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OVERLOAD AND fragmentation are two major barriers to education reform, and they are related. Overload is the continuous stream of planned and unplanned changes that affect the schools. Educators must contend constantly with multiple innovations and myriad policies, and they must deal with them all at once. Overload is compounded by a host of unplanned changes and problems, including technological developments, shifting demographics, family and community complexities, economic and political pressures, and more. Fragmentation occurs when the pressures -- and even the opportunities -- for reform work at cross purposes or seem disjointed and incoherent.
Overload and fragmentation combine to reduce educators' motivation for working on reform. Together they make the situation that the schools face seem hopeless, and they take their toll on the most committed, who find that will alone is not sufficient to achieve or sustain reform.
This situation would seem to be an ideal candidate for "systemic reform," which promises to align the different parts of the system, focus on the right things, and marshal and coordinate resources in agreed-upon directions. The idea of systemic reform is to define clear and inspiring learning goals for all students, to gear instruction to focus on these new directions, and to back up these changes with appropriate governance and accountability procedures.
In this article I first want to present evidence that there is a fundamental flaw in the reasoning that leads us to conclude that we can resolve the problem by attending to systemic alignment. Then I will make the case that we must turn the question on its head and ask not how we can make the system cohere, but rather how we can help educators achieve greater coherence in their own minds and efforts. Finally, I will describe the main implications for evaluating systemic reforms at the level of practice.
The False Assumption of Systemic Reform
There is an overwhelming amount of evidence that educational change is inherently, endemically, and ineluctably nonlinear. This means that the most systemically sophisticated plan imaginable will unfold in a nonlinear, broken-front, back-and-forth manner. It will be fragmented.
This conclusion is both theoretically and empirically compelling. Dynamically complex societies, to use Peter Senge's phrase, could not operate in any other way.(1) In Change Forces I describe in...