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LEGACY PAPER Reform in

teaching
Why so many structural changes practice?
in schools and so little reform in
teaching practice? 109
Larry Cuban Received 7 July 2012
Stanford University, Stanford, California, USA Revised 14 August 2012
Accepted 15 August 2012

Abstract
Purpose – The aim of this paper is to explain how errors in policymaking contribute to the
minimal impact that structural, curricular and cultural changes have made on teaching practice in
American schools.
Design/methodology/approach – Drawing on the author’s research legacy, the paper extends an
historical analysis to explore and explain current dilemmas of change in schools and schooling.
Findings – Over the last century, educational reforms have most often led to first order classroom
change, represented by the development of hybrids of old and new teaching practices. Second order
change at the classroom level has proven elusive. Factors at the policymaking level that explain the
minimal impact on classroom practice include a misplaced trust in structural reform, an understanding
of schools as complicated rather than complex systems, and the tendency not to distinguish teacher
quality from the quality of teaching.
Originality/value – The paper proposes that the lack of impact of reform on classroom practice is
explained in large part by errors in assumptions and thinking that policymakers commit, a focus
seldom explored in research.
Keywords Educational policy, Educational innovation, Education, Innovation, Teaching,
United States of America
Paper type Conceptual paper

The path of educational progress more closely resembles the flight of a butterfly than the
flight of a bullet ( Jackson, 1968, pp. 166-7).
Two vivid images of flight capture “the path of educational progress.” The images also
suggest that change – I prefer “change” because it carries less baggage than “progress” –
inside and outside of schools is more complex than usually portrayed by scholars,
practitioners, and policymakers. Change, for example, is hardly monolithic. There are
incremental and fundamental changes that occur in organizations as disparate as
families, police agencies, Fortune 500 companies, the US Army, the criminal justice
systems, and the public school just around the corner[1].
Classrooms in that age-graded school around the corner and the district in which it
is located have been the recipient of policies aimed at changing what teachers do and
what students learn for nearly two centuries. Most of those intended policy changes
sought to improve teaching and learning incrementally; yet many intended to sweep
away old practices and reconstitute teaching and learning in new, fundamentally
different ways. In time, an inconsistency emerged. While the structures of schooling
Journal of Educational
and classroom teaching have indeed changed over the past two centuries there has Administration
been a deep-seated continuity in both schooling and teaching that has made what Vol. 51 No. 2, 2013
pp. 109-125
r Emerald Group Publishing Limited
0957-8234
The author dedicates this article to Barbaraciela Cuban Goodwin. DOI 10.1108/09578231311304661
JEA occurs in classrooms familiar to generation after generation of parents and observers.
51,2 Is this remarkable stability and lack of fundamental change or “real reform” in
teaching and learning due to workplace conditions, inertia, stubborn resistance from
teachers, or, perhaps, sensible adaptations to the complexity of multiple goals and
school structures in the past century[2]?
Such explanations, with much evidence to support each one, have been offered
110 many times to unravel the inconsistency. In this paper I want to offer a different
explanation that moves the center of gravity from teachers and their working
conditions in age-graded schools to examining the ideas and beliefs of policy elites who
frame the problems, select the solutions for improving public schools, and make
mistakes in doing so. I do that because scholars seldom examine policymaker errors
when answering the question of why amid so many structural changes in schooling
there has been remarkable stability in how teachers have taught and do teach now[3].

Structural and cultural changes in public schooling

Any fair-minded observer familiar with the history of US education could hardly deny
the fundamental changes in funding, organization, governance, and curriculum that
have occurred in public schools over the past two centuries. Schooling in the USA has
gone from a largely private, religious, and short-term schooling for a narrow slice of
middle class and affluent Americans in the eighteenth century to a public, tax-
supported, secular system governed by state and local school boards that has
provided, over time, equal access to knowledge and age-graded structures for all
children and youth from kindergarten through high school.
By the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century a national system
of tax-supported public schooling, albeit decentralized in 50 states and 14,000
locally governed school districts, welcomed almost 50 million children and youth.
Staffed by over three million teachers in nearly 100,000 age-graded schools
(National Center for Education Statistics, 2011), this massive decentralized system
has made access to public schooling universal. And in the early decades of the
twenty-first century, reformers have promoted policies for all students to graduate
high school and then enter college ( just under 70 percent do; Bureau of Labor
Statistics, United States Department of Labor, 2012). In the USA now a K-16 system
of schooling is emerging.
The major change in access to schools matches the shift in curriculum from a largely
religious-infused curriculum in early nineteenth-century schools, to largely secular,
vocationally driven courses of study in public school curricula two centuries later.
From “In Adam’s Fall We Sinned All,” a couplet taken from the eithteenth century
New England Primer, through lessons in McGuffey Readers (William McGuffey was
a Protestant minister) in the early nineteenth century, school reformers insured that
the public school curriculum included prayer and taught moral lessons steeped in
Protestantism. As non-Protestant immigrants increasingly sent their children to
public schools and different ethnic groups wanted their language and culture to be
present in tax-supported schools, state and federal court decisions began to separate
religious activities from public schools. Within decades, US Supreme Court decisions
had banned daily prayer and religious practices while public school was in session
(Kaestle, 1983; Zimmerman, 2002).
By the early twentieth century, the school curriculum was becoming secular
and aimed at preparing the young for jobs in an industrial-based economy.
