Transform, Not Reform

School reform is once again on the national agenda put there by a new documentary called “Waiting for Superman.” Given what is being offered by President Obama, the U.S. Department of Education, education pundits, and critics as solutions to the problems our school systems are facing I felt a need to respond.

So, here we go again! One more time politicians, pundits, and critics calling out school systems for failing to provide America’s children with the education they need and then offering their worn, tired, and failed recommendations for education reform: a longer school year, fire incompetent teachers, create charter schools, dump more money into failing schools, practice school-based continuous improvement, and others.

None of these “fixes” can do what needs to be done to provide America’s children with the education they need to succeed in our 21^st Century knowledge economy. We need to transform our school systems, not reform them.

Education reform is a failed strategy because it focuses on fixing the broken parts of America’s more than 14,000 school systems (which is pejoratively referred to as piecemeal change) while sustaining the underlying paradigm that drives teaching and learning in those systems. Fixing the broken parts of any school system is a failed change strategy because the underlying paradigm has outlived its usefulness and effectiveness and nothing can be done to fix it—it has to be replaced.

A paradigm is a set of theories, models, beliefs, and so on that influence the performance of an entire profession. The dominant paradigm influencing the performance of school systems is one that emerged at the beginning of the Industrial Age in the late 1700s-early 1800s. This Industrial Age paradigm created a factory model for educating groups of students by requiring them to learn a fixed amount of knowledge in a fixed amount of time. That paradigm continues to control the performance of school systems throughout the United States.

There is no place in the controlling paradigm for providing each child with an educational experience that is tailored to his or her needs, interests, and abilities. Because of this significant feature, that paradigm always has and always will leave children behind. Leaving children behind is an unavoidable consequence of the Industrial Age design of America’s school systems. The systems are perfectly designed to get the results they are getting.

Providing America’s children with an education that satisfies the requirements of our 21st Century Knowledge Age society requires a paradigm-shifting revolution that drives out the dominant Industrial Age paradigm by making four inter-connected transformations:

• Transform the way teachers teach and how children learn by replacing group-based, teacher-centered instruction with personalized, learner-centered instruction (if a child receives a personalized learning experience that is customized to respond to his or her needs, interests, and abilities and if that child is given the time he or she needs to master the required content, how can that child ever be left behind?);

• Transform the quality of work life for teachers, administrators, and support staff by transforming a school system’s organization culture, its reward system, job descriptions, and so on, to align with the requirements of the new teaching and learning processes (if teachers and staff are de-motivated and dissatisfied, they will not use the new teaching and learning paradigm effectively. The quality of work life has a direct and significant impact on motivation and satisfaction);

• Transform the way school systems interact with external stakeholders by moving away from a crisis-oriented, reactive approach to an opportunity-seeking, proactive approach (if a school system wants to transform as many of us change-minded advocates believe they should they will need political support and financial resources from their communities); and,

• Transform the way in which educators’ create change by replacing piecemeal change strategies with whole-system change strategies (piecemeal change cannot create transformational change).

Our society cannot afford to carry its old education paradigm forward. It does no good to dream of an idealized future for education if that future is just a projection and continuation of the past. Instead, change-minded educators should imagine that the dominant paradigm controlling the design and performance of school systems was destroyed last night and now they must invent brand new school systems. To align with the requirements of our society’s 21^st Century Knowledge Age those new systems must be designed in response to the learning needs of individual children if we truly never want to leave any child behind.

The time is now. The need is great. The past before us is not the future. We need to create a brand new future for America’s school systems—a future created through transformation not reformation. The education reform recommendations we are hearing and reading about—one more time—cannot and never will be able to achieve this vision for the future of education in the United States.

Francis M. Duffy, Ph.D. is the author of Dream! Create! Sustain!: Mastering the Art & Science of Transforming School Systems published by Rowman & Littlefield Education. He is also the co-director of FutureMinds: Transforming American School Systems—a nationwide initiative sponsored by the Association for Educational Communications and Technology to transform school systems for success in the 21^st Century. He can be reached at duffy@thefmduffygroup.com.

