Why so many structural changes in schools and so little reform in teaching practice?
| Published date | 15 March 2013 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/09578231311304661 |
| Date | 15 March 2013 |
| Pages | 109-125 |
| Author | Larry Cuban |
| Subject Matter | Education |
LEGACY PAPER
Why so many structural changes
in schools and so little reform in
teaching practice?
Larry Cuban
Stanford University, Stanford, California, USA
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 onclassroom practice include a misplacedtrust 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 Conce ptual paper
The path of educational progress more closely resembles the flight of a butterfly than the
flight of a bullet (J ackson, 1968, pp. 166-7).
Twovivid 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 an dthe district in which it
is located have been the recipient of policies aimed at changing what teachers do and
what students learn for ne arly two centuries. Most of those intended policy changes
sought to improve teaching and learning incrementally; yet many intended to swee p
away old practices and reconstitute teaching and learning in new, fundamentally
different ways. In time, an inconsistency emerged. While the structures of schooling
and classroom teaching have indeed changed over the past two centuries there has
been a deep-seated continuity in both schooling and te aching that has made what
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at
www.emeraldinsight.com/0957-8234.htm
Received 7 July 2012
Revised 14 August 2012
Accepted 15 August 2012
Journal of Educational
Administration
Vol.51 No.2, 2013
pp. 109-125
rEmeraldGroup PublishingLimited
0957-8234
DOI 10.1108/09578231311304661
The author dedicates this article to Barbaraciela Cuban Goodwin.
109
Reform in
teaching
practice?
occurs in classrooms familiar to generation after generation of parents and observers.
Is this remarkable stability and lack of fundamental change or “real reform” in
teaching and learning due to workplace conditions, inertia, stubbo rn resistance from
teachers, or, perhaps, sensible adaptations to the complexity of multiple goals and
school structures in the past centur y[2]?
Such explanations, with much evidence to support each one , have been offered
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 sc hool boards that has
provided, over time, equal access to knowledge and age-graded structu res 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 schoolsmatches 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 couple t taken from the eithteenth c entury
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 ste eped 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
110
JEA
51,2
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