of understanding of the change process. But educators should not succumb to despair. There is growing evidence that the best hope for significant school improvement is transforming schools into professional learning communities. This book provides educators with specific, practical strategies they can use to make that transformation.
Chapter 2
A New Model: The Professional Learning Community
Our decade-long effort to reform U.S. education has failed. It has failed because it has not let go of an educational vision that is neither workable nor appropriate to today’s needs.
—Seymour Sarason (1996, p. 358)
In times of drastic change, it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves beautifully equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.
—Eric Hoffer (1972, p. 32)
American public schools were originally organized according to the concepts and principles of the factory model, the prevalent organizational model of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The professional learning community is based on an entirely different model. If schools are to be transformed into learning communities, educators must be prepared first of all to acknowledge that the traditional guiding model of education is no longer relevant in a post-industrial, knowledge-based society. Second, they must embrace ideas and assumptions that are radically different than those that have guided schools in the past.
By the late nineteenth century, efforts to create schools in the image of the factory had become explicit and purposeful. In Principles of Scientific Management, the bible that articulated the concepts of the industrial model, Frederick Winslow Taylor (1911) argued that “one best system” could be identified to complete any task or solve any organizational problem. According to this philosophy, it was management’s job to identify the one best way, train workers accordingly, and then provide the supervision and monitoring needed to ensure that workers would follow the prescribed methods. Thus, a small group of people could do the thinking for the entire organization. Workers were regarded as relatively interchangeable parts in the industrial process. Taylor’s model demanded centralization, standardization, hierarchical top-down management, a rigid sense of time, and accountability based on adherence to the system. The assembly line embodied Taylor’s principles and had helped the United States become the world’s industrial giant. Assured that they had discovered the one best way to run an organization, business leaders and politicians argued that schools should adopt a similar model to produce the kinds of workers that industry required.
For the most part, educators needed little prompting. Much enamored with the industrial model, leading educators were enthusiastic about applying its principles to their enterprises. An ardent advocate of the industrial model, William T. Harris was one of the most influential school superintendents in the United States in the late nineteenth century, serving as the president and director of the National Education Association, the president of the National Association of School Superintendents, and the United States commissioner of education. He wrote:
Our schools are, in a sense, factories in which the raw materials (children) are to be shaped and fashioned in order to meet the various demands of life. The specifications for manufacturing come from the demands of the twentieth century civilization, and it is the business of the school to build its pupils according to the specifications laid down. (quoted in Fiske, 1992, pp. 32–33)
Ellwood Cubberly, a professor at Stanford University and one of the nation’s foremost educational thinkers of his time, reflected the opinion of his contemporaries when he wrote the following in 1934:
The public schools of the United States are, in a sense, a manufactury, doing a two billion dollar business each year in trying to prepare future citizens for usefulness and efficiency in life. As such we have recently been engaged in revising our manufacturing specifications and in applying to the conduct of our business some of the same principles of specialized production and manufacturing efficiency which control in other parts of the manufacturing world. (p. 528)
The uniformity, standardization, and bureaucracy of the factory model soon became predominant characteristics of the school district. The key was to have the thinkers of the organization specify exactly what and how to teach at each grade level and then to provide strict supervision to ensure that teachers did as they were told. Decisions flowed from state boards of education down the ladder of the educational bureaucracy to local school boards, superintendents, and principals. Eventually, decisions would be directed to teachers who, like factory workers, were viewed as underlings responsible for carrying out the decisions of their bosses. Students were simply the raw material transported along the educational assembly line. They would be moved to a station where a teacher would “pour” in mathematics until the bell rang; then they would be moved to the next station where another teacher would “assemble” the nuts and bolts of English until the next bell rang, and so on. Those who completed this 13-year trek on the assembly line would emerge as finished products, ready to function efficiently in the industrial world.
Unfortunately, many of the principles of this factory model still prevail within the structures of American schools. Schools continue to focus on procedures rather than results, following the assumption that if they adhere to the rules—teaching the prescribed curriculum, maintaining the correct class sizes, using the appropriate textbooks, accumulating the right number of course credits—students will learn what they need to know. Less attention is paid to determining whether or not the learning has actually occurred. Instead, schools remain preoccupied with time and design, organizing the class period, school day, and school year according to rigid schedules that must be followed. In many schools, teachers and their opinions are still considered to be insignificant. Above all else, the factory model has established a conservative tradition in American schools. Taylor’s concept of the one right system has led to a credo of “get it right—then keep it going.” As a result of this philosophy, many educators seem unable to embrace a concept of continuous improvement that has the significantly different credo of “get it right, and then make it better and better and better.”
In defense of nineteenth-century educators, the factory model may have indeed served schools well when they were not intended to educate large numbers of students to a high level. In 1893, for example, when the Committee of Ten issued the report that was to shape the high school curriculum for decades, 1893), less than three percent of American students were actually graduating from high school. Even as late as 1950, the majority of students continued to drop out of high school before graduation. In this way, the factory model did indeed function as it was intended by sorting and selecting students. The model continued to work reasonably well as long as dropouts had ready access to unskilled jobs in industry, regardless of their educational level. The number of unskilled jobs in industry has declined significantly, however, and the most enlightened corporations—even many factories—have abandoned this model (Blankstein, 1992).
The factory model is woefully inadequate for meeting the national education goals of today—goals that call for all students to master rigorous content, learn how to learn, pursue productive employment, and compete in a global economy. If educators are to meet these challenges, they must abandon an outdated model that is contrary to the findings of educational research, the best practices of both schools and industry, and common sense. They must embrace a new conceptual model for schools. The issue then becomes identifying the model that offers the best hope for significant school improvement.
The School as a Professional Learning Community
Researchers both inside and outside of education offer remarkably similar conclusions about the best path for sustained organizational improvement. Consider the following findings:
Only
