School Reform Initiatives
Linked to the changing needs of the labour market as economies globally diversify from a reliance on heavy industry and manufacturing, there is an urgent need to secure ways of raising student achievement in schools (Harris & Chapman, 2004) in order to ensure a pool of skilled labour that better meets the needs of tomorrow’s knowledge-based economies. Therefore there are continuous efforts being implemented to improve all schools within most countries round the world, based on the belief that education is the key to global productivity, an important factor in developing human resources, and a major factor in the determination of economic returns on investments in education (Plank, 1987; Schoening, 1998). Recently interest has turned to finding answers to questions such as: “how to do a whole system reform”, “How to bridge the gap in students’ achievements”, and “Where to begin?” (Barber & Mourshed, 2007; Mourshed, Chijioke, & Barber, 2010) as, although many countries have undertaken some form of school system reform, very few have succeeded in improving their systems to develop a better situation (Barber & Mourshed, 2007; Mourshed et al., 2010). For example Bifulco, Duncombe and Yinger (2005) investigated the impact of whole-school reform on students’ reading performance in New York City, and they found that the school reform programmes had no systematic impact on students’ reading. Similarly, Coe indicated that “the evidence that levels of attainment in schools in England have systematically improved over the last 30 years is unconvincing” (2013, p. 3), a finding congruent with the work of Muijs, Chapman, and Armstrong (2012), who found that schools’ participation in Teach First programmes, (based on the US Programme Teach for America), provided ambiguous results on the impact of learning.
The process of changing school cultures (re-culturing) in ways that support whole change (Copland, 2003) is what makes a difference in improving schools’ performance (Fullan, 2000), utilising strategies such as diagnostic information, systematic planning (Keefe, 1994), communicating a shared vision of where the school is going (Muijs & Harris, 2006; Wikeley, Stoll, Murillo, & De Jong, 2005), what the school’s expectations are, and what the school can achieve (Muijs, Harris, Chapman, & Russ, 2010). Re-culturing involves traveling from a limited pedagogical situation to a position where teachers’ new knowledge and skills can make a difference in students’ achievement, resulting in a positive effect on both the school culture and structure (Fullan, 2000).
However, re-culturing schools is not an easy task, as it seems policy makers, school leaders and researchers play different roles in improving students’ achievement: Policy makers set goals and create the conditions for teachers to meet these goals in practice; School principals are expected to develop the quality of teaching inside the school using the guidelines from the policy makers, whereas, researchers develop and test theories about quality in education to help the policy makers to understand the challenges in education in order to enhance the practice inside the school. However, the relationship between theories and practice in educational effectiveness has not always been clearly articulated (Creemers & Kyriakides, 2008) and there are a number of publications that support this view, such as Creemers and Reezigt (1997) and Teddlie and Reynolds (2000). Therefore, policymakers, school leaders, and educators need to be supported to develop a common understanding of how a system with certain environmental conditions has mapped a path, or can map a path, to create and sustain improvement (Mourshed et al., 2010). This top down model of change is only one approach and an alternative is provided by the idea of professional learning communities that suggest a bottom up model, where teachers and learners take control of this process of continuous improvement as outlined in this article. In this model, the whole school reform programme focuses on the school as the unit of improvement, unlike the top down models, which focus on system wide policies. (Bifulco et al., 2005).
