The infatuation with new reforms ensures that only the rare measure is seen through to the end. The churning of policy distracts administrators, teachers, and community members from fostering faculty commitment and expertise the real keys to school improvement. Rapid leadership turnover and the constant search for new solutions cause previous initiatives to be abandoned mid-stream. The result is that faculty and administrators become disillusioned and increasingly resist further change. Evidence on the performance of parochial and high-performing schools suggests that the best schools are characterized by focus, and develop expertise in specific approaches.
School improvement requires time, concentration, and the commitment of core personnel.
This requires that the leadership emphasizes selected efforts and then nurture those efforts in the schools. Policy churn punishes those teachers who throw themselves into reform efforts, even though these very teachers are likely to be among the more effective teachers in a school system. Disinterested teachers safely ride out the successive waves of reform behind the closed doors of their classrooms. Those teachers who invest their energy and sacrifice their time find their efforts wasted if reforms dissipate. Because each regime tends to initiate new reforms, within a few years this entire process starts again.