SHAKING
UP THE SCHOOLHOUSE : How to
Support
and Sustain Educational Innovation
By
Philip C. Schlechty
Part One: Understanding the System
When
the rate of change outside an organization is greater that the rate of change
inside, the continuing existence of the organization is threatened. American
society, the external err environment for U.S. schools, has been experiencing
dramatic shifts in structure over the past half century. The effect on schools
is compounded by the fact that some of the most profound shifts have been in
the core technologies of schooling, more specifically, shifts in the mean by
which information is stored, retrieved, transmitted, and processes These shifts
require school leaders to respond with dramatic and powerful changes in the way
schools go about doing their business and peg haps even with a redefinition of
the nature of the business they do.
To date, however, the response
has been slow. Most efforts to bring about improvement in school performance
have met at best with on] modest success, and what success there has been has
largely taken the form of turning truly terrible schools into mediocre ones.
There have been less success in making mediocre schools excellent and in
driving excellent schools to excel even more.
The reason this is so has
little to do with the will or intelligence of educators. If all it took to
improve schools were bright leaders who had the will to change our
schools, those schools would already be performing at much higher levels than
they are now. The reason schools have not improved is that they have changed so
much and so often with so little effect that leaders seem baffled about what to
do next.
To change a system, leaders
must control that system and feel that they are in control. Today many
educational leaders-policymakers, administrators, and teachers-feel powerless
and feel that the systems
they lead are out of control or
beyond their control. If educational leaders are to improve these systems,
however, they must learn to control them; for without control there can be no
systematic improve-ment. Any improvement that might occur will be more
attributable to chance than to leadership.
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