When Is Systemic Change Not Systemic?

Hello everyone,

I was reminded of a question I have addressed repeatedly since I started writing, teaching, and speaking about systemic change back in 1984: "When is systemic change not systemic"?

There are many often conflicting definitions of systemic change. The definitional confusion still confuses practitioners and policymakers today and I see this confusion appearing in publications on school improvement; for example,

• When I read articles about examples of systemic change and the articles are about high school reform, I cringe.
• When I read articles about systemic change and they are all about building-level change, I cringe.
• When I read articles that claim that curriculum improvement, introducing new instructional technology, or creating a new management information system are examples of systemic change, I cringe.

All of the above changes can be part of a systemic change initiative, but, by themselves, they are not examples of systemic change.

The "system" is the intact school district. In fact, a school district is one of the few organizations in the world that is actually often called a system (as in, "school system"). The school system is all the programs, buildings, activities, people, etc. that must be aligned and coordinated to deliver educational services to students. If you draw a circle around all those elements everything inside the circle is the system to be improved and everything outside the circle, including state departments of education, comprises the system's external environment (this notion comes from Fred and Merrelyn Emery, early pioneers of the systems approach to improving organizations as systems).

Russell Ackoff (another early pioneer of systemic change) tells us that it is pure folly to try to improve parts of a system (as in focusing improvement only on a school building or a level of schooling like high school reform). He says that not only won't the entire system improve by focusing on the parts, but it is likely that the piecemeal focus will actually cause the system's performance to deterioriate.

Systemic change must also follow three paths: Path 1--improve the system's relationship with its external environment; Path 2--improve the system's core and supporting work; and Path 3--improve the system's internal social infrastructure. If efforts labeled systemic change do not follow those three paths, those changes are not systemic.

So, to answer my opening question, "When is systemic change not systemic"?, the answer is , "When it focuses on anything less than the whole-system."

What Systemic Transformational Change Means to Me

Dear Colleagues,

The Association for Educational Communication and Technology (AECT) recently launched the FutureMinds: Transforming American School Systems initiative (http://www.futureminds.us/). Dr. Charles Reigeluth of Indiana University and I are the co-directors of that initiative. The vision for FutureMinds is to develop the capacity of state departments of education to create and sustain transformational change within entire school systems in their states.

I'd like to share a few thoughts with you about what systemic transformational change means to me.

Systemic transformational change creates a substantially different organizational reality in a school system. Creating and sustaining that new reality is not an easy task because within each school district there are multiple realities encased in the mindsets of the educators working in those districts; not to mention in the mindsets of key external stakeholders who think they know what’s best for a school system.

The existing multiple realities need to be blended into a shared reality of a desirable future for a school system. But it is insufficient simply to create a unified and shared vision of a desirable future. The literature on transformational change repeatedly reinforces the need for people in organizations to change the way they think and act (i.e., to change their paradigms or mindsets) with regard to three change paths:

• Path 1--their system’s relationships with its external environment,
• Path 2--their system's core and supporting work processes, and
• Path 3--their system's internal social infrastructure (which includes organization culture, organization design, job descriptions, reward system, etc.).
  

The way that educators currently think and act along those three paths represents their current mindsets or paradigms. If educators want to create and sustain transformational change, then they need to shift the way they think and act with regard to how they relate to their environment (Path 1), how they do their work (Path 2), and the quality of their system's social infrastructure (Path 3). Thus, three paradigm shifts are required.

But there is a fourth paradigm shift that’s required--there is a need for educators to change the way they think and act with regard to creating and sustaining change. Their dominant, controlling paradigm for change is what we call piecemeal.

