The Power of Persistence: Education System ... - EQUIP123.net

The importance of these insights, both for donors and for national education
leaders, is evident as one considers the experience in education reform in
country after country. The best innovative ideas may be neither accepted nor
sustained. Progress is uneven. The implementation dip that Fullan has found
in all successful school reforms is inevitable when people struggle to apply new
skills in which they are not proficient. The challenge for effective reform is both to
recognize the potential for this dip, and to create support structures that provide
the stability and continuity—and time - for reforms to work. The short-term
focus on tangible results and predictable progress, on the part of both donors and
politicians, leads to a tendency to declare failure prematurely, and to abandon
or continually modify reforms. Alternatively, it can also result in a premature
judgment of success.
Fullan’s distinction between reculturing and restructuring is useful in explicitly
recognizing that organizational reorganization alone is not sufficient to address
the critical human aspects of change. Human behavior is influenced by powerful
mental models of the ways things ‘should’ be. It is hard to overemphasize
the importance of the human element, and how difficult this is to address.
Reculturing happens not only in classrooms with teachers, but in school
management with directors, oversight with supervisors and in administration
at all levels.
When asked what the key is for enabling effective system change, many
professional educators formulate the answer in terms of having the right people
in the right place at the right time; as leadership; as vision and commitment;
or some other very subjective (and difficult to replicate) human factor. Fullan
acknowledges these truisms but goes further, devoting an entire chapter to his
argument that not just the people, but also the relationships among people that
make a difference.
If the traditional measures of objectives, outcomes, and quantitative impacts are
not particularly informative for system change, what process measures might
be useful One approach has been taken by studies that seek to identify the
characteristics of countries with strong and rapidly improving education systems.
The EFA Global Monitoring Report 2005 identified three common characteristics
found in countries with impressive educational outcomes (Cuba, Korea, Canada,
and Finland).
• The first characteristic is an institutional environment that values teachers,
and demonstrates this value through on-going professional development,
high esteem for the profession, strong teacher support, and a commitment to
teacher quality even in the face of teacher shortages.
SECTION 1: INTROdUCTION
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