers kids into next grade even though they may not have accomplished learning goals of current grade. Assume also that research supports that such social pass is less damaging to children than retention in grade. A reform to address problem (tinkering change) would be to institute special classes or summer school for such children or to lengthen school day or school year. A system would be to get rid of current system that organizes children by age and grade. Elementary teachers know that any age-grade group (say 4th grade, mostly 10-year-olds) has children that range in reading ability from 1st grade to 8th grade (or higher), in mathematical ability from 1st grade to 8th grade (or higher). And so forth. Yet we retain myth that all 10-year-olds should be able to perform these tasks in those subjects to that level of excellence before going on to 5th grade. On surface, this is just dumb. But it's system we have, and very few people are willing to think it through, challenge it, and, if appropriate, recommend getting rid of it. …