Improving High Schools: The Case for New Goals and Strategies

To improve schools, what we need are not new policy gimmicks, a national curriculum, or more multiple-choice tests, Mr. Wagner avers, but rather some old-fashioned democratic virtues. WHILE NEARLY everyone agrees that we need to improve our nation's high schools fundamentally, the right mix of goals and strategies that will produce significant change is not yet clear. Strong leadership, site-based management (shared decision making), and pedagogical innovations such as team teaching and an interdisciplinary curriculum are currently very popular approaches, but whether adopting them produces fundamental changes in teaching and learning remains in question. For the past four years I have served as a consultant to more than a dozen school improvement efforts in public and independent schools. The story of one high school in particular, which I shall call High, stands out as representative of efforts to initiate change. Ourtown is a public school in a small blue-collar community. For more than two years, I worked closely with Ourtown's administration and faculty and consulted with students, parents, and community leaders. While a couple of years is not long enough to measure definite improvements, I believe that a careful look at the experience of this school provides us with some early indicators of the limits of effective leadership, site-based management, and curricular innovations as agents of school improvement. From analyzing the results at Ourtown and at other schools engaged in similar efforts, I have concluded that many current attempts at school improvement will probably fail without a much broader and more widely shared understanding of the need for education reform. It has become clear to me that, if teachers and students are going to be motivated to work in different ways and if the schools are to cultivate long-term local support for ongoing change, there must first be consensus within the community about the goals of school reform and about the best ways to measure progress toward those goals. Individual communities, not professional organizations or the federal government, must decide what it means to be an educated person in America. A CASE STUDY OF SCHOOL IMPROVEMENT Ourtown High School is located in one of those small New England mill towns that has seen better times. Even during the booming Eighties, unemployment had reached more than 10%, and semiskilled or unskilled blue-collar jobs were just about the only work available. Now with the recession in full force, more than a third of the families in the town receive some form of public assistance. The high school mirrors the sense in the town of glory days gone by. Built solidly but unimaginatively out of the same red brick as the now-empty mill, the school holds less than half of the students it did 15 years ago. Gone is the marching band that once was its pride -- too few interested students and too little money for uniforms and teachers. Recently, the dropout rate has hovered close to 30%, and more graduates go on to the military than to college. Scores on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) last year were the lowest in the school's history. A few years ago, the town hired a young and dynamic new superintendent, whom I shall call Mary Murphy. Mary, who had recently been a doctoral student and an assistant superintendent in a more affluent, more progressive system, came in with some revolutionary ideas. Mary believes that our high schools are outdated and that change must be radical and must be implemented all at once, rather than incrementally. Upon arriving, Mary declared that she wanted to create democratic, community-controlled schools that would challenge every student to strive for excellence. She set in motion plans to develop teams for school-based management and theme schools. Mary also established advisory groups of teachers and members of the community to write a mission statement for the school system and to work out her ideas for a new curricular focus for each school. …