So, now we are faced with the challenge of helping educators shift from four existing paradigms to four new paradigms for creating and sustaining systemic transformational change along three change paths:

• Paradigm Shift 1: shift from a reactive stance in response to the environment to a proactive stance (Path 1: improve the system's relationship with its external environment).
• Paradigm Shift 2: shift from the Industrial-Age paradigm of schooling to an Information-Age paradigm; and, include the supporting work processes in a school system within this shift (Path 2: improve the system's core and supporting work processes).
• Paradigm Shift 3: shift from a command and control organization design to a participatory organization design (Path 3: improve the system's internal social infrastructure; which requires changes to organization culture, communication practices, job descriptions, reward systems, and other elements of the social infrastructure).
• Paradigm Shift 4: shift from a piecemeal approach to change to a systemic transformational change approach (by moving along the three change paths to create unparalleled opportunities to improve student, faculty and staff, and whole-system learning that are substantially different than what is currently being done in the system).
  

Our first challenge in our efforts to stimulate and support four paradigm shifts is to convince educators that these shifts are needed. Telling them that they are needed will not be enough. They have heard these kinds of calls for change before. We need compelling data that not only point out the need for change, but also shine a bright flood light on the opportunities that systemic transformational change provides. “Need data” push people toward change. “Opportunity data” draw people toward change. Both kinds of data are critical for motivating people to make their mindsets malleable and therefore capable of changing.


In addition to the need and opportunity data, we will need to use an integrated set of communication strategies that have been documented as effective in promoting transformational change (see Nevis, Lancourt, & Vassallo, 1996).

These communication strategies are:

1. Persuasive communication (the rah rah, let’s get going communication)
2. Participation (involving people in setting a course to a desirable future)
3. Expectancy (communicating to people our expectation that they can succeed in systemic transformational change)
4. Role modeling (providing educators with real life examples of school systems and other organizations that have transformed or are transforming)
5. Structural rearrangement (helping change leaders make key changes to the organization design of their school systems)
6. Extrinsic rewards (helping change leaders re-tool their districts’ reward systems to reinforce desirable behaviors that unequivocally support their transformation journey)
7. Coercion (communicating to change leaders that all examples of successful transformation have been shown to start with the use of positive coercion applied by senior leaders in the system).
   

Reference


Nevis, E. C., Lancourt, J. L., & Vassallo, H. G. (1996). Intentional revolutions: A seven-point strategy for transforming organizations. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

I hope all this makes sense.

The AECT FutureMinds: Transforming American School Systems Initiative

Two pieces of information that are exciting for me to share...

1. The national Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT) has a Division of Systemic Change. Members of that division teach, write about, and facilitate systemic change in school systems and other organizations. I recently (March, 2007) became the president-elect of that division.

2. A group of us within the AECT Division of Systemic Change submitted a proposal to the AECT board of directors to launch a new, nationwide initiative to collaborate with selected state departments of education to help them create and sustain systemic transformational change in selected school systems within their states.

Last week, that proposal was accepted unanimously by the AECT board of directors. I am one of the co-directors of this new nationwide initiative, which will be called "FutureMinds: Transforming American School Systems." The other co-director is Dr. Charles Reigeluth from Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana.

The methodology we will be using to help selected state departments of education transform selected school systems in their states is a modified version of my methodology for creating and sustaining transformational change in school systems (called Step-Up-To-Excellence--SUTE). SUTE was blended with Dr. Reigeluth's methodology to create a hybrid methodology that we are calling "The Duffy-Reigeluth School System Transformation Protocol." Dr. Reigeluth has been using an earlier version of this blended methodology to facilitate whole-system change in the Metropolitan School District of Decatur, Indiana (you may visit the website for their transformation journey at http://www.indiana.edu/~syschang/decatur/publications.html).

The new SST Protocol will be described in my 9th book on whole-system change that I am currently writing with the working title "Dream! Create! Sustain!: Mastering the art & science of school system transformation." The book will become part of my Leading Systemic School Improvement Series published by Rowman & Littlefield Education (you may visit the website for the Series by going to http://www.rowmaneducation.com/Series/ and then clicking the link for the series).