Public schools had come to include academic subjects and non-academic activities
(e.g. extracurricular sports, clubs, health care, nutritious breakfasts, and lunches). Reform in
A high school diploma opened doors for jobs. teaching
And by the end of the twentieth century, an ideology of everyone going to college
had thoroughly permeated policymaker thinking. The belief gripped parents and practice?
students, from wealthy to poor, that a college diploma was essential for entering the
labor market and climbing the ladder of economic success. So going to school and
earning credentials would lead to good jobs, a stronger economy, and market 111
competitiveness for US companies. In the early twenty-first century, schools had
become thoroughly vocationalized (Wood, 2012).
Beyond providing access to tax-supported schooling and major shifts in curriculum
content, societal changes have also swept across schools. In the past century, social
norms and behaviors have changed in the USA from formal to informal in
relationships, dress, and language and those new norms have transformed the social
organization of public schools and classrooms.
In the early twentieth century, dress-clad women and tie-wearing men, facing rows
of 50 or more bolted down desks, controlled students’ every move. They gave or
withheld permission for students to leave their seat. They required students to stand
when reciting from the textbook or answering a question. Teachers often scowled,
reprimanded, and paddled students for misbehaving.
Since Second World War, social changes in the larger culture created new norms and
social practices. As in the larger American culture where informal dress, manners, talk,
and behavior became the norm, school and classroom daily life became more casual.
Formality in teacher-student relations and classroom practices diminished. By the
1980s, classrooms were filled with moveable tables and desks, particularly in the early
grades, so students faced one another and saw walls festooned with colorful posters
and student work. Jean-wearing teachers drinking coffee smiled often at their classes
and students went to a pencil sharpener or elsewhere in the room without asking for
the teacher’s permission. The dread of early twentieth century classrooms marked
often by the swish of a paddle and a teacher’s sneer slowly gave way, decade by decade,
to classrooms where teachers were kinder, more informal in language and dress, and
had a light touch in controlling unacceptable behavior. Classrooms became less fearful
and more comfortable places for students even in big city schools filled with security
aides and scanners ( Jackson, 1986).
Yet amid these fundamental changes in public school structures and culture there
are contradictions.

Contradictions
While the organizational, governance, curricula, and formal social relations in school
had changed dramatically in the past century, reformers have failed to alter
substantially how teachers teach (e.g. textbook-driven lessons, more teacher talk than
student talk, mostly whole group instruction with occasional small group-work,
seatwork for students, periodic quizzes, and tests)[4].
For nearly a century and a half, US reformers (e.g. late-nineteenth century
progressive educators, open classroom advocates in 1960s, small high school
champions in the 1980s and 1990s, and charter school promoters in the first decade of
the twenty-first century) have tried hard to turn teacher-centered classroom practices
into more flexible and demanding pedagogies that included substantial intellectual
content and a deeper understanding of ideas, learning through inquiry, collaborative
work, and ways of teaching that bridged in-school and out-of-school worlds. They
JEA sought a second-order or fundamental change in pedagogy. More often than not, when
51,2 policy-driven reformers talk about wanting to “improve teaching” they are using
verbal shorthand to mean increased intellectual rigor and student-centered classroom
practices (Cuban, 1993; Harris, 2005; Zilversmit, 1993).
Technological innovations have been drafted often into the task of altering
teacher-centered practices. Since the mid-nineteenth century, slate blackboards,
112 textbooks, stereopticon viewers, film, overhead projectors, radio, and instructional
television were adopted and used by teachers. Late-twentieth century technological
advances in work, commerce, and entertainment have penetrated schools repeatedly
including the contemporary push for cyber schools and online instruction. Yet today
most K-12 students in age-graded schools abundantly filled with laptops, desktop
computers, and hand-held devices still experience classroom lessons unfold in the
familiar progression of tasks and activities (e.g. homework, textbook assignments,
worksheets, whole group discussions, small group activities, tests, etc.). For the
most part, teachers have tamed technological innovations seeking fundamental
reforms in pedagogy to fit their classroom practice since the early twentieth century
(Cuban, 1986; Harris, 2005).
In short, generations of reformers sought a student-centered, intellectually
demanding pedagogy that would engage children and youth in learning basic
academic content and lead to their accumulating sufficient social and intellectual skills
to enter into and participate successfully in communities, jobs, and a democratic
society. They wanted to “improve” teaching. In some places, such sea changes in
pedagogy have occurred and been sustained but hardly numbering more than a tiny
fraction of US public schools, mostly located in affluent public and private schools.
These efforts to create engaging, student-centered, even adventurous, teaching have
led to some incremental changes that have slightly modified traditional classroom
practices (e.g. small group work, student-directed projects, use of laptops in daily
lesson) by creating mixes of old and new practices – hybrids. Yet, overall, these first
order or incremental changes have largely left intact teaching routines that students’
grandparents visiting these schools would find familiar.
