Andrew (Andy) Hargreaves, Dennis Shirley - The Fourth Way_ The Inspiring Future for Educational Change-Corwin (2009)

16 The Fourth Way
into schools to relieve teachers from extraneous administrative tasks and
other workload pressures. 35 The Building Schools for the Future initiative
established a 10-year program of building new secondary schools,
some of them located in the country’s most economically depressed and
racially divided towns and cities. 36 A successful Sure Start program has
given more children, especially from poor families, an earlier start and
educational opportunities. Partnerships with businesses, universities,
and community organizations have led to the creation of brand-new secondary
school academies in many inner cities where their educational
predecessors had been failing. And the founding of the world’s first
National College for School Leadership has increased the priority and prestige
of educational leadership as a central part of both capacity-building
and change-management strategies in the system. This bounty of funded
activity sets the Third Way apart from its more-market-driven and underresourced
predecessor.
Finally, publication of more and more amounts and kinds of performance
data has increased the information available to parents when they
choose their children’s school. Integration of education with children’s
services at national and local levels has been designed to connect schools
more to their communities and to give coordinated attention to the whole
child’s development. All kinds of incentives have been offered to teachers
and schools to network with and learn from their peers, especially in terms
of successful schools taking on or even taking over weaker partners as a
way to drive up standards.
Ontario
The Canadian province of Ontario represents an even more advanced
version of Third Way thinking. In the latter half of the 1990s, the province
was the epitome of Second Way standardization. Its conservative agenda
of diminished resources and reductions in teachers’ preparation time, highstakes
tests linked to graduation, and accelerating reform requirements
exacted high costs on teaching and learning. Teachers in the Change Over
Time study complained of there being “too many changes, too fast,” “too
much, too quickly,” “just so much, so soon,” to an extent that was “too vast
and just overwhelming.” Having to “take shortcuts” meant that teachers
did not “always feel [they] could do [their] best work.” “What a waste of
my intelligence, creativity, and leadership potential!” one teacher concluded. 37
Ontario’s educational system was as far removed from the needs of a fastpaced,
flexible knowledge economy as it is possible to get.
This changed in 2003, when the Liberal Party of Premier Dalton
McGuinty took office. McGuinty made two inspired appointments:
recruiting educational policy scholar Ben Levin to the education ministry’s