Change as Collaborative Inquiry: A Constructivist Methodology for Reinventing Schools.

To make the implementation of higher standards a reality for most children, we must develop a new practice of "whole-school" change that is consistent with our understanding of how learning takes place and how organizations change, Mr. Wagner asserts. For the last several years, the big push in education reform has been to develop new, more rigorous state and district standards for learning. While the debate continues to rage in many communities over the exact nature and extent of these standards, as well as over how they will be assessed, it seems that we may have reached some kind of national consensus that there will be standards. For now, at least, many educational leaders have come to believe that the need to monitor progress toward genuine equality of educational opportunity and achievement outweighs the danger that the standards movement will simply lead to more of the same: more "coverage" of the same stale Carnegie-unit curriculum and more use of the same standardized tests for accountability purposes. So much for the easy part. The development of new learning standards was a fairly simple matter in comparison to what it will take to actually implement them. The adoption of new standards does not answer the question of how we make the necessary changes that will enable all students to achieve at higher levels and meet the new learning standards. Most approaches to systemic education reform are rooted in obsolete, top-down or expert-driven management beliefs and practices that reflect neither what we know about how people learn nor what we have come to understand about how organizations change. ' To make the implementation of higher standards a reality for most children, we must develop a new practice of "whole-school" change that is consistent with our understanding of how learning takes place and how organizations change. We must connect our means and our ends. We need to create a methodology for a more collaborative, "constructivist" process of change in schools and districts, if we are to develop what Peter Senge calls a "learning organization. " Since 1988 I have been studying and helping with the change process in K-12 public and independent schools in the U.S. and Brazil. Initially, I worked as a researcher and an independent consultant, but since 1994 I have headed a team from the Institute for Responsive Education that is working on whole-school change with clusters of K-12 schools in seven low-income communities around the country. In our work with our partner schools, we are developing new, "constructivist" approaches to whole-school change. Our methodology contrasts sharply with more conventional practices in each of the four stages of the change process, as I have outlined them in earlier work: 1) defining the problem, 2) developing the goals of change, 3) implementing change strategies, and 4) assessing results. (2) We are also coming to understand the new kind of leadership required in a successful school change process. Defining the Problem: 'Failure' Versus Obsolescence Since the publication of A Nation at Risk in 1983, a growing and increasingly shrill chorus of business and political leaders (Democrats and Republicans alike) and of national and local media has reached virtual consensus on one thing: U.S. schools are failing. You read it or hear it nearly every day in the media. This analysis of the problem, while lending itself to dramatic pronouncements, is fundamentally wrong and is a serious impediment to change in schools. By most objective criteria, American public schools are doing a better job than they were 25 years ago: a greater number of students - both white and minority - are graduating from high school, taking the SAT 1, and attending college. (3) Our schools are not failing. They continue to do exactly what they were designed to do nearly a hundred years ago: they sort out a small percentage of students to be prepared for further learning and for professional and managerial jobs, while giving the remaining students the minimal skills needed for manual labor or assembly-line work. …