While many important instructional changes have occurred since the late-
nineteenth century in elementary and secondary school classrooms, no
transformation in classroom authority or how teachers taught on the scale of the
above fundamental structural, curricular, and cultural changes have altered
classroom instruction. Surely, over the years curricular change in content (e.g. new
academic and vocational courses) have come and gone. Innovative textbooks in
reading, math, science, social studies, and foreign language have entered and exited
classrooms. New teachers equipped with content knowledge and modern methods
have entered classrooms. The what of teaching has, indeed, changed but when it
comes to the how – the pedagogy – few major changes have occurred. Surely, the
growth of hybrids, mixes of teacher-centered and student-centered classroom
practices, have broadened teacher repertoires. So with many changes in the “what” of
teaching, the “how” of basic instructional practices such as lectures, whole-group
activities, question/answer recitations, textbooks, homework, blackboards (now
whiteboards), work sheets, paper-and-pencil tests – persist. And just as surely,
teachers wield their authority in classrooms, albeit with a lighter hand than a century
ago; they still design lessons and direct their students to complete tasks in those
lessons. Continuity in classroom practice has trumped fundamental reforms in
schooling. So much structural change, so little reform in pedagogy[5].
A puzzling question Reform in
Because of this persistence in classroom instruction (including mixes of old and new teaching
practices and adoption of different classroom technologies) differs dramatically from the
other fundamental structural changes in organization, governance, curricular changes, practice?
and shift in cultural norms in school behavior, the contradiction yields a puzzling question:
With so many major structural changes in US public schools over the past century,
why have classroom practices been largely stable with a modest blending of new and old 113
teaching practices leaving contemporary classroom lessons familiar to earlier generations
of school-goers?
Is this puzzling question worth answering? For policymakers, novice and veteran
reformers, researchers, parents, and practitioners, it is, especially in light of the
recurring school reform movements a century apart.
In the 1890s, using an economic rationale to spur school changes, reform-driven
coalitions of business and civic leaders wanted graduates to be fully prepared to
enter the labor market. Top business, civic, and philanthropic leaders promoted
vocational education in secondary schools and succeeded in getting the US
government to fund such courses in 1917. Vocational education became a mainstay in
public schools for nearly a century.
Since the 1980s, another coalition including donors with deep pockets has lobbied
district school boards and superintendents, state legislatures and governors, and the
US Congress and presidents to adopt policies to alter existing school structures (e.g.
new forms of school governance, expanded school choice for parents, standards-based
testing and accountability, new technologies). And they have been successful. These
policies, like those a century earlier, are anchored in key assumptions (Barkan, 2011;
Hess, 2002; McGuinn, 2006; Schneider, 2011; Shipps, 2006).
Reformers assumed that structural changes would alter dominant teaching practices.
Teachers would adopt intellectually ambitious, inquiry-driven, skill-rich forms of
teaching that would be superior to what has routinely occurred in classrooms. They
assumed that teachers who integrated these better ways of teaching across the K-12
curriculum for all students would lead to richer and far more effective learning. And the
knowledge and skills accumulated from that richer and more effective learning would
lead to college and careers that create economic growth, increase productivity, and spur
innovation in business and society. Those linked assumptions drive the policy logic
among contemporary reformers. But which of these structures and strategies would
change teachers and how they deliver lessons to boost student learning?
Changing teachers has been the dominant policy strategy to improve classroom
instruction. Change the teacher – the logic goes – and you improve student learning.
Over decades, reformers have established structures that raised standards in
recruiting, preparing, selecting, and evaluating teachers. Where once a grammar
school certificate and high school diploma were sufficient credentials to enter the
classroom, now US teachers need a bachelor’s degree and, in many states, a master’s
degree to teach. Where in earlier decades, only college and university schools of
education produced credentialed teachers, now alternative paths to classrooms
(e.g. Teach for America; districts certifying business and military personnel making
mid-career changes) have produced a steady stream of energetic, capable novice
teachers with the personal traits that energize teaching and motivate students to learn.
Moreover, recently established testing and accountability structures now include ways
to evaluate and pay individual teachers on the basis of student performance on tests.
Spurred by philanthropic and federal grants, state lawmakers and district
JEA policymakers have generated procedures aimed at distinguishing between effective
51,2 and less effective teachers based on test scores and other measures. This favored
strategy aims at improving the caliber of teachers and the quality of teaching
(Darling-Hammond, 2010; Glass, 2008).
Although these strategies have been put into place in the past century and teachers
have created hybrids of old and new approaches, classroom practices still remain eerily
114 similar to earlier periods. These new structures and strategies of recruiting, selecting,
and training teachers to have a teacher corps with personal traits that will spur
students to learn, while important and worthwhile in upgrading the quality of
instruction, has yet to alter substantially how teachers teach (Cohen and Hill, 2001;
Cuban, 2009; Goodlad, 1984).
Nor have popular market-driven structures that expand parental choice and
encourage competition such as creating thousands of charter schools or issuing
vouchers transformed classroom teaching and learning. Altering funding patterns of
public schools and expanding parental choice of schools, reformers believed, would
prod district schools to compete with one another in attracting teachers and students
by inventing new forms of schooling and innovative classroom practices. These newly
created structures have yet to show results in either teaching practices or student
learning that promoters of market-based schooling have promised time and again
(Cuban, 2009; Hamilton et al., 2008; Lubienski, 2003).
Nor has the policy of importing electronic technologies into classrooms over the
past century (e.g. film, instructional television, desktop computers, interactive
whiteboards, laptops) altered substantially teacher and student daily routines.
Promoters promising that high-tech solutions would magically transform old teacher-
directed practices into ambitious new student-centered pedagogies have become a
virtual cliché. Yet evidence of transformed classroom practice remains sparse
compared to the accumulated evidence that most teachers have domesticated
innovative technologies by incorporating them into their existing repertoire of teacher-
directed practices (Cuban, 2001, 2009)[6].
