Are We Looking to Reform, Re-Form, 
or Transform Education?

Dr. William Spady

Controversy roils on Capitol Hill around the impact of the President’s “No Child Left Behind” (NCLB) school reform initiative, and whether or not to reauthorize it.  NCLB’s proponents want to be sure that its accountability provisions are retained and that schools are compelled to improve the performance of large numbers of under-achieving students and schools.  NCLB’s opponents not only decry the profound limitations of its standardized testing provisions but its insensitive, standardized, and limiting way of viewing learning, the individual, and the larger purposes of public education.   

Since momentum is building to not reauthorize NCLB in its current form, it is not clear what understandings about education will prevail as this intense debate proceeds.  What I see and hear suggests that different groups hold fundamentally different positions around a host of critical factors related to education’s potential purposes, priorities, outcomes, structures, and processes – each of which emanates from different beliefs about the nature of human beings and the world in which they live.

But perhaps the biggest issue facing our leaders and ourselves is not which “model” of education should “prevail over” the others when the NCLB smoke clears, but whether we can thoughtfully craft policies that encourage either the pursuit of each model in its own right, or – better yet – the integration of the best features of each in one unified and truly transformed system.  While the latter may be more far-reaching than our highly conflicted political climate may allow in 2007, it may not lie beyond our current thinking and political capacity to allow parents, communities, and states an authentic “choice” in which model, or combination of models, of public education to make available to their children.  

Please note, this is not about choosing between public and private provisions of what amounts to essentially the same model – what has so often passed for “choice” in the past two decades – but the design and provision of fundamentally different models within the same community/district/ jurisdiction.  This is, of course, what charter schools were to have done, but not accomplished very successfully, in the past decade.  

Some Fundamentals of Our Current System

With few exceptions, the word “school” conjures up a host of attributes that all coalesce into what we think is “the” vehicle for “providing education” to our children.  Schools as we have known them for over a century are almost all defined, structured, and operated in a given way that is legally mandated and reinforced by state laws and regulations.  For example, almost all adults take it for granted that schools will have fixed calendar years and daily schedules, grade levels and textbook materials that match them, a curriculum organized around the academic subject areas, self-contained classrooms in which individual teachers operate with a fixed number of students, teachers “teaching” children what the latter don’t know based on those curriculum materials, tests and test scores, grades and report cards, promotion and graduation standards, etc.  

Why?  Because this is the school we went to, our parents went to, and our grand parents went to, and it’s simply a familiar, institutionalized, and unchanging feature of our cultural heritage.  And while most of us want to see it improve and be “better,” we have major difficulty imaging it varying from this familiar pattern of attributes.  

These institutionalized attributes are the “boxes” that often constrain and limit our thinking about learning and the inner development of human beings.  And, some believe, they’re the reason that educational change is universally slow, piecemeal, and highly politicized.  Hence, our efforts to “reform” schools almost always leave these structural attributes in place and shift the improvement burden to the adults who work there, as if more ability and effort on their parts are sufficient to bringing about deep change and better learning.  

In my 2001 book Beyond Counterfeit Reforms I call this pervasive orientation “educentrism” – which simply means that we view change from the point of view of how schools already are, and look for ways to improve them that ultimately keep these fundamental features in place, while not realizing that these structural features may be the actual source of education’s alleged shortcomings. 

But great 20th Century educational figures such as John Dewey, Maria Montessori, and Rudolph Steiner were able to imagine education lying outside of this educentric paradigm, and their particular models are widely known and respected throughout the world.  A key feature of their models is that they are all much more “learner centered” than what their advocates regard as the typical “factory model/assembly line” nature of most public systems.  And that distinction seems to be a good place to start in understanding the choices that could emerge from America’s current educational reform debate.  

Expanding Our Reform Thinking

Let’s imagine that we could array some of the key choices available to us into three broad categories, each with its supporting research base and enthusiastic advocates:  the educentric “Reform Education” models, the functional “Re-Form Education” models, and the holistic “Transform Education” models.  

The Reformers would argue that the current structural attributes of schools are fine as they are, but the people in the schools need to function in a “higher performance” way to do justice to the inherent character of the existing system, its curriculum, and its clientele.  The best way for this to happen is to implement a system of agreed-upon curriculum and performance standards, along with the monitoring and enforcement mechanisms to assure that those standards will be met.  From A Nation at Risk in 1983 to NCLB today, this has been the major thrust of educational policy thinking at the federal and state levels in the U.S. 

The Re-Formers, on the other hand, would argue that a major redefining, reframing, and restructuring of the system would need to occur if schools are to respond today’s 21st Century economic challenges and take advantage of the technologies and extensive knowledge bases already available to most Americans.  Re-Formed schools would embody far greater flexibilities in learning resources, learning contexts, learning processes, learning challenges, and the timing and duration of learning opportunities than is prevalent today.  They would also offer more “real-world” learning experiences, opportunities for exploration and team-based learning, and “authentic” demonstrations that link to tomorrow’s challenges and realities.  One of the best examples of this Re-Form orientation lies within the recent Tough Choices or Tough Times report produced by the National Center on Education and the Economy.  

