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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