In short, current and past structures and strategies aimed at school improvement
have yet to revise substantially routine classroom practices – ones which reformers
have continually criticized and tried to alter. The inescapable fact of stability amid
modest changes in classroom practices after so much policy talk and action over
decades make the question important to answer for policymakers, parents, and
practitioners who demand improved schools. Answering the central question of this
paper requires examining the errors that policymakers commit[7].

Fundamental errors in policymaker thinking and actions in designing and

converting policies into classroom practice
The fundamental error in thinking policymakers make is threefold. They believe that
redesigning, replacing, or renovating key structures – school governance, organization,
and curriculum – will dramatically change teacher instruction and student learning.
Second, they believe that public schools and classrooms are complicated not complex
systems. There is a difference. Finally, policymakers err in thinking that their
worldview is the same as that of teachers when, in fact, they seldom distinguish
between teacher quality and the quality of teaching[8].
As a result of these beliefs, many policymakers see schooling as a collection of
complicated structures that can be broken down into discrete segments and
re-engineered through algorithms and flow charts to perfection – like piloting a Boeing Reform in
737 – rather than as a complex, dynamic, and yes, messy, multi-level system such as air teaching
traffic control with controllers adapting constantly to varying weather conditions,
aircraft downtime, and daily peak arrivals/departures of flights[9]. practice?
Policymakers treating school system structures like mechanical gears and cogs
issue directives seeking school and classroom reforms and talk as if administrators
and practitioners will carry out these marching orders listed in memos, diagrammed in 115
flow charts, and published in policy manuals. Too many loose connections, unmapped
but interdependent relationships, unpredictable events, and ambiguous directives
combine into a web-like complex system confounding what policymakers seek, what
administrators request, and what teachers end up doing. Re-engineering school
organizational structures to fundamentally change classroom patterns and make them
closer to the “flight of a bullet” – remains a fantasy[10].
What worsens the fundamental error of seeing schooling as a complicated
set of structures in need of overhaul rather than a tangled maze of intersecting
structures, events, and relationships is that reform-driven policymakers often want
teachers to put into classroom practice contradictory goals. Since the late-1980s, to cite
one instance, the standards, testing, and accountability movement has pressed for
exacting and intellectually challenging content and skills to be learned by all students.
With the common core curriculum structure on the horizon for the nation’s children
and youth, the fulfillment of this three-decade vision of a rigorous, intellectually
engaging curriculum available to every US student is on the cusp of being put into
practice. Yet even in the best of situations where well-prepared teachers and
ample resources are present, those worthy curriculum and instructional aims conflict
with one another[11].
Consider that teachers, researchers, and policymakers have disagreed – and
continue to do so – as to which strategies are best to engage all students intellectually.
Child-centered or subject-centered curriculum? Teacher-centered or student-centered
pedagogies? Disagreements over how best to teach reading, math, social studies,
foreign language, and science, for example, have been around for over a century.
Moreover, insuring that every student has access to challenging ideas conflicts with
each and every student becoming intellectually engaged with ideas simply because
students vary in motivations, aptitudes, and background. Access to knowledge does
not guarantee engagement. That variation nearly guarantees that, even with the best of
teacher efforts under the best of working conditions, many children and youth will be
interested in other things than prescribed ideas and skills encased in a demanding
curriculum (Kennedy, 2005).
Compounding that fundamental error is that policymakers have only a dim idea of
what teachers are thinking, much less their daily classroom practices. While nearly all
school board members have been students and sat a few feet away from teachers for
over a dozen years, few have taught in public school classrooms. The same can be said
for most federal and state policymakers. Generally, district superintendents have been
teachers early in their careers but an emerging movement to hire non-educator
superintendents in big cities (e.g. lawyer Joel Klein in New York, former Colorado
Governor Roy Romer in Los Angeles, ex-US Army generals Julius Becton in
Washington, DC and John Stanford in Seattle) continues to spread in urban districts
(Quinn, 2007; The Broad Center, 2010).
The gap in first-hand knowledge of daily work conditions underscores the simple
fact that teachers and policymakers live in separate worlds where experiences,
JEA values, and incentives differ dramatically. David Labaree (2010) summed up those
51,2 differences crisply:
Teachers focus on what is particular within their own classrooms; reformers focus on what is
universal across many classrooms. Teachers operate in a setting dominated by personal
relations; reformers operate in a setting dominated by abstract political and social aims.
Teachers draw on clinical experience; reformers draw on social scientific theory. Teachers
116 embrace the ambiguity of classroom process and practice; reformers pursue the clarity of
tables and graphs. Teachers put a premium on professional adaptability; reformers put a
premium on uniformity of practices and outcomes (p. 158).

To put some details into the differences that Labaree specifies, consider when a school
board adopts a new policy of buying and deploying 1:1 laptop computers. Teachers ask
questions such as: Can I learn how to use these devices quickly or do I have to spend a lot
of time figuring out what to do in my daily lessons? What happens if I need immediate
help? Will laptops motivate my students? Do these new technologies require me to gain
knowledge and skills that are connected to what the state and district expect me to teach
and what students need? Will my students learn better and more than they do now?
Policymakers seldom either anticipate or pay attention to such critical and practical
questions. These questions reveal that teachers prize ideas and actions that payoff in
learning and meaningful relationships with students. They seek concrete and specific
solutions to classroom problems. The incentives that drive teachers come more from
internal values than external rewards: the joys of seeing students learn and achieve
goals, the service they render to society, and similar psychic rewards.
