Moreover, the cost of firing is often prohibitive in terms of its damage to morale. Given teachers desire for security, the personal nature of their work, and their comparative lack of worldliness, the dismissal of a colleague sends shock waves through a faculty, raising anxiety even among the most talented. Back to top Innovation . As should be clear by now, schools, for good reasons, change at a glacial pace. All the characteristics above make them conservative organizations and guarantee that they will be harder to change than almost every other kind of institution - except perhaps a family or a church.
Schools do change, but far more slowly and incrementally than companies do.
The traditions of schooling link the generations of our society. They give shape and meaning not just to our children s lives but to our own. And meaning, it turns out, is crucial to innovation. How any of us react to any change depends chiefly on what the change means to us. Change is always pressed in the name of progress, but its early impact is frequently to cause loss, because it upsets the patterns, practices, relationships, and assumptions by which we have lived and which have made our lives meaningful.