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

18 The Fourth Way
that included principal removal and school closure, accelerated carousels
of leadership turnover, and ceaseless exposures of and emphases on failure
all epitomized the punitive pressures of top-down, Second Way reforms.
The promised support of full funding for NCLB was never honored by
President George W. Bush; Senator Ted Kennedy, cosponsor of the Act, pointedly
boycotted its first anniversary celebration at the White House. Subsequent
economic developments led many tax-starved school districts to withdraw literacy
coaches and other key personnel as the credit crunch hit, thereby making
the kinds of lateral learning promoted in Canada and England much more
difficult to achieve. The funding offered to schools, when it did come, came in
dribs and drabs, arriving with the attached strings of impossible improvement
deadlines that produced panic-driven measures of short-term change. Strategies
for professionals to work with colleagues across or beyond the confinements
of their own districts were almost entirely absent.
There were some bursts of creativity in the United States during the years
when England and Canada were advancing into the Third Way, but these
almost all came from outside government. Former high-profile advocates of
the Second Way, including two previous U.S. secretaries of education, reversed
course and argued that educational systems must encourage the innovation and
creativity needed to compete in a global knowledge economy. 40 In cities such
as Boston, Denver, New York, and Philadelphia, clusters of traditional public
schools, charter schools, and various hybrids such as pilot schools found ways
to share coaches and mentors and were given greater autonomy to innovate in
exchange for producing better results. 41 Long lists of students waiting to get
into alternative schools that had proven successful testified to the attractiveness
of many of the start-ups for those burned out by unresponsive bureaucracies.
In the absence of federal leadership during the Bush administration,
foundations played a more central role in the United States than in England or
Canada. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation invested in converting high
school behemoths into more intimate and more personalized learning communities.
42 The Wallace Foundation tried to turn principals into leaders rather
than mere managers. 43 Other foundations and venture capital organizations,
such as the New Schools Venture Fund, helped teachers and schools to use
achievement data as a basis for improvement and intervention decisions. 44
The Obama presidency is encouraging a new climate for educational
change that shows signs of building on these earlier initiatives. There is
not merely talk of more educational innovation but also now a new federal
agency to promote it. Better tests and assessments such as growth rather
than status models are being called for that will measure higher-level
knowledge and skills beyond the basics that dominate many existing statewide
instruments. A willingness to address the influence of out-of-school
factors on children’s learning and well-being as in the wraparound services
of the Harlem Children’s Zone indicates a dramatic departure from
previous policies.