The world policymakers inhabit, however, differs greatly. They ask different
questions than teachers do. How much do the innovations cost to put into practice?
How many teachers are using the new materials or devices? Are the new programs
effective? Have students test scores gone up? Have the media reported the results?
Their world is largely political where election cycles, budgets, media attention, and
measurable outcomes determine job longevity and personal satisfaction. Incentives
such as re-election, influencing others, and positive media dominate daily routines. The
values of efficiency, effectiveness, and popularity rule the day.
Obviously, the worlds of teachers and policymakers overlap when it comes to the
values of effectiveness although each would define differently which effects are most
important and the measures used. Efficiency at the school and district levels –
squeezing more test scores out of every dollar spent – is far more a policymaker value
than one held by teachers.
In neglecting or ignoring teachers’ perspectives, policymakers, intent upon
transforming how teachers teach, have a serious credibility problem in mobilizing
teachers to support their reform agenda. And without teacher support for reform-
driven policies, few significant changes will occur in daily lessons.
In class warfare, lawyer and writer Steven Brill illustrates this point. He interviewed
current members of the reform-driven policy elite. Brill (2011) reported that these
influential elected officials, donors, hedge fund managers, CEOs, and high-tech
entrepreneurs saw the structure of collective bargaining where teacher unions and the
school board negotiated contracts as causing poor academic performance in urban
schools. They believe that without union contracts, first-rate teachers who could be
evaluated and paid on the basis of their performance would raise student test scores.
Stellar teachers would make “no excuses” and get students to achieve while ineffective
teachers would be fired.
 Enamored with Ivy league graduates in Teach for America, New Leaders for New Reform in
Schools, and hedge fund founders, Brill documents in over 80 chapters villainous union teaching
officials and heroes like ex-chancellors Joel Klein of New York City and Michelle Rhee
of Washington, DC schools, the founders of KIPP schools, and a Teach for America practice?
graduate who worked in a Harlem charter school. Thus, these heroes promote more
charter schools, work to curb teacher union influence, recruit new teachers and
principals from hitherto untapped pools of candidates, and embrace performance- 117
based evaluation and compensation.
Brill illustrates the complexity of reforming schools and the separate worlds
that teachers and reform-driven policymakers inhabit in his final chapter. Over
400 pages into the book, after painting teacher unions as wearing black hats
and KIPP leaders and Teach for America novices wearing white ones, he pivots
180 degrees. In that chapter, he reveals to readers that Jessica Reid, that gallant
Teach for America graduate who in earlier chapters said “to do this right, you have
to be on all the time” and went on to serve as an assistant principal in a charter
school resigned. She said: “this wasn’t a sustainable life, in terms of my health and
my marriage” (Brill, 2011, pp. 20, 424).
And then a founder of KIPP admitted to Brill that the model of recruiting super-
talented teachers who worked in those charter schools for 12-plus hours a day week
after week could never supply enough teachers to reform urban schools across the
nation. Finally, in a stunning turnabout, Brill recommends one of the villains, the head
of the American Federation of Teachers, to become the next chancellor of the New York
City schools, the largest district in the nation.
Forget the structural reforms that Brill recommended throughout the book. Forget
the “no excuses” mantra that reform-driven policymakers and their entourages he
interviewed repeated and praised. It is almost as if Brill had an epiphany.
Since one could not rely on super-heroes to staff and run schools, no reform
agenda could ever move beyond headlines in media and scattered success stories in
schools without the support of mainstream teachers and union leaders. Even after
Brill’s Who’s Who of policymakers, CEOs, and philanthropists pursued a reform
agenda in urban districts, his enthusiasm leaked out of his “no excuses” balloon and
he came to see that without most teachers working with you, little of real worth
happens in schools and classrooms. Brill’s book and its turnabout in the last chapter
shows the divergent world views and values that policymakers and teachers have
and their resulting consequences.
Linked to the different worlds that policymakers and teachers inhabit is another
significant error that policymakers commit. They and their elite cadre confuse teacher
quality with teaching quality. They believe that personal traits of teachers – smart,
determined, energetic, caring, and intellectually curious – produce student learning
rather than the classroom and school settings. Both are entangled and crucial, of
course, but policymakers and their influential camp followers have accentuated
personal traits far more than the organizational and social context in which teachers
work. So if students score low on tests, then who the teachers are, their personal traits,
credentials, and attitudes come under close scrutiny, rather than the age-graded school,
neighborhood demography, workplace conditions, and resources that support
teaching. The person overshadows the place (Kennedy, 2010).
And for obvious reasons, reform-enthused policymakers can have some measure of
influence over who is in the schools but far less influence on changing neighborhood
demographics or poverty. In giving far more weight to individual teacher traits rather
JEA than seriously working to alter the situation in which teachers teach, policymakers end
51,2 up having a cramped view of teaching quality. They ignore that quality teaching is
complex because it includes both “good” and “successful” teaching, a distinction often
missing from policymakers’ vocabulary. Both “good” and “successful” teaching is
necessary to reach the threshold of quality instruction and make student learning
possible. To lead us through the thicket of complexity, I lean on Fenstermacher and
118 Richardson’s (2005) analysis of quality teaching.
“Good” teaching is about the how and what of classroom practice. For example, the
task of getting a child to understand the theory of evolution (or the Declaration of
Independence or prime numbers) in ways fitting students’ ages consistent with best
practices in the field is “good” teaching. “Successful” teaching, however, is about what
the child learns. For example, getting the same child to write three paragraphs filled
with relevant details and present-day examples that demonstrate understanding of the
theory of evolution or the Declaration of Independence is “successful” teaching. Ditto
for a student able to show that she knows prime numbers by completing Eratosthenes
Sieve. “Good” and “successful” teaching, then, are not the same nor does one
necessarily lead to the other. How can that be?
