Managing change or living with change? Education reform in complex environments

Citation

Howard Stevenson, D. and Angela Thody, P. (2009), "Managing change or living with change? Education reform in complex environments", International Journal of Educational Management, Vol. 23 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijem.2009.06023daa.002

Managing change or living with change? Education reform in complex environments

Article Type: Guest editorial From: International Journal of Educational Management, Volume 23, Issue 4

About the Guest Editors

Dr Howard StevensonDeputy Director of the Centre for Educational Research and Development and was previously a senior lecturer at the School of Education, University of Leicester. His research interests focus on education policy in the statutory and post-compulsory sectors, labour process analyses of teachers’ work and education sector industrial and labour relations.

Professor Angela ThodyIn semi-retirement as an emeritus professor at the University of Lincoln. Her current research centres on the writing and presenting of research and on roles for emeriti professors. She established her academic reputation particularly in school governance, teachers’ careers, classroom management and gender issues, both UK and international. In these areas, Angela has ten academic books, 50+ articles in professional and academic journals and various chapters and research reports. Angela edited one of the journals of the British Education Leadership Management and Administration Society for seven years and was President of the Commonwealth Council for Educational Administration for six years.

In the 1990s education management titles that focused on “managing change” seemed to abound in both the statutory (Bennett et al., 1992; Whitaker, 1993) and post compulsory sectors (Ford, 1996; Ringel, 2000). From scholarly texts to top-tips for Principals (see Fullan, 2008), considerable interest was focused on how change could be “managed” in educational contexts, whether this was at institutional or system level. This focus on the management of change appeared as a direct consequence of the discourses that had shaped education policy discussions in the 1980s and that was resulting in wide scale education reform, principally in the form of site-based management initiatives and the move towards what were claimed to be increasingly autonomous institutions.

A common feature of many of these texts was their tendency to see change as a process to be “managed” – something to be “engineered” and “manipulated”, and if only school and college leaders knew what levers to pull, and which buttons to press, then successful change could be secured. It was as if school and college leaders had been protected from the need to manage change by the suffocating dominance of state bureaucracies, but now that schools and colleges were liberated their leaders needed to be equipped with the knowledge and the skills to “do” change. This not only applied to the school sector, but also universities whose traditional autonomy was being recast in an age of entrepreneurialism. The proliferation of titles focused on change management was itself a reflection of the interest in, and increasing importance of, education institutional principals as the leaders and managers of organisations.

This focus on change management as a technical process had two principal weaknesses and these inadequacies have become increasingly apparent with time. First, has been a realisation of the complexities of the change processes being studied. Education reform in the 1990s, particularly in the UK and USA, and other countries that embraced the philosophy and practice of site-based management most enthusiastically, appeared to be driven by a conviction that school and college leaders need only be released from the dead-weight of state bureaucracy, and provided with appropriate training, from which radical and widespread change would follow. In reality the processes have change have proven much more complex than this, the consequences of reform have been much more uneven and the outcomes of restructuring much less certain. All of these consequences derive in part from the second key weakness in much change management literature, namely the tendency to disconnect the processes of change from the contexts of change. Managing change was too often treated as a technical process, divested of any political significance. What was driving change? Change in what? In whose interests? Who would gain and who would lose? Who had the power to advocate or resist? None of these are neutral questions, but rather reflect the fundamentally political nature of the questions being posed (Butt and Gunter, 2007). In short, studies of change management were disconnected from the wider issue of neo-liberal restructuring within the global economy which not only provided the context for much reform of the public sector, but was driving reform in quite specific and deliberate directions (Apple, 2006).

It is our conviction that although both these deficiencies in traditional change management literature are increasingly acknowledged they continue to feature in some form. The work of Michael Fullan for example has developed a more sophisticated understanding of the relationship between system wide change and its impact in individual institutions (Fullan, 1999, 2007), whilst Fullan has also highlighted the centrality of the “moral imperative” in school leadership (Fullan, 2003). However, whilst it is welcome that change forces are often linked to the values base that drives them there is still an inadequate understanding of how those values are themselves determined. Claims to be more overt in relation to values are important, as is the claim to a new “values-driven leadership” (Day et al., 2000). Nevertheless, it is important to more effectively understand the relationship between policy and values, and to understand that values not only shape policy, but are themselves shaped by policy and wider policy discourses (Bottery, 2000).

The papers collected in this special issue make no claim as to how to “do” change management, but rather they seek to address weaknesses in the change management literature identified above by providing a broader and more complex analysis of the processes of change. The papers presented are deliberately diverse, drawn from Africa, Asia, Europe and North America and drawing on work in both the statutory and post-compulsory sectors. They focus on “change” as a process both located in national policy contexts, and one rooted in individual institutions, and several papers are concerned with how each of these is interdependent with the other.

