Learning by All.

Through a longitudinal investigation of the ways policy makers and practitioners in three states think about curricular reform in elementary mathematics and literacy instruction, the authors have been trying to find out just what it would take to make such reforms take root. They share their hunches here. We are in the midst of multiple calls for educational change. Reformers demand that teaching focus on understanding ideas, not on memorizing facts. Students should master skills and think mathematically; they should read biography and write about their experiences. Teachers should help students develop basic skills and understand mathematical concepts; they should help students read words correctly and interpret text. Students should write to learn, and they should write to communicate. Moreover, reformers want these experiences for all students, not just for the intellectually elite or the college-bound. The implications of such visions are far-reaching. Curriculum would be more challenging, and students' work, less perfunctory. Interpretation and analysis would become more important than recall. New assessments would ask students to perform complex tasks rather than to reproduce what they have been told. Teachers would listen more and speak less. All students would be engaged and helped to grow. Infusing these ideals into the daily life of schools will require that reformers take account of the fact that schools and the people who work in them are not blank slates. While reformers seek more demanding and engaging teaching and learning, most instruction in the U.S. is quite conventional. And it has been so for generations. Thus the teaching and learning envisioned in these reforms is not something that most of us know how to do or even know enough to want. If we already wanted this kind of learning - and if we knew how to teach in such ways - more classrooms would look like the ones envisioned by the reformers. This "people problem" poses special challenges for reformers, because the very people who must work on these reforms have little firsthand knowledge of or experience with this kind of education. Steeped in traditional views of knowledge and instruction, educators at all levels find themselves in the uncomfortable position of having to promote and deliver something about which they are just learning. Students, parents, administrators, and community members also lack experience with what this kind of learning might look like, what it might offer, and how it might be created. Moreover, these reforms are visions, not programs for practice. They are sketches of what teaching and learning could be. They are images and ideals, not realities. Schoolpeople must construct practice from these sketches, and they must promote new goals and means to meet those goals, even as they seek to develop alternative visions of what the reforms really mean. Much learning would be required for the current generation of reforms to succeed. Students and their teachers would have to learn dramatically new approaches to their work. Parents, too, would have a lot to learn, as would policy makers. None of this learning would be easy, nor would it happen overnight. Instructional revolutions have been tried before with limited success, in good part because reformers paid so little attention to reeducation. If we look only to the past for guidance, we see that history suggests that these new reforms will fade, becoming fleeting memories like the New Math or MACOS (Man: A Course of Study). Teachers and administrators seem to say as much, yawning wearily in the face of yet another promised reform. Scholars agree, noting an overwhelming systemic resistance to change.(1) We aren't interested in writing yet another obituary of education reform. Rather, we wonder what it would take to make such reforms take root. We are trying to find out through a longitudinal investigation of the ways policy makers and practitioners think about curricular reform in elementary mathematics and literacy instruction in three states: California, Michigan, and South Carolina. …