Fenstermacher and Richardson point out that learning, like teaching, can also be
distinguished between “good” and “successful.” The above examples of student
proficiency on the theory of evolution, the Declaration of Independence, and prime
numbers demonstrate “successful” learning. “Good” learning, however, requires other
factors to be in place. “Good” learning occurs when the student is willing to learn and
puts forth effort, the student’s family, peers, and community support learning, the
student has the place, time, and resources to learn, and, finally, “good” teaching.
In short, “good” teaching is one of four necessary components to “good” learning. In
making this mistake, policymakers mislead the public by squishing together “good”
teaching and “successful” learning. In doing so, policymakers erase three critical factors
that are equally important in getting students to learn: the student’s own effort, support
of family and peers, and the opportunity to learn in school. “No excuses” reformers glide
over these other factors critical to learning. Current hoopla over paying teachers for their
performance based on student test scores is an expression of this conflation of “good”
teaching with “successful” learning and the ultimate deceiving of parents, voters, and
students that “good” teaching naturally leads to “successful” learning.
Not only does this policymaker error about quality classroom instruction confuse the
personal traits of the teacher with teaching, it also nurtures a heroic view of school
improvement where superstars (e.g. Geoffrey Canada in “Waiting for Superman,” Jaime
Escalante of “Stand and Deliver,” Erin Gruwell of “Freedom Writers”) labor day in and
day out to get their students to ace AP Calculus tests, become accomplished writers, and
achieve in Harlem schools. No profession – doctors, lawyers, military officers, or nuclear
physicists – can depend upon superstars – as Steven Brill found out with Jessica Reid –
to get their work done every day. Nor should all teachers have to be heroic. Policymakers
attributing quality far more to individual traits in teachers than to the context in which
they teach leads to confusing “good” teaching with “successful” learning committing
even further collateral damage to the profession by setting up the expectation that only
heroes need apply (Gruwell and Freedom Writers, 1999; Mathews, 1988; Tough, 2008).
By stripping away from “good” learning essential factors of students’ motivation,
the contexts in which they live, and the opportunities they have to learn in school,
policymakers inadvertently twist the links between teaching and learning into a
simpleminded formula that mis-educates the public they serve. They encourage a
generation of idealistic newcomers to become classroom heroes who end up deserting Reform in
schools in wholesale numbers within a few years because they find out that “good” teaching
teaching does not lead automatically to “successful” learning. Fenstermacher and
Richardson help us parse “quality teaching” into distinctions between “good” and practice?
“successful” teaching and learning while revealing serious conceptual errors that
policymakers have made and continue to do so.
119
Summary and conclusions
There is no single one answer to the puzzling question of why there have been so many
structural changes in US schooling intended to transform teaching practices yet so
little reform occurring in classrooms. To the degree that policymakers consider
different explanations for the contradiction, each way of looking at the puzzling
question points in a direction for new and improved policy in the event that decision-
makers want to alter how teachers usually teach. The standard answers – ones with
much evidence to support them – involve the age-graded school and daily working
conditions, who teachers are and their experiences as students before entering the
profession, teacher resistance, and other similar explanations. Each suggests what
policymakers should do were they inspired to alter classroom pedagogies.
In this paper, I wanted to focus on one answer that seldom is noted by those eager
to reform schools and teaching practices: The errors in assumptions and thinking
that policymakers commit. Assuming that structural changes will directly lead to
changing traditional teaching practices in complex organizations like districts
and schools without making distinctions between quality in teaching and quality
of teachers have left a trail of broken dreams, wrecked careers, and “oops!” from
policymakers who have departed for different jobs.
I believe that these policymaker mistakes are (and have been) serious in their
consequences. Yet these errors can be corrected far more easily than pursuing a new
reforms that have been tried many times in the past to fundamentally alter dominant
teaching practices of over three million teachers working in nearly 100,000 age-graded
schools with almost 50 million students.
There are no easy answers to unravel the puzzling question I raised in this paper or
to turn around failing schools. But there is wisdom packed into the metaphor of
educational progress being closer to the path of a butterfly than the flight of a bullet.
The image suggest that those who seek deep and major changes in complex
institutions like schools have to recognize that the institutions themselves have plans
for reformers dead-set on transforming altering teaching practices. The institutional
setting of the age-graded school, the expectations of parents and taxpayers for what
schools ought to do in a democratic society, and the economic inequalities that cast a
long shadow over what happens in schools and what teachers do in classrooms are
often ignored by reformers unaware of previous efforts to overhaul public schools. If
such reformers come to recognize the institutional complexity of schools and non-linear
paths they need to follow, especially in mobilizing teachers and providing the
conditions under which they can see that changes will help their students, perhaps
reformers can make incremental changes that just might accumulate into long-term
transformation of both the age-graded school and teaching practices.
