I recently posted a long article by Michael Fullan that proposed a new paradigm for education reform. I found Fullan’s dismissal of the status quo persuasive, as well as his description of a forward-looking approach.
Laura Chapman, inveterate researcher and loyal reader, reviewed Fullan’s recent work and was disappointed with what she found:
If ever any paper needed close reading this is it, especially Fullan’s discussion of the 6C’s, 21st Century Skills, and vague references to some ancillary research in California and Australia.
I am working on learning more about at least one of Fullan’s California projects. Unfortunately there are no peer-reviewed summary of accomplishments.
Here is a link if you also want to see what assessment looked like in one Fullan project, a three-year $10 million effort to improve the performance of English Learners including long-term English Learners, funded by the California School Boards Association and several non-profits. https://michaelfullan.ca/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/The-Coherence-Framework-in-Action.pdf
You will see that the main measures of accomplishment are expressed as percentages, and that these percentages changed over the three-year project.
100% of Long-Term English Learners will access new curriculum supported with adequate technology, instructional materials, and assessments.
5% annual increase in English Learner language proficiency.
3% annual increase in English Learner A-G completion. (A-G refers to courses required for admission to either the California State University or University of California systems with a grade of C or better).
50% increase in Long-Term English Learner students reporting they feel positively connected to the school environment and experience success.
Year-to-year changes in these percentages appear to be framed as if evidence for continuous improvement.
This brief suggests that more detail can be found in specific pages of Fullan’s 2016 book: The Taking Action Guide to Building Coherence in Schools, Districts, and Systems. You have to buy or borrow the book to see the details.
Although some of the Fullan’s paper is appealing, it also represents another proposal for managing learning as if there are no redeeming features in our public schools and the principle of democratic governance for these.
It is worth noting that Joanne Quinn, a frequent collaborator with Fullan, has an MBA in Marketing and Human Resource Management. According to LinkedIn for 16 years she has been President of Quinn Consultants in Toronto. She also served for ten years as the Superintendent of Education for four schools in a district with 65,000 students.
Fullan is think-big thinker: “This paper is intended to provide a comprehensive solution to what ails the current public school system and its place in societal development – a system that is failing badly in the face of ever complex fundamental challenges to our survival, let alone our thriving as a species.”
I am uncomfortable with anyone who claims to have a “comprehensive solution” to the current public school system (including the USA) and who fails to address the fiscal and policy constraints that have been imposed on that system for decades along with a pattern of denial that planet earth and human survival is at risk.
If you want a better and brief jargon-free article on doable reforms, find “Twenty Years of Failing Schools” in The Progressive, February/March issue (pages 50-51. This article includes specific suggestions for the Biden administration and the new Secretary of Education. The author is Diane Ravitch.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I once wrote a paper here in Toronto (Fullans from here) for the teachers union called ‘The Glass is Half Fullan’. He seems to be an ally on things like smaller classes (good) but also favors testing . He writes about teachers in a condescending way implying that they all need to be fixed which makes him far more popular with principals and superintendents than classroom teachers. I found myself reading his stuff over many years due to his influence here going true, true, false, false, true, false, true. He often has a profound sense of the obvious.
“He often has a profound sense of the obvious.”
Brilliant sum up of so much that is “education reform”. So many platitudes, so little time. And the media elevates the ed reformers who spew those platitudes as if they were geniuses and the mediocre education journalists who are awed by the brilliance of those platitude-spewers are certain that since the platitudes are true, that means the solutions that these billionaire-supported platitude-spewers offer up must also be true.
Education journalists depend on ed reformers to “reform-splain” to their math and statistics-phobic minds what ed reform-funded studies mean and can’t judge for themselves what is nonsense. They never miss a chance to believe that those spewing the obvious are brilliant when those spewing the obvious are in favor with billionaires.
“Reform-splain” — exactly what they do
No matter how many charts and colorful diagrams are used to show instructional intent or assess progress, the real impact of helping foreign students learn and adjust occurs in the classroom, hopefully, in the context of a smaller class. I fail to see anything new or exciting that ESL/ ENL or bilingual teachers are already doing. In fact, 5% framework fails to distinguish between between levels of beginners, intermediates and advanced students. Many beginners may make less that 5% in a beginning level class on a standardized assessment as comprehension is very low. Students also often arrive at various times during the year unlike most regular ed students. Intermediates easily increase by 10% or more, and I have had advanced students gain 25% or more on standardized tests. He also makes no mention of the significant SIFE (students with interrupted formal education), and most students from poor and conflict areas as these students represent the majority of ESL/ENL students. Of course, teachers of ELLs must be culturally affirming, but there is a great deal more to consider when teaching ELLs. Fullan’s paradigm is nothing new at all.