Therefore, to understand how the education system can map a path for improvement and sustain progress, the school needs to be taken as the centre of improvement for the education system, where all its parts work closely together to make progress and achieve sustainable improvement. Improving schools’ performance can be seen to be multi-dimensional, rather than uni-dimensional, the result of implementing a range of initiatives and policies simultaneously (Fullan & Miles, 1992). Hopkins et al., (2014) reviewed the last four decades of school effectiveness and school improvement research and found that there is much about how to improve a single school, but few studies evidencing, successful efforts at sustainable improvement. The roles and responsibilities of school principals, senior teachers, and teachers within schools on the one hand, and the support team, school improvement partners, subject supervisors, and the Ministry of Education on the other hand, should be clearly defined and each must be committed to the school improvement process, according to Kuijpers, Houtveen and Wubbels (2010). Gaining an understanding of the key players’ reactions and responses to education reform, which Hargreaves found in his study of 50 Canadian teachers differed according to their age, subject specialty, and gender, is crucial for ongoing improvement and the maintenance of achievements (2005). Andy Hargreaves argued that sustainable improvement needs to have mixture of teacher age groups, mentoring across the generation and collective learning from wisdom and experience. He found that though many schools have the above mentioned, improvement is unsustainable. Since that time, further Canadian Studies centred on the Province of Ontario, focused on three key areas: improving student outcomes, reducing the gaps in achievement, and increasing public confidence in government education. In 2004 nearly 5000 schools were engaged in the Ontario reform with the result that 10 percent more students are now achieving the provincial standard, and the number of schools with very low performance has fallen by three-quarters. Ontario’s success has been attributed to the focus on student learning, achieved by reducing the number of students in each class to a maximum of 20, and providing professional development programmes to teachers and principals, both groups being recognised as key players. Some of the main outcomes of this reform project were the reduction in the poorly performing schools by 75 percent, an increase in public confidence, and higher teacher retention, with early retirement amongst teachers dropping by 50 percent (Levin, 2008). The building of a school’s capacity for improvement was central to this successful reform project, which also worked on other areas such as teachers’ commitment, the impact of high learner expectations, a focus on students’ literacy and numeracy skills, effective use of data and feedback, and the need for strong positive relationships with parents in order to sustain the early improvement over the longer term. This Canadian reform project appears to have been sustainable because it incorporated many of factors that previous research had indicated were important, but most importantly placed the school community at the centre of the reforms. Whilst, Coe (2013) indicated that smaller classes have not been found to have a significant impact on student learning, there were many other factors involved in the Ontario project that made it successful and sustainable. It is therefore very useful to compare this experience with that of the United States of America.
In the USA, despite two waves of reform over the past two decades starting in 1983, the schools did not change much neither did the teachers. The first wave increased standards and regulations, which resulted in increased teachers’ salaries, and an increase in the school day and year. The criticism of the first wave was that it applied a top-down approach and did not add any capacity to the system. Therefore a second wave of reform was introduced, which focused on strengthening the relationship between the school and parents, addressing the diversity of students’ needs, attracting and retaining high performing teachers by providing professional development sessions to change the roles of the teachers (Desimone, 2002). This multi-faceted approach also did not appear to produce the expected results, with little change evidenced in either school organisation or teaching approaches. In response to the failure of these earlier reforms, a third wave of reform, known as the Comprehensive Schoolwide Reform (CSR), was implemented, focusing on improving the entire school (Desimone, 2002), rather than just one or more elements in the schools. However, there was “great variation in the level and consistency of implementation of CSR models, both within and between schools” (Desimone, 2002, p. 6), and that might lead to different understanding, different focuses, and different learning outcomes.
In contrast, Chinese education reform aimed to broaden education and to implement a whole child approach through the development of the curriculum examination scores focus. By revising the school curriculum and focusing on one area it has apparently succeeded in a number of schools, according to Dello-Iacovo (2009).
So, from these examples (Canada, USA and China), it can be seen that school reform differs from country to country according to its needs, and its focus: while some countries focused on one dimension to enhance school performance, others focused on multi dimensions to achieve the same purpose. What can be concluded, though, is that the focus on the outcome, on students’ achievement, is more important than the process used to reform the school system.
To sum up, education reform initiatives are intended to improve schools’ performance and make learning more effective and meaningful (Aksit, 2007). It appears that high performance schools selectively and carefully identify the initiatives that need to be implemented and they prepare the school community for the change (Zendeli, 2011). However, reforms were seen to fail, or were not effectively implemented, because attempts to solve educational sectors problems were superficial (Fullan & Miles, 1992) or were implemented for political reasons rather than to meet identified educational requirements (Baskan & Erduran, 2009), points explored further in the next sections. In saying this, mass education is clearly linked to economic requirements, and government investment is justified on this basis. Indeed, the need for any country to invest in school reform appears to be driven out of economic necessity and a wish to become more globally competitive. The whole school effectiveness movement discussed in the next section must therefore be seen within this context of social, technological, economic and political change.
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