The F. M. Duffy Reports

In 1995 I started publishing The F. M. Duffy Reports. These are quarterly reports distributed free of charge that focus on helping change leaders in school districts learn about the challenges of creating and sustaining whole-system change in their districts. The reports are distributed to an international audience of educators, state superintendents of schools, school board members, education agency executives, consultants, professors, state and federal politicians with an interest in improving schooling, graduate students, and others.

If you would like to subscribe to these Reports, please send me an email at duffy@thefmduffygroup.com.

Defining the System to be Improved

Piecemeal change to improve schooling inside a school district is an approach that at its worst does more harm than good and at its best is limited to creating pockets of “good” within school districts. When it comes to improving schooling in a district, however, creating pockets of good isn’t good enough. Whole school systems need to be improved.

To transform an entire school system, change leaders in that system must know what a system is and how it functions and they must be skillful in using a set of systems thinking tools. This blog introduces you to both of these competency sets.

The concept of “systemic change” provides the context for the kind of change leadership described in this blog. Because the term has different meanings, I need to clarify exactly which meaning I will be using. Squire and Reigeluth (2000) identify four distinct meanings of the term:

Statewide policy systemic change. This meaning focuses on statewide changes in tests, curricular guidelines, teacher-certification requirements, textbook adoptions, funding policies, and so forth. These changes are supposed to be coordinated to support one another (Smith & O’Day, 1990). This meaning is frequently used by policymakers when they talk about systemic change.

Districtwide systemic change. Educators subscribing to this meaning see systemic change as any change, including new programming, intended to spread across an entire school district. This is the meaning often held by preK-12th grade educators.

Schoolwide systemic change. Using this meaning, educators see systemic change happening inside single school buildings and it typically involves “…a deeper (re)thinking of the purposes of schooling and the goals of education” (Squire & Reigeluth, 2000, p. 144). This is the meaning that seems to inform the work of such groups as the New American Schools, Inc. and the Coalition of Essential Schools.

Ecological systemic change. This meaning sees systems as rich networks of interrelationships and interdependencies within the system and between the system and its “systemic environment” (the larger system of which it is a part, its peer systems within that larger system, and other systems with which it interacts outside of its larger system). This perspective recognizes that a significant change in one part of a system requires changes in other parts of the system. It also recognizes the need for changes in three interconnected aspects of a system: its core and supporting work processes, its internal social architecture, and its relationships with its environment (Duffy, Rogerson, & Blick, 2000). This view of systemic change subsumes the other three meanings, and it is how “systems thinkers” view systemic change (e.g., Ackoff, 1981; Banathy, 1996; Checkland, 1984; Emery & Purser, 1996; Senge, 1990). This is the definition that I endorse.

Russell Ackoff (1999, pp 6-8) adds depth and breadth to our understanding of organizations as systems. He says a system is a whole entity consisting of several parts with the following properties, which were edited to fit school systems:

• The whole school system has one or more defining properties or functions; for example, the defining function of a school district is to educate children and teenagers.
• Each piece of a school system can affect the behavior or properties of the whole; for example, a couple of low performing schools in a district can drag a whole district into low performing status.
• There is a subset of school system components that are essential for carrying out the main purpose of the whole district but they cannot, by themselves, fulfill the main purpose of a school system; e.g., teachers and classrooms in a single school building are essential elements of a school system and they are necessary for helping a school system fulfill its core purpose, but these classrooms and schools cannot and never will be able to do what the whole school system does.
• There is also a subset of components that are nonessential for fulfilling a school system’s main purpose, but are necessary for other minor purposes; e.g., school public relations, secretarial work, and pupil personnel services.
• A school system depends on its environment for the importation of “energy” (i.e., human, technical and financial resources); therefore it is an “open system.” A school district’s external task environment (i.e., the environment it interacts with on a daily basis) consists of individuals and groups identified as customers, critics, competitors, suppliers, and stakeholders.
• The way in which an essential element of a school system affects the whole system depends on its interaction with at least one other element; e.g., the effect a single school’s performance has on the whole district depends on the interaction that the school has with at least one other school in the system.
• The effect that any subset of a school system has on the whole system depends on the behavior of at least one other subset of elements; for example, let’s say that a school district is organized preKindergarten-12th grade. This means the core work process for that district is 13 steps long (pre-K-12th grade).
  Now, let’s say that district leaders are concerned about the performance of their high school (which is a subset of the whole system). This high school contains grades 9-12. It would be a mistake to focus improvement efforts only on that high school because its performance is affected by at least two other subsets of schools (i.e., the elementary and middle schools that “feed” into the high school).
  Since all essential elements of a school system interact, it would be wise to examine and determine how the elementary and middle schools are affecting the performance of the high schools. Focusing improvement only on the high schools would be a non-systemic and, therefore, piecemeal approach to improvement.
  