Testing will never solve our social problems. We would be wise to focus on the whole student as well as well being. When students are heard and valued, they are more prepared to tackle academics.
Hope you are feeling ok, Diane.
Dianne, I pray you are recovering better than ever. Rick CharvetGilroy, CA
“This paper is intended to provide a comprehensive solution to what ails the current public school system and its place in societal development – a system that is failing badly in the face of ever complex fundamental challenges to our survival, let alone our thriving as a species.” — Fulan
I think that quote all by itself identified Fulan as a con man, a fraud, and another serial liar. Our more than 13,500 community-based, democratic, public school districts spread across the United States have never and are not failing badly.
The two biggest challenges are funding all of those state and community schools properly/fairly and trusting/supporting all of our highly trained public school teachers like the professionals most of them already are.
TFA doesn’t count.
Lloyd,
If it were true that our 13,500 public school districts have never failed badly, all federal action beginning with the Brown vs Board of Education of Topeka Kansas would have been unnecessary. I know you do not believe that.
The segregated black schools were desperately shamefully underfunded . But you knew that.
Laura Chapman for sec of ed. You can never pull the wool over her eyes.
This post and the comments mention several problems: ELL improvements of only 5% per year, classes which are not small, too much testing, too much influence from “reformers”, conflicts between principals and teachers, inadequate funding, and schools that are not failing “badly.”.
Going back further, we learned at the start of the pandemic that many schools in NYC have inadequate ventilation systems. Go back some more years, and schools with leaky roofs and lead paint were in the news.
In the early 2000s, I participated in a NYC Department of Education program that attempted to recruit and train enough volunteers to bring music to the 80 elementary schools that had no music teacher. (This was a joint project with The Metropolitan Opera Guild, financed by Seagram’s.)
Question: When is a parent justified in seeking an alternative?
As a parent, I want my kids to have an education that enriches their lives and hopefully provides them viable future to live on their own.
I don’t find standardized test scores to be a very compelling measurement of those expectations. It’s possible that, post high school graduation, surveying which students complete college education (or the equivalent) and/or which have stable jobs might be closer to measuring those expectations.
But schools don’t seem to think long term enough to work with those kinds of measurements.
There is zero evidence that standardized testing improves results. It it worked, USA would not be #17 in PISA.
It’s really not that schools are unable to “think long term enough to work with those kinds of measurements.” The standards and measurement systems are set by outside forces. Schools are constantly trying to adapt to the new curriculum guidelines/standards/assessment requirements / targets etc.
Reading Diane’s books would help with understanding the forces in play that impact “schools.”
Our district once had Fullan speak to the regions principals around 2015. My supervisor at the time, an advocate for disruption, was ironically ecstatic to get such a respected educator to speak in Alabama. As Fullan spoke he often criticized the very tactics our district practiced in regard to data and organizational management. Principals in the room could be seen grinning as they looked at one another with Fullan’s prescriptions while district leadership simply sat stoically throughout the presentation. No organizational priorities changed following Fullan’s talk. People like Michael Fullan and the Defour’s speak in meaningful ways about the challenges present with American schools, yet they show little interest in getting into the fray caused by advocates of privatization and tech over reach. They have become too comfortable in their own financial pursuits that districts and ed organizations are too willing to contribute. They talk about over arching education trends, but seem to care little for the school as community. Their solutions are typically unwieldy and obtuse.
Re: your last three sentences. This is exactly what I (and other teachers) thought about our district’s grand new “instrument” for evaluating us. Twice as time consuming as the previous one, it was designed by someone with advanced ed. degrees who made much more money consulting and selling “instruments” than could be made teaching. That cost may have resulted in the multiple pages, copies, and time devoted to said “instrument; so it seemed to me. As a fine arts teacher, half of the “instrument” was irrelevant, and the process of being evaluated by a principal with no formal training in arts education was pretty much useless (as has been most of the professional development I have endured).
By contrast, during my first 14 years I was evaluated by two principals with arts backgrounds. One had been an English teacher and directed high school plays and musicals, and the other had been a 4th grade teacher and a member of a noted boy choir during his childhood. Those evaluations–and our frequent conversations throughout the year–were very helpful. Also very helpful, practical and obvious were their instructions on PD days: “Go visit a colleague in another district, or work in your room; you know what you need.” These principals took the initiative to overrule the district’s PD instructions, which were always “special area teachers choose a grade level or subject area to sit in on.”
This is a clip from Morning Joe. Jeremy Tate talks about the “crisis in American mainstream education” and that the purpose of education is not “bland utilitarianism” (career/job ready). He references Plato – that the object of education “is to teach us to love what is beautiful” ……and goes on to discuss that the purpose of education is to teach us to be human.
https://www.msnbc.com/morning-joe/watch/howard-university-to-shut-down-classical-studies-department-110508101802