Top-Down Reform is an Oxymoron

In the coming weeks, I'm going to be test-driving a teacher self-assessment system I'm designing with some colleagues, but today I wanted to share an LA Times Op-Ed whose theme is the involvement—more, more accurately, the lack of involvement—of teachers in the school reform process.

While the article primarily addresses national school reform in ways most relevant to failing schools, in exploring the problems with the top-down approach to improving schools, it draws some lessons that absolutely apply to Westport:

Instead of seeing teachers as key contributors to system improvement efforts, reformers are focused on making teachers more replaceable. Instead of involving teachers and their unions in collaborative reform, they are being pushed aside as impediments to top-down decision-making. Instead of bringing teachers together to help each other become more effective professionals, district administrators are resorting to simplistic quantified individual performance measures. In reality, schools are collaborative, not individual, enterprises, so teaching quality and school performance depend above all on whether the institutional systems support teachers' efforts.

Now, in Westport, the theme certainly isn't "making teachers more replaceable." There is a substantial honoring of teacher autonomy and quality in this community and in the district's attitude. However, the district is still heavily focused on a top-down approach to improving itself, and that approach absolutely wastes teacher talent and creates more frustration and gridlock than it does substantive reform. The recent issues with the social networking policy are a perfect example of a problem created by "top-down decision-making" when "involving teachers and their unions in collaborative reform" could easily have produced a more sensible, precisely-worded policy to better protect students and teachers. Despite the best of intentions, the top-down approach is doomed by its nature to expend most of its energy in meetings, producing policy changes that often do more harm than good.

The district has launched a "Westport 2025" initiative to examine reform possibilities for the school system. There's some good work happening around this initiative, but it's primarily a top-down, administrative push run by people who aren't in the classroom. There are some teachers on the initiative's committee, but it's unclear what their role really is or what the committee's specific purpose might be.

Teachers hold the curriculum in their hands every day, and every day they stand in front of the students and work with it. They know what's getting in the way of real learning and what supports it. They see qualitative data every day, while administrators are largely limited to the quantitative data they can gather. It's no fault of any particular administrator; in fact, my experience with the administrative team is that they are good-hearted people who want to support their teachers and make positive changes. It's the nature of the beast itself that's the problem.

If you want to change schools for the better, and if you want to change this district for the better, you need to provide teachers with opportunities to collaborate on reform. They need to be involved from the first steps to the last, and they need to have the time to do so. Yes, that means money. Teachers are already working full-time just teaching the curriculum in its current form. If you want them to work on revolutionizing it, you need to give them the money and the time they need to work on that part-time job on top of their full-time job.

Even more than money, though, it means reaching out and putting the teachers in control of reform. You don't write new policy or curriculum and put it in place and then see if the teachers are upset enough to protest. You need to put your ideas on the table and ask the teachers where they would go with the reform, and you need to compensate them for the substantial amount of time it takes to reinvent a school properly. If the district is serious about reform, it needs to get serious about structuring and funding that reform, or "Westport 2025" is going to produce a lot of good-sounding concepts and little fundamental change.