The Ecology of School Improvement: Notes on the School Improvement Industry in the United States

This paper explains how organizations other than schools and governing agencies affect the scope and pace of change in American education. In particular, the paper discusses a set of organizations operating in what can be called the school improvement “industry” in the United States, that is, a group of organizations providing schools and governing agencies with information, training, materials, and programmatic resources relevant to problems of instructional improvement. The paper shows how the structure and functioning of these organizations explain patterns of change in American education – including why schools in the United States experience wave after wave of innovation and reform while at the same time maintaining a stable core of instructional practices. A great deal of research suggests that educational change in the United States is faddish and has little real or lasting impact on the core function of schools – instruction. During most of the 20th century, for example, American schools experienced wave after wave of innovation and reform – almost all of it touting the promise of fundamental change and improvement in instructional practice. Few of these efforts appear to have produced real and lasting change in instruction however. After decades of educational reform and innovation, most analysts agree that instructional practices in American schools look very much like they did a century ago.1 Two lines of argument have been used to explain this pattern of change in American education. One focuses on issues of school organization, culture, and leadership, arguing that schools are inherently conservative institutions and that deep and lasting change can come about only through transformational leadership and a fundamental restructuring of school as organizations.2 Another line of argument blames patterns of educational change on the decentralized and pluralistic nature of educational governance in the United States. In this argument, patterns of educational governance in the United States are seen as promoting multiple and incoherent reform efforts that lead to loose coupling within schools and the key to lasting change in education is seen as lying in the development of “systemic” policy arrangements that produce coherent and focused education reforms.3 Neither of these arguments fully explains the unique pattern of educational change observed in the United States. The literature on AmerJournal of Educational Change 3: 283–314, 2002. © 2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.