Urban Education Institute Staff Workshop Series
So Much Reform, So Little Change:
Author Charles Payne explains why urban school reform never delivered
what it promised
Urban school reforms continue to fail across the nation because of an overinvestment in school structure and governance and insufficient attention to school culture and instruction, University of Chicago scholar Charles M. Payne said at a workshop sponsored by the Urban Education Institute.
"Reform after reform fails because of nothing more complicated than the sheer inability of adults to cooperate with one another," Payne wrote in his latest book, So Much Reform, So Little Change: The Persistence of Failure in American Schools (Harvard Education Press, 2008). Building on 40 years experience as a researcher and advocate, Payne paints a vivid picture of the types of social dysfunction, from teacher rivalries and mistrust to racial tensions, that keep seemingly good ideas from taking hold in the classroom.
Payne, the Frank P. Hixon Professor in the School of Social Service Administration at the University, expanded on the dissonance between education policy and schoolhouse reality outlined in his book during a recent conversation with staff of the Urban Education Institute, faculty from the University Committee on Education, graduate students from across the University. and civic leaders from Chicago. The workshop, the first of five planned in 2008-09, took place at the Carter G. Woodson Middle Campus, the newest of the four campuses of the University of Chicago Charter School operated by the Urban Education Institute.
Instead of articulating and supporting quality instruction, many educational reforms are "predicated on giving up on the people in the schools," Payne told the workshop.
Chicago provides a stellar example of a city where structures and governance have dominated local school reform, Payne said. Starting in 1988, reformers, blaming an unresponsive central bureaucracy for many of the system's woes, tried to shift the power to individual schools through Local School Councils that would hire and fire principals and approve budgets. Attention next turned to transferring political control of the public schools to the Chicago mayor in 1995. The city's most recent reform effort, Renaissance 2010, began opening new schools in 2005 to give parents choices beyond traditional neighborhood schools.
Chicago's latest wave of reform has resulted in a plethora of public school structures, from 30 charter schools on 67 campuses with varying philosophies to new "contract" and "performance" schools that are given greater autonomy in turn for more accountability. These new schools were added to Chicago's already complicated mix of traditional neighborhood schools, magnets to encourage racial integration, and schools that screen for academic performance, such as the classical academies and gifted centers on the elementary level and selective enrollment high schools.
"One of the negatives of the multiple provider model is that there is not a common model on how teaching and instruction should take place," said Payne at the workshop.
Yet ample research supports the effectiveness of teachers who challenge their students with high expectations and intellectually ambitious work coupled with social support, Payne said. Those are among the same characteristics that many older African Americans describe fondly when they praise the quality of the segregated schools they attended as children, Payne observed. In his book, he calls it "authoritative-supportive" teaching.
Penny Bender Sebring, founding co-director of the Consortium on Chicago School Research at the University of Chicago, moderated Payne's talk. The Consortium on Chicago School Research, like the Woodson charter campus, is also part of the University's Urban Education Institute. In turn, Payne's book was informed by CCSR research done by Sebring and others on issues such as the five essential supports for school improvement.
"The Consortium on Chicago School Research is the closest thing we have to a Manhattan Project on urban schools," Payne wrote, praising its combination of quantitative and qualitative work.
The interplay of scholarship like Payne's, research from the Consortium, and the usefulness of both to teachers and leaders in real schools is at the essence of the Urban Education Institute's work.
"At UEI, we develop new knowledge, outstanding educators and exemplary schools - building new synergies between practice and scholarship," said Timothy Knowles, Lewis Sebring director of the Urban Education Institute. "The promise here is we can improve the quality of schooling not just for children in Chicago, but for children growing up across urban America."
At Payne's invitation, many of the practitioners in the audience offered their own examples of a promising school program that was implemented badly, often because of insufficient preparation time or unrealistic expectations about results.
"You go in and do a professional development session on Friday and teachers are supposed to implement it on Monday. Call us if you have a problem," Payne said of this faulty approach to implementing reform.
Despite the failures he has chronicled, Payne agreed that he is "cautiously optimistic" about the nation's urban elementary schools, citing progress in Chicago, Boston, New York City and other locales on different measures of student achievement from standardized tests to college-going rates.
"I've been accused of being a Cassandra," Payne chuckled. He noted that his personal experience with students from the Carter G. Woodson Campus suggested a positive social culture that counters the examples in his book. "My hope is that there are more schools like this."