By going beyond the usual explanations for teaching stability over decades in
the face of fundamental structural changes, I do provide partial answers to the
central question in this paper. Examining policymaker ideas and beliefs, long
disregarded, can help reduce the frequent policy wars over curriculum, teacher
JEA behavior, and miraculous solutions to all that ails a significant social institution in
51,2 a democracy where “our children are 20 percent of our population and 100 percent of
our future” (Wattenberg, 1993).
Notes
1. I distinguish between two kinds of planned changes, fundamental and incremental, that
have occurred in US schools over the past two centuries. By “fundamental change” I mean
120 altering the basic building blocks of US schooling such as requiring taxpayers to fund public
schools and give access to all students, establishing goals for schooling (e.g. all students will
be literate, discharge their civic duties, and be vocationally prepared for the labor market), and
organizing curricula and instructional practices in age-graded elementary and secondary schools.
These “building blocks” are structures that have defined public schools for the past two centuries.
Changing them fundamentally means altering funding (e.g. vouchers, charter schools),
governance (e.g. site-based management, mayoral control), organization (e.g. moving from an
age-graded school to non-graded teams and entire schools), curriculum (e.g. “new” math,
“hands-on” science), and instruction (e.g. moving from teacher-centered to student-centered
pedagogy). When I initially wrote about planned school change, I called these fundamental
shifts in structure, “second-order changes.”
Often those who champion second-order changes in public schools talk about “real reform”
or “transformation of schooling.” What they refer to are fundamental changes in one or more
structures of schooling, not first-order or incremental changes.
Incremental changes refer to amendments in current structures, not deep changes to or
removal of these core components of schooling. In my earlier writings on school change, I
had called these “first-order” changes.
Such changes as creating new academic courses, extending the school day or year, reducing
class size, raising teacher salaries, introducing new reading or math programs, etc., do not
alter the basic structures of public schools. They correct deficiencies and improve existing
structures. They are not intended to alter substantially current arrangements. They do not
replace the goals, funding, organization, and governance of schools. They are add-ons. Many
promoters of change in schools call such changes “tinkering,” usually in a dismissive way,
because they want “real reform” or fundamental re-ordering of existing structures.
The terms “first order” and “second order,” I drew from Watzlawick et al. (1974, pp. 10-11)
and Cuban (1988, pp. 228-32).
For an example of “real reform” (see Editors, 2012).
For an example of the use of the words “revolution” and “transformation” to mean
fundamental change, in a TED talk, Sir Ken Robinson (2012), former director of arts in
schools project in England and University of Warwick professor, now an international
adviser on education, said: “Every education system in the world is being reformed at the
moment and it’s not enough. Reform is no use anymore, because that’s simply improving a
broken model. What we need – and the word’s been used many times during the course of
the past few days – is not evolution, but a revolution in education. This has to be
transformed into something else.”
2. To be clear to readers, I do not favor either incremental or fundamental change in teaching
practices. I have been involved in classroom changes that were incremental and proved
significant over time. I have been involved in fundamental changes and done research on
such initiatives in schools and found some, over time, made a difference in teaching and with
students but I also found many outright failures. I work from the principle that age-graded
schools tilt toward teacher-centered instruction and incremental changes toward student-
centered can correct that tilt – as so many teachers have done in constructing hybrids of
these two pedagogical approaches. The second principle I hold is that students differ from
one another in motivations, interests, prior achievement, and aptitudes. Therefore, teaching
practices that incorporate a broad range of tasks and activities drawing from varied
traditions of teaching makes the most sense.
3. For the regularities of schooling and teaching – what some call the “grammar of schooling – Reform in
explanations that focus on both how teachers become teachers and the context of the age-
graded school in cultures that mandate compulsory attendance of students for a decade or teaching
more” (see Lortie, 1975; Metz, 1989; Sarason, 1982; and Tyack and Cuban, 1995). For practice?
explanations that point to the resistance of teachers to change (see Darling-Hammond, 2004;
Gitlin and Margonis, 1995; Labaree, 2010; Muncey and McQuillan, 1996; and Olsen and
Kirtman, 2002).
4. For millennia different labels have been attached to what I call “teacher-centered” and
121
“student-centered” instruction. John Dewey labeled the former “traditional” and the latter
“progressive.” Philip Jackson delineated both as traditions of teaching stretching back
centuries. He called the former “mimetic” and the latter “transformative.” He preferred
“conservative” vs “liberal” allowing for much overlap between the two traditions but
without the political baggage accompanying the terms (see Jackson, 1986, pp. 98-145).
5. I need to stress the obvious. Change occurs all the time in schools. Teachers alter classroom
activities; schools launch new programs; districts mandate new procedures. And stability is
ever-present. Teachers have daily routines; schools have schedules; districts have standard
operating procedures that employees follow weekly. In short, stability is a defining trait of
organizational structures. And so is change. To maintain stability, changes must occur.
Stability and change are the yin and yang of classrooms, schools, and districts. The
interdependency keeps organizations in equilibrium. No classroom, school, or district is
frozen in amber; they are constantly changing. Teaching hybrids of student-centered and
teacher-centered pedagogies evolve over time. Hybrid schools that blend online learning
with regular teacher-class-of 25 students arise; districts develop portfolios of school options
from which parents choose. The phrase “dynamic conservatism” that Donald Schon (1973)
coined referring to organizations that “fight to remain the same” (p. 32) captures the frequent
changes that strengthen continuity in practice.
