Reinventing America's Schools by David Osborne

Author:David Osborne
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

PART V

THE KEYS TO SUCCESS

CHAPTER 12

THE DNA OF 21ST CENTURY SYSTEMS

“Education reform” has been the name of the game in urban districts for more than three decades. There has been improvement, but in most places the pace has been glacial. Why? Because most districts have not pursued the reforms with the highest leverage, those that force everything else in the system to change. “Reform du jour” has been the norm, quantity more important than quality. Professor Jeffrey Henig and three colleagues, who wrote about reform in four urban districts in the 1990s in The Color of School Reform: Race, Politics, and the Challenge of Urban Education, put it well:

In spite of frequent charges that the education community is reflexively resistant to innovation and reform, we find that the school systems in Atlanta, Baltimore, Detroit, and DC are virtually overrun with reform initiatives. Some of these efforts may represent political posturing or efforts to substitute the appearance of reform for the genuine article, but we find many signs of sincere efforts in which committed educators and parents are investing time, energy and emotional capital. The problem, we suggest, is less an unwillingness to try something new—in this respect school professionals seem more like gullible consumers than complacent bureaucrats—than a fragmented, episodic effort.

… the typical pattern is for initially vibrant reform movements to sputter and run out of steam.

The late Gene Maeroff, a former New York Times correspondent, author of 15 books, and one-time school board president, wrote a book about reform in Syracuse and came to similar conclusions. “School reform has proved itself more difficult than getting a man on the moon,” he wrote. “Failures and mixed results predominate. It puts one in mind of the exploits of Don Quixote, with reformers at times seemingly tilting at imaginary windmills.”

Charles Taylor Kerchner and three academic colleagues wrote a similar account of education reform in Los Angeles. Like so many of their colleagues elsewhere, reformers in Los Angeles failed to permanently change the behavior and attitudes of the thousands of people who made up the school district. Somehow, none of their efforts got at the most fundamental pieces of district DNA.

Over the past three decades, I have researched and written about the most dramatic examples of transformation in post-bureaucratic public organizations and systems I could find, in multiple countries and at every level of the public sector. I have constantly asked: What strategies made the most difference? What pieces of DNA had to be changed to get fundamentally different behavior? In the answers I have received, the patterns have been striking. Whether in public education, the Department of Defense, city government, or state government, the fundamental DNA of bureaucracy is the same—which means the strategies required to transform it are the same.

Traditional public bureaucracies centralize authority, organize in hierarchies, use rules to control behavior, avoid competition, treat those they serve as dependents, not customers, and produce standardized services for mass markets. A century ago, bureaucracy was perhaps the most effective form of organization

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