Methods of School Reform

Educational reform and change is a movement that was motivated by the 1983 report AA Nation At Risk,@ published by the National Commission on Excellence in Education. Response to the report elicited many ideas and methods of school reform. In March of 1994, President Clinton signed the GOALS 2000: Educate America Act, which established national education goals that focused on results, accountability and flexibility in the use of federal education resources. The 1994 Goals 2000 Act formalized into law the six original National Education Goals (school readiness, increased graduation rate, student achievement, mathematics and science, adult literacy and lifelong learning, safe schools) and added two goals on teacher education and professional development and parental involvement. This paper will identify some of the most significant issues in educational reform by focusing on the ideas of several prominent people in the field including Linda Darling-Hammond, Michael Fullan, John Goodlad, Andy Hargreaves, Michael Huberman, Seymour Sarason, Albert Shanker, Gary Wehlage, Stephen Covey and Alfie Kohn.

There has been a call to reform the educational system in general and schools in particular almost since the inception of the public school system in the United States (Ornstein & Hunkins, 1993). The call to reform the educational system has intensified over the past four decades due to rapidly falling levels of academic achievement, including the graduation of many essentially i

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e forms of assistance by external agents were found to have the potential to promote intellectual quality and professional community: sustained school-wide staff development; standard setting aimed at learning of high intellectual quality; and deregulation. Wehlage maintains that restructuring as such does not have a precise definition, but the term does suggest that schooling needs to be comprehensively redesigned; improving parts of schools is not enough. His major argument is that the quality of education for children depends more on basic human and social resources in a school than on specific techniques, practices or structures. The starting point for the current mediocrity in education should be a focus on student learning rather than on specific tools of restructuring. Goodlad (2000), Hargreaves (1994) and Sarason (1990, 1996) prefer to talk of renewal, rather than reform. Goodlad, a co-director of the Center for Educational Renewal at the University of Washington, maintains that reform is a bad concept and that renewal is a better concept since it is more realistic. He also abjures the restraints put on teachers by state and federal bureaucracies, to the point of saying that teachers are not professionals. The problem

Category: Government - M