ABSTRACT

Educational reforms fail again and again. One reason for the failure is that educational reform stops just outside the classroom door. During the last 25 years, the dominant educational reform initiatives in the US have operated under the misguided conventional wisdom that the educational system is loosely coupled. With this model in mind, decades of educational reform efforts have focused on tightening the system. Based on empirical results we argue that the educational system is neither loosely or tightly coupled, but bifurcated in that (to borrow a metaphor from geoscience) it is comprised of two tectonic plates. The first plate consists of the state, district and school levels, and the second is the classroom, with a fault line between them. The theory of bifurcated system not only explains why past educational changes have stopped at the classroom door, but also raises the key question of how to bridge the fault line. We propose two principles for school improvement in the bifurcated context. The first principle is to integrate principal and teacher leadership, effectively bridging the fault line in both directions. The second principle is the school renewal process, helping transform the classroom practice by emphasizing implementation integrity rather than fidelity.

摘要

教育改革屡屡失败。失败的原因之一是教育改革停在了教室门外。在过去的 25 年里，美国主导的教育改革举措是在教育系统松散耦合的错误传统观念下运作的。考虑到这种模式，几十年的教育改革努力都集中在收紧系统上。根据实证结果，我们认为教育系统既不是松散耦合也不是紧密耦合，而是分叉的（借用地球科学的比喻）它由两个构造板块组成。第一个板块由州、地区和学校三级组成，第二个板块是教室，它们之间有断层线。分叉系统理论不仅解释了为什么过去的教育变革止步于课堂门口，而且提出了如何弥合断层线的关键问题。我们提出了在分叉情况下改善学校的两个原则。第一个原则是整合校长和教师的领导，有效地弥合双向的断层线。第二个原则是学校更新过程，通过强调实施帮助转变课堂实践正直而不是忠诚。