The Transformers would argue that the existing attributes of schools impose artificial, mechanistic, and counter-productive constraints on human beings and ignore their inner nature, natural talents, and how they learn and develop.  They advocate an approach that honors the innate curiosity, natural learning capacities, and unique aptitudes of individuals and encourages them to explore and discover understandings and possibilities that exist within life itself.  More often than not these rich and challenging experiences lie outside the boundaries of the conventional academic subject areas, and they tap and expand the individual’s intuitive, interpersonal, compassionate, creative, and spiritual capacities.  

Next, let’s imagine that we can array these different models along several key dimensions that are fundamental to determining their direction, character, and likely outcomes.  To highlight their differences we’ll place the Reformers on the left, the Transformers on the right, and assume that the Re-Formers fall somewhere in the middle, but definitely not on the left.  

	Reformer Orientation				  Transformer Orientation

	   Educentric Paradigm				           Holistic Paradigm

           Content Focused Learning				      Inner Focused Learning

 Disciplinary Curriculum				 Trans-disciplinary Curriculum

           Rational/Logical Thinking				   Divergent/Lateral Thinking

      Teacher-Initiated/						Learner-Initiated/     
          Classroom-Based Learning				     Life Experience Learning

   Graded Structure and 				    Non-Graded Structure and 
	 Learning Opportunities				       Learning Opportunities

	 Academic Achievement				        Personal Development
	      and Advancement 						   and Maturity

           Transmission of Accepted				        Exploration of Unique 
      Knowledge and Understandings			           Possibilities and Understandings

	  External Expectations, 				          Internal Motivation, 
	  Control, and Rewards 				       Control, and Fulfillment

           Premium on IQ Learning				     Focus on EQ Development

     Competitive Organizational Ethic			         Collaborative Organizational Ethic

     Quantitative Measures of Success			       Qualitative Measures of Development

           Closed System Thinking				       Open System Thinking
	      and Operations						  and Operations

    Scheduled Learning Opportunities 		            Flexible Learning Opportunities

            Getting Right Answers				     Asking Deeper Questions   

 Adults as Control and 				       Adults as Learning and 
    Evaluation Agents 					    Performance Role Models

While this list of comparisons could be extended further, the items above clearly portray the major difference between the educentric, system-focused orientation of today’s Reformers and NCLB advocates – embodied in Paradigm 1 below – and the holistic, person-focused orientation of the Transformers who are opposed to NCLB’s reauthorization – Paradigms 4 and 5 below.  While the Transformers may have the strong appeal of Dewey, Montessori, and Steiner on their side, the overwhelming impetus of educational policy thinking and educational inertia across the globe today lies with the Reformers.  Said differently, if this figure were a see-saw, the Reformers would be like a 400 pound gorilla sitting on the ground, with the small-child Transformers suspended precariously in mid-air with no hope of getting down.

America’s Real “Choice” Issue

The greatest choice facing congressional educational policy makers is not about whether to re-authorize NCLB, or whether to support/subsidize private schools as many conservatives would wish, but whether to create a policy context that encourages the development and widespread implementation of key Re-Form and Transform alternatives that attract clientele suited them.  Enlightened educators and parents know that the Reform model being imposed on all of America’s children is both out-moded and inappropriate for most 21st Century learners.  Only in this way can the U.S. become a genuine world leader in educational change and offer its citizens the future-focused and learner-responsive alternatives that they deserve.  

Paradigm 1:  Academic Standards

Essence of the Model:  Content mastery of academic subjects
Nature of Learning:  Mental processing of verbal, abstract, and symbolic material
Major Outcome Measure:  Paper-pencil test performance on content “essentials”
Key Pedagogy:  Curriculum transmission by content experts from approved texts
Opportunity Structure:  Grade level-constrained/time-based/calendar-driven

Paradigm 2:  Performance-Based

Essence of the Model:  Functional competence across a range of practical skills
Nature of Learning:  Hands-on practice and application of defined skills
Major Outcome Measure:  Demonstrated mastery of criterion-defined tasks 
Key Pedagogy:  Modeling and direct feedback on increasingly complex skills
Opportunity Structure:  Time-flexible/determined by rate of learning 

Paradigm 3:  Life Performance

Essence of the Model:  Direct engagement with emerging life role challenges 
Nature of Learning:  Integration and application of life performance abilities 
Major Outcome Measure:  Demonstration of complex performance roles in context
Key Pedagogy:  Undertaking life-challenge simulations of increasing complexity
Opportunity Structure:  Expanded/continuous opportunity in life settings

Paradigm 4:  Personal Empowerment

Essence of the Model:  Personal control over one’s learning and development
Nature of Learning:  Intrinsic motivation fuels natural interests and aptitudes
Major Outcome Measure:  Authentic exhibitions of one’s developed abilities
Key Pedagogy:  In-depth exploration and experience develop expertise
Opportunity Structure:  Learner-responsive/developmentally-based timing

Paradigm 5:  Inner Realization

Essence of the Model:  Expanded consciousness of one’s spiritual nature/potential
Nature of Learning:  Developing one’s intuitive connection to universal wisdom
Major Outcome Measure:  Taking full responsibility for one’s life and experiences
Key Pedagogy:  Meditative exploration by quieting the conscious mind
Temporal Structure:  Learner-controlled timing/group-enhanced experience