6. For relations between technology use and student outcomes (see, e.g. Lei, 2010). Nonetheless,
the policy talk continues to promote the transformational power of new technologies in
schools. In announcing a new national technology plan, US Secretary of Education, Arne
Duncan (2010) said: “We have the opportunity to completely reform our nation’s schools.
We’re not talking about tinkering around the edges here. We’re talking about a fundamental
re-thinking of how our schools function and placing a focus on teaching and learning like
never before.”
7. There are educational decision-makers and policy analysts who start from the premise that
policymakers are only doing what they are supposed to do with the tools they have at hand –
establishing new testing and accountability structures, for example – and the problem is that
there is too much belly-aching and whining from teachers, administrators, and other
educators who do not like the new structures. This line of thinking ignores the possibility
that policymakers err in their decisions (see, e.g. Hess, 2012a, b).
8. A complicated system assumes expert and rational leaders, top-down planning, smooth
implementation of policies, and a clock-like organization that runs smoothly. Work is
specified and delegated to particular units. Certainty about outcomes is in the air the
organization breathes. Complicated systems use the most sophisticated math, technical, and
engineering expertise in mapping out flow charts to solve problems. Yet even those
sophisticated systems fail from time to time such as the Challenger shuttle disaster in 1986,
Three Mile Island nuclear meltdown in 1979, and the 2010 BP oil leak.
Complex systems like criminal justice, health care, and schools, however, are filled with
hundreds of moving parts, scores of players of varied expertise and independence yet
missing a “mission control” that runs all these different parts within an ever-changing
political, economic, and societal environment. The result: constant adaptations in design and
action. Recall the US President, Congress, lobbying groups, and scores of interest groups
JEA trying to get a reform health care bill into law during 2010 in the midst of a slow recovery
from the quasi-Great Depression of 2008. Or ponder the USA’s bungled efforts to build a
51,2 democratic Iraq between 2003 and 2010 after the engineered “shock and awe” got rid of
Saddam Hussein.
Blueprints, technical experts, strategic plans, and savvy managers simply are inadequate to
get complex systems with thousands of reciprocal ties between people to operate effectively
in such constantly changing and unpredictable environments. These web-like complex
122 systems of interdependent units adapt continuously to turbulent surroundings.
Health care, criminal justice, and school systems even with their fac¸ades of command-and-
control mechanisms, policy manuals filled with procedures for subordinates to follow are
constantly buffeted by unpredictable events – picture a hospital emergency room, a
kindergarten class of wailing and reclusive five-year olds, judges doing arraignments one
after the other. So what if schools, hospitals, and courts resemble spider webs of
interconnecting strands more than carefully designed and well-oiled machines?
One practical outcome of this distinction is approaching planned change differently. Those
who run complicated systems (e.g. airplane and automotive industrialists, investment
bankers, computer hardware and software CEOs) introduce change by laying out a detailed
design of what is to be changed, step-by-step procedures to implement the change and
overcome any employee resistance, and reduce variation in performance once change is
implemented. Highly rational, mechanical, and smooth.
The problem for those who inhabit complex systems like schools is that change, conflict, and
unplanned changes occur all the time. So do adaptations because of the web-like independent
and interdependent relationships that make up the system. What happens when smart
people try to graft procedures from complicated organizations onto complex systems?
Trying to toilet train a three-week-old baby is an absurd example of the thinking that occurs
when a complicated solution (designing a flow chart for teaching toilet training) meets a
complex problem (a baby that feeds continually, sleeps 20 hours a day, and soils her diapers
repeatedly). Inevitably, the toilet training flow chart gets adapted again and again until the
baby is ready to be toilet trained – a few years later. Or consider a less absurd example of the
pay-for-performance plans imported from complicated business systems to be installed in
complex school districts. The pay-4-performance policy will get adapted repeatedly and,
over time, will become unrecognizable to designers and promoters.
The answer, then, to the so-what question is: at the minimum, know that working in a
complex system means adapting to changes, dealing with conflicts, and constant learning.
These are natural, not aberrations. Know further that reform designs borrowed from
complicated systems and imposed from the top in complex systems will hardly make a dent
in the daily work of those whose job is convert policy into action (see, Burns and Knox, 2011;
Davis and Sumara, 2001; O’Day, 2002; and Sargut and McGrath, 2011).
9. The example of piloting a large aircraft and air traffic control is often used in distinguishing
between complicated and complex systems (see, e.g. Sargut and McGrath, 2011).
10. Scholars applied institutional theory to schools in the 1980s and 1990s. They emphasized
that the rational model of decision-makers making policy and bureaucrats putting those
policies into action seldom worked in school organizations because policy was “loosely
coupled” to the work that teachers did in their classrooms. Social beliefs, myths, and
ceremonies about schooling helped smooth out the disjunctures between policy and practice
but teachers had little direct supervision and had sufficient autonomy to embrace or ignore
policy directives. Much of the delineation of institutional theory mirrored a later generation
of social science scholars using complexity theory to characterize schools and classrooms
(see Dimaggio and Powell, 1983; Sargut and McGrath, 2011; Hardman, 2010; Meyer and
Rowan, 1977; Scott and Meyer, 1994; and Weick, 1976).
11. In all, 45 states (2012) have adopted the common core standards in math and English (see
National Governors Association, 2012).
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About the author

Larry Cuban is Emeritus Professor at Stanford University.

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