• A school system is a whole entity that cannot be divided into individual components without losing its essential properties or functions. For example, the dominant approach to improving schooling in the United States is called school-based or site-based improvement. This approach divides a school system into its aggregate parts; i.e., individual schools. Then, it is assumed that improving these individual schools will somehow improve the whole system. When attempts are made to improve a school system in this way—by disaggregating it into its individual schools—its effectiveness as a system deteriorates rapidly.
• Because a school system derives its effectiveness from the interaction of its elements rather than from what the elements do independent of the system, when efforts are taken to improve the individual elements as if they were not part of a whole system (as in school-based improvement), the performance of the whole system, according to Ackoff (p. 9), deteriorates and the system involved will be significantly weakened.
  
  Strategies for Defining the System to Be Improved
  
  Some authors (Fullan, date unknown) are suggesting that systemic change in education must occur within a mega-system defined by three levels: the district system, the community system and the state department of education system. This tri-level solution, as Fullan calls it, seems reasonable and intuitively correct. I agree that all three systems must be engaged in any effort to transform a school system. Although I agree with this tri-level concept, I would like to tweak it using principles from systems theory, in particular principles from Ackoff (above) and Merrelyn Emery (described below).
  
  Let’s examine the tri-level solution keeping Ackoff’s systems principles (above) in mind.
  
  Each school district, community and state department of education interact with each other and to some degree depend on each other, but each also functions as an intact, self-managing system. When the three are combined into a mega-system for the purpose of systemic change, the complexity of that system countervails any effort to improve that mega-system.
  
  As a case in point, consider what a mega-system of education would look like in the state of Pennsylvania. That state has 99 school districts, each inside a community, thereby adding 99 additional systems to the mega-system. Finally, there is one state department of education. The total number of self-functioning, relatively autonomous sub-systems in that mega-system would therefore add up to 199 complex sub-systems (99 communities, 99 school districts and 1 state department of education), each with its own special characteristics.
  
  How would you go about changing that tri-level mega-system? Who would lead that transformation? How would the special characteristics, needs, and demands of each of the 199 sub-systems be addressed? How long would it take to transform a mega-system of this size if, indeed, it could be changed at all?
  
  I think it would be impossible to change a mega-system of that size and complexity.
  
  Merrelyn Emery (Emery & Purser, 1996) gave us a different strategy for identifying “the system to be improved.” She said that we should draw a circle around every unit, department, person, and so on that must collaborate to deliver a complete service or product. To identify a unit of change that would increase the likelihood of improving schooling, that circle would go around everything that we call a school system. Everything inside the circle—the entire school system—becomes the unit of change. Everything outside the circle is part of a school system’s external environment.
  
  The idea of involving three system levels in any effort to improve a school district is correct. How to involve those three systems is where there is disagreement. Instead of creating a single tri-level mega-system to involve a school district’s community and state department of education, if we used Emery’s principle for defining the system to be improved those two systems would be considered part of a school district’s external environment. Then, change leaders could follow three paths simultaneously that would lead to school district transformation.
  
