The Right Reform: First Things First

The Right Reform: First Things First

Today students in the United States mostly encounter only one type of teaching technique, a traditional style overrun with chalkboard lectures and unenthusiastic teachers; a classroom structure which forces students to act like the receptacles Freire described in his work, "Pedagogy of the Oppressed." Paulo Freire argues that too often education involves what he termed Ð''banking' the educator making Ð''deposits' in the pupils. Children do not express or think for themselves anymore. Currently American students function as toilets for a teacher's input.

Styles of pedagogy have changed over the past twenty years. No longer are students passive learners, regurgitating information from chalkboard lectures derived from out of date textbooks (Fullan, 4). Today's educators understand that to produce an education beneficial for life the United States must educate its children with an array of techniques mirroring life's developmental stages. One initiative driving public education reform in America is the idea that schools will improve when teachers learn how to address the individual needs of each child (Fullan, 6). First Things First (FTF), a reform model developed in 1996 by the Institute for Research and Reform in Education (IRRE), comes close to addressing the needs of individual students through good educational practices supported by decades of educational research (IRRE website.)

The approach American schools have taken to reform has changed drastically. Reform plans in the 1980's were characterized by efforts to identify and Ð''cure' children and adolescents who were failing to thrive by creating narrow programs designed to address specific problems. The reform ideology was based on a micro level. Children who were problematic, or those labeled Ð''at-risk', were placed in programs to reduce negative school features like dropping out, drug use, and teen pregnancy (Fullan, 8). While some programs were designed to increase student's job skills no significant increase in better outcomes for youth was achieved. James P. Connell, founder of FTF, illustrates how the "safety net" approach to school policy gave way a "youth development" approach in the late 1990's. The latter approach is based on research of proven methods of pedagogy (Connell, 94