The paper by Rusch and Horsford takes as its starting point events in a single institution to raise wider issues about how it becomes possible to bring about change on a wider scale. Specifically the paper is concerned with how “hearts and minds” can be changed in ways that address issues of racism by going beyond colour-blindness to a more assertive colour consciousness. Rusch and Horsford argue that too often issues of race and racism are left unspoken with “silences” acting to reinforce a status quo that protects White power and privilege. Central to the possibility of changing hearts and minds is “the need to break the silence and engage in constructive talk about race across color lines”. None of this is easy, and at times it may be deeply uncomfortable, but Rusch and Horsford argue it offers an important way in which inequities of power and privilege can be identified, discussed openly and confronted. Their paper highlights the difficulty of developing agendas driven by social justice within educational institutions, and the need to develop the spaces in which “counternarratives” can be developed.

The aspiration to change hearts and minds is also articulated in the paper by Magone and Elsner as they describe progress in implementing a bold statewide curriculum initiative in Montana. Montana’s Indian Education for All initiative committed the state to ensuring that all the state’s students were aware of the culture and history of its American Indian Population. The paper details how this policy was implemented, and it offers an optimistic account of how bold curriculum reform can be introduced by creating alliances of administrators and professionals. However, it also highlights the factors that can militate against change – notably, a degree of professional inertia (if not resistance) and a failure to identify adequate resources.

Two papers in this collection focus on examples to secure radical and much needed change in African nations with fresh memories of deeply divided societies. Rutaisire and Gahima have played a key role in developing education policy in Rwanda in the years following the 1994 genocide. Rwanda was a country ripped apart by the genocide of 1994 and education has played a pivotal role in nurturing not only reconstruction, but reconciliation. Central to this process has been the need to develop the teacher workforce, in terms of both quantity and quality – developing both more, and more qualified, teachers in a country desperately short of resources. Rutaisire and Gahima highlight the significant gains that have been made in recent years, but also the limitations of a policy that is overly reliant on “top-down” impetus. The key challenge they identify is to develop a greater sense of teacher professionality in which teachers can take initiative for developing and implementing change at school level. Within their paper they discuss some of the ways this might be accomplished.

The tension between national formulation and local implementation is also highlighted by Bisschoff’s article in which he explores the difficulties experienced by reformers in South Africa as the country seeks to make education a central element of a socially just society in the post-Apartheid state. In this case study Bisschoff reveals a desire for change on the part of national government, and an urge to make progress quickly. There is therefore a heavy reliance on statutorily mandated change from central government, but despite this drive from the centre implementation on the ground is patchy and uneven. Bisschoff highlights a number of factors that appear to militate against the smooth implementation of national directives with a particular focus on the gap between “knowing and doing” – that teachers are aware of legislation and the demands it makes, but they refuse to implement it. Bisschoff argues that there is a need to retreat from the excessive use of legislation to mandate change, and instead develop more inclusive ways of engaging professionals in the implementation of policies, in particular allowing policy to be adapted to better suit local conditions and contexts.

The emphasis throughout these papers on winning hearts and minds emphasizes the need to win support for change, and the need to develop broad coalitions for advancement. However, it is important not to underestimate the difficulties in achieving this, or the contrary pressures that can undermine progressive professional values. Justine Mercer’s paper illustrates clearly how external pressures can drive changes in ways that can frequently conflict with professional values. Many of the changes discussed in these papers take place in a context of increasing marketisation in education, in both the statutory and post-compulsory sectors, as neo-liberalism increasingly shapes the trajectory of policy reform. Mercer illustrates in very clear terms how these pressures introduce tensions into the work of faculty staff as they try to square professional aspirations with market imperatives. In this sense we see education professionals as they live with change, and are jostled by it, whilst they simultaneously seek to shape it.

Cheng’s paper also focuses on some of the tensions in policy that emerge from conflicting agendas and aspirations. Cheng discusses how a policy that purports to address social justice issues and reduce inequality in Hong Kong is likely to have the reverse effect as its emphasis on quasi-market reforms favours those with the cultural and economic capital to maximize their market privilege. In particular Cheng argues that it is important for academic scholars to develop more effective methods for analyzing change processes, so that it is possible to develop a more sophisticated analysis of the factors that shape change. Cheng makes use of Critical Discourse Analysis to analyse the introduction of a voucher policy in pre-primary education in Hong Kong and argues that such a methodological approach can significantly enhance our understanding of change processes.

Taken together this collection of papers highlight the complexity of analyzing change processes in a range of contexts. They illustrate the need to see change as something that is not “managed” in a way that is linear, logical and rational – but rather as a process we live with, negotiating and navigating as we proceed. It is important to win hearts and minds for progressive change – but it is also important to recognize the powerful forces that frame the discourses within which hearts and minds are shaped.

Howard Stevenson, Angela Thody