  Three Paths Toward Improvement (Duffy, 2003, 2004)
  
  Principles of whole-system change suggest that three paths must be followed to change and entire system (where a system is defined using Merrelyn Emery’s advice). The three paths are: Path 1: improve a district’s relationships with its external environment; Path 2: improve a district’s core and supporting work processes; and Path 3: improve a district’s internal social environment.
  
  Using this three path approach (rather than a tri-level approach) change leaders in school systems would work with their colleagues to improve the relationship they have with their community and with their state department of education. Using this three-path approach in Pennsylvania, for example, each of the 99 school systems would be working to improve their unique relationship with their own community and each would be working to improve their unique relationship with their state department of education. Thus, systemwide change would be occurring with each school system by engaging that district in tri-level relationship (each district with its community and with its state department of education) thereby making the prospects of successful systemic change more likely than if this same kind of change process was attempted in a mega-system.
  
  It is clear that the community system and state department of education system must be part of any district’s effort to engage in whole-system change. Blending the three systems together to create a single mega-system creates an extraordinarily complex mega-system that may become notoriously impossible to change and would create significant resistance to future change.
  
  
  

References

Ackoff, R. L. (1981). Creating the corporate future. New York: John Wiley & Sons.

Ackoff, R. L. (1999). Re-creating the corporation: A design of organizations for the 21st century. New York: Oxford University Press.

Banathy, B. H. (1996). Designing social systems in a changing world. New York: Plenum Press.

Checkland, P. (1984). Systems thinking, systems practice (Reprinted with corrections February, 1984 ed.). Chichester Sussex. New York: Wiley & Sons.

Duffy, F. M. (2004). Courage, passion and vision: A guide to leading systemic school improvement. Lanham, MD: ScarecrowEducation and the American Association for School Administrators.

Duffy, F. M. (2003). Step-Up-T0-Excelllence: An innovative approach to managing and rewarding performance in school systems. Lanham, MD: ScarecrowEducation.

Duffy, F. M., Rogerson, L. G., & Blick, C. (2000). Redesigning America’s schools: A systems approach to improvement. Norwood, MA: Christopher-Gordon Publishers.

Emery, M. & Purser, R. E. (1996). The Search Conference: A powerful method for planning organizational change and community action. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Fullan, M. (date unknown). The tri-level solution: School/district/state synergy. Retrieved on May 7, 2005 at http://www.saee.ca/analyst/C_023.1_BII_LON.php.

Senge, P. M. (1990). The fifth discipline: The art and practice of the learning organization (1st ed.). New York: Doubleday.

Smith, M. S., & O’Day, J. (1990). Systemic school reform. In S. Fuhrman & B. Malen (Eds.). The politics of curriculum and testing (pp. 233-267). Philadelphia: Falmer Press.

Squire, K. D., & Reigeluth, C. M. (2000). The many faces of systemic change. Educational Horizons, 78(3), 145-154.

The Leading Systemic School Improvement Series

Dear Colleagues,

One of the pleasures in my life is serving as the founding editor of Rowman & Littlefield Education's new Leading Systemic School Improvement Series.

The vision for the series is that it provides change leaders in school systems with the knowledge and tools they need to create and sustain systemwide change in their districts.

The series has three broad categories of books:

Category 1: Why whole-system change is needed in school districts.
Category 2: What the desired outcomes of whole-system change should be.
Category 3: How to create and sustain whole-system change in school districts.

To date, we have several wonderful books in the series and more on the way.

You may visit the webpage for the series by visiting http://www.rowmaneducation.com/Series/. Once there, click the link for the Leading Systemic School Improvement Series.

Also, if you are an author and would like to write a book for the series, please call me at 301-854-9800 or E-mail me at duffy@thefmduffygroup.com to talk about your idea.

