1. the need for systemic transformational change in school districts  (Page 4/4)

School systems, however, are not making this required transformation journey. In fact, after many years of applying the traditional approach to improving education (one school, one program at a time), very little has changed in how America’s children are educated in school systems. The old paradigm persists and is sustained by the one-school-at-a-time approach to improvement. This approach, although important and still needed as one element of a transformational change strategy, is inherently insufficient as a stand-alone change strategy because it disregards the nature of school districts as intact, organic systems governed by classic principles of system functioning. Further, the one-school-at-a-time approach often fails because changes to one part of a system makes that part incompatible with the rest of the system, which then works to change it back to its pre-change state. Therefore, the piecemeal approach to change is insufficient because it fails to transform an entire school district and it unintentionally maintains the system’s status quo.

Given the insufficiency of the one-school-at-a-time approach to improvement, change efforts are now being scaled up to the level of the whole district —but the whole-district improvement methodologies currently being used are not creating and sustaining the paradigm shift in teaching and learning that is required for the Information Age because these approaches to whole-district change do not apply principles of systemic transformational change. Instead, all these approaches to change are doing is tweaking school systems in ways that maintain the status quo—the old paradigm.

One of the key reasons why current efforts to change whole-districts are failing to create transformational paradigm change is because there is definitional confusion about the meaning of “system” and “systemic change.” Many approaches to change that are characterized as systemic are not; e.g., high school reform is not systemic change; developing a new curriculum is not systemic change; and introducing new instructional technology is not systemic change. However, some of these approaches can be used as elements of a whole-system change methodology.

Further, not all systemic change efforts aim to create transformational, paradigm-shifting change. For example, some systemic change efforts aim to make systemic (system-wide) improvements to a system’s current operations (its existing mental model for how to function). Making system-wide improvements to current operations is called continuous improvement, and this does not create transformational change. Transformational change, on the other hand, seeks organizational reinvention rather than simply trying to replicate best practices, discontinuity rather than incrementalism, and true innovation rather than periodic reordering of the system (Lazlo&Laugel, 2000, p. 184).

Transformational change also requires simultaneous improvements along three change paths: Path 1— transform the system’s core and supporting work processes; Path 2—transform the system’s internal social infrastructure; and, Path 3—transform the system’s relationship with its external environment. Only one contemporary approach to improving school systems (Duffy&Riegeluth, 2008) follows these three paths, and failure to create changes along these paths is part of the explanation of why so many contemporary change efforts failed or are failing to create systemic transformational change.

Despite the paucity of real-life examples of system-wide transformational change, there are many examples of school-wide change that were very successful until the larger system that they were part of (i.e., the school system) changed them back to be compatible with the district’s dominant, controlling mental model for teaching and learning. The power of the unchanged parts of a system to attack and destroy a changing part is not to be ignored or minimized. This phenomenon is real, it is common, and it is yet one more reason why whole districts need to be transformed, not pieces of them.