The far side of Educational Reform

Teachers are at the far end of educational reform. 

Great start of the 


Apart from students and parents, they are often the very last to be consulted about and connected to agendas of what changes are needed in education, and of how those changes should be managed. Educational change is something that government departments, venture philanthropists, performance-driven economists and election-minded legislators increasingly arrogate to themselves. Even when these policy-setting and policy-transporting bodies speak on behalf of teachers, teachers often have little or no voice. Teachers are rarely asked to speak on their own account.

Not surprisingly, therefore, teachers are also often at the far end with educational reform. They are at the end of their tether. Targets and testing, capricious and contradictory changes, political climates that feed on failure and foment professional fear, insecurity and instability, cut-throat competition and rampant privatization – these are the enemies of teaching that erode confidence and betray trust throughout the teaching profession, although they are more prominent south of the border than within Canada itself. However, less obvious adversaries in Canada and elsewhere can still make teachers feel at their wits end today. Hackneyed harangues against whole-class teaching that equate it with factory-style schooling; excessive exaltation of technologically-driven instruction; reduc-tion of deep
personalization to slick customization; data warehouses that drive teachers to distraction; and exploitation of international performance comparisons to the domestic disadvantage of public school teachers in almost every devel- oped country – these are the gimmicky
Goliaths of educational change today. They are the surreal Far Side of school reform.
If it is indeed the case, as is now commonly claimed, that the teacher is the most important within-school influence on a child’s educational achievement, then it is time to stop insulting teachers, excluding teachers and inflicting change after change upon them. It is time to bring teachers back in: to make them part of the solution and not just part of the problem.
THREE WAYS OF CHANGE The First Way of Change
How did we get to this position where teachers are always the objects and never the subjects of change, where leaders say they esteem teachers on the one hand and then on the other hand assume that teachers know little about how to improve teaching and learning?

When international delegations visit
high performing jurisdictions, including
those in Canada, it is not teachers
they typically get to meet but
rather ministers, administrators and
advisors – those who command
and commandeer a view from the top, along with an official version of what everyone else is supposed to see. This is not only a bias of judgment, but it leads to a bias of evidence and perception. Diane Wood’s research (2007) has shown that professional learning communities, like many reforms, are often viewed more favourably by people at the top than by those at the bottom. Quantitative survey research on leadership and trust, reveals that “site and district administrators view themselves...and each other...as exhibiting trust behaviors consistently higher