Political Support for Whole-System Change in School Districts

While writing my newest book, Power, politics and ethics: Dynamic leadership for systemic school improvement (which is in press by Rowman & Littlefield Education), I exchanged several E-mail notes with Peter Block. Peter is an internationally famous writer and thought-leader in the field of leadership and organization development.

In one note, Peter questioned my proposition that whole-system change must be explicitly supported by a superintendent of schools and a majority of his or her school board members prior to beginning that kind of change process. Peter said (which I paraphrase here), “I disagree. There is great change under the radar of the top leaders. What are educators supposed to do if they don’t have that kind of support; give up the idea of change?”

In reply I said,

“Yes, there is great change under the radar of the top; however, in many cases in school districts the great changes are rather frequent, piecemeal, disconnected efforts to make incremental improvements in individual schools and programs within a district. And when all is said and done, not much really changes--there's just a lot of activity in the name of change. Whole-system change requires a different approach to change; one that is systemic, systematic, and strategic.

Systemic, systematic and strategic change aimed at transforming an entire school system must have support from key school board members. In the absence of board support educators should not give up a change effort; however, nor should they charge full speed ahead without having support from key board members (not necessarily from all of them). Instead, change leaders need to spend time developing a critical mass of support among key internal and external stakeholders, including key school board members.”

The methodology I've created for transforming whole school systems, Step-Up-To-Excellence, begins with a "pre-launch preparation" phase. That phase is primarily focused on building political support (both inside and outside of a school district). During this phase change leaders engage community members, faculty, staff and school board members in structured large-group processes that are based on Harrison Owen's Open Space Technology and Marvin Weisbord's Future Search. The purpose of these engagements is to build political support for whole-system change. If the political support is not there, the change effort will almost certainly fail.

What change leaders will be left with after a failed whole-system change effort is anger, frustration and a hardened resolve to resist change in the future.

Bottom-line: Whole-system change requires political support from key internal and external stakeholders, including key school board members. In the absence of that support, change leaders need to spend time building it.

If they can't build a sufficient amount of political support, then they shouldn't try to engage their school districts in large-scale, whole-system change. Of course they can continue to engage in small, incremental changes (e.g., improving a curriculum, developing a new teacher evaluation plan, and so on); but large-scale system-wide change will fail in the absence of political support and if it is bound to fail it shouldn't be tried because the emotional, physical and financial costs of whole-system change are significant.”

Peter wrote back and said that he agreed with my assessment. It was quite a relief and an honor to have someone like Peter agree with my beliefs about political support for whole-system change.

What do you think? I invite you to post your opinions on this.

My contribution to the resurgence of interest in systemic change in school districts

Michael Fullan (2000) wrote about the return of systemic change in school districts (The return of large-scale reform. Journal of Educational Change, 1, 1-25).

As I reflected on his observation, I started to think about how my body of work as a professor, author, and consultant may have contributed to that resurgence of interest in systemic change. It is my hope that in some small way, the ideas I have shared about large-scale change in school districts have influenced this resurgence of interest in systemic change.

What I did to try to identify how I may have influenced the return of systemic change was to examine my experience and extract from my vita samples of my work from 1980-2000. Here’s what I found.

In 1980, Chris Argyris sponsored an honorary faculty position for me in the Harvard Graduate School of Education to study his and Donald Schön’s ideas about personal and organizational learning. That’s when I started thinking about organizational learning in school systems.

In 1985 and 1986, I published my first two articles on applying principles of organization development and systems theory to improving the practice of instructional supervision in school districts. In 1990, I continued writing about the application of systems change to the challenge of improving instructional supervision.

An article in 1992 expressed views that reflected a shift in my thinking away from how to improve the process of instructional supervision to improving whole school systems. Then, in 1995 I published three articles that continued to shift my thinking to a focus on using systems theory to improve entire school systems.

In 1995, I started publishing and distributing The F.M. Duffy Reports. These were free quarterly reports distributed through the U.S. mail to an international audience of practitioners, professors, consultants, school board members, and politicians. The theme of the reports was about how to create and sustain system-wide change in school districts. In 2005, I started distributing these Reports via E-mail. The theme remains the same.

My first book was published in 1996 with the title Designing high performance schools: A practical guide to organizational reengineering. This book described in detail how to apply principles of systemic change to improve schools and school systems. One of the chapters in that book was about Knowledge Work Supervision.

1997 saw another two articles published about applying principles of systemic change to improving school systems. Two more articles appeared in 1997 and 1998 about a reconceptualized model of supervision that shifted the focus of supervision off of individual teachers and onto the performance of an entire school system. That model was called Knowledge Work Supervision (which was first described in my first book).

I invited Lynda Rogerson and Charles Blick to co-author Redesigning America’s schools: A systems approach to improvement. That book was published in 2000 and provided a detailed description of how to redesign an entire school system using Knowledge Work Supervision. Charles Reigeluth of Indiana University, a noted expert on systemic change in education, characterized that book as the best one he has ever seen on applying principles of systems theory to the challenge of transforming school systems.

I stopped reviewing my vita at the year 2000 because that was the year that Fullan published his article on the return of large-scale reform.

Since 2000, I have published many more articles and several more books. The Knowledge Work Supervision methodology has been transformed into Step-Up-To-Excellence.

All tolled, I hope that my ideas as expressed in my writing, teaching and consulting have contributed in some small way to the return of large-scale reform in education as commented upon by Michael Fullan.

References

Books

Duffy, F. M. (2005, in press). Power, politics and ethics: Dynamic leadership for systemic school improvement. Leading Systemic School Improvement Series. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Education.

Duffy, F. M. (2004). Moving upward together: Creating strategic alignment to sustain change. Leading Systemic School Improvement Series, No.1. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Education.

Duffy, F. M. (2003). Courage, passion, and vision: A guide to leading systemic school improvement. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Education and the American Association of School Administrators.

Duffy, F. M. (2002). Step-Up-To-Excellence: An innovative approach to managing and rewarding performance in school systems. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Education.

Duffy, F. M. & Dale, J. (Eds.) (2001). Creating successful school systems: Voices from the university, the field, and the community. Norwood, MA: Christopher-Gordon Publishers.

Duffy, F. M., Rogerson, L. G., & Blick, C. (2000). Redesigning America’s schools: A systems approach to improvement. Norwood, MA: Christopher-Gordon Publishers.

Duffy, F. M. (1996). Designing high performance schools: A practical guide to organizational reengineering. Del Ray Beach, FL: St. Lucie Press.


Articles


___________(2000 Winter). Re-conceptualizing instructional supervision. Journal of Curriculum and Supervision, 15 (2), 123-145.

____________(1998). Knowledge Work Supervision: Transforming school systems into high performing learning organizations. ERIC Clearinghouse on Educational Management, EA 029224.

___________ (1997 May). Supervise schooling, not teachers. Educational Leadership, 54 (8), 78 - 83.

___________ (1997 January). Knowledge Work Supervision: Transforming school systems into high-performing learning organizations. International Journal of Educational Management, 11 (1), 26 - 31.

__________ (1995). Supervising knowledge-work. NASSP Bulletin, 79 (573), 56-66.

__________ (1995). Supervising knowledge work. ERIC Clearinghouse on Educational Management. EA026349.

__________ (1995). Designing high performance schools through instructional supervision. ERIC Clearinghouse on Educational Management. EA026350.

__________ (April, 1992). Random thoughts, deeply felt. In the Chesapeake Bay Organization Development Network Newsletter, 6 (2)

____________(1990 Spring). Soil conditions, cornerstones, and other thoughts: A treatise for a school superintendent. Wingspan,5 (2).

__________ (1986). Improving the effectiveness of supervisory practice. Planning and Changing: A Journal for School Administrator, 16 (4), 195-205.

__________ (1985). Analyzing and evaluating supervisory practice. In ERIC Clearinghouse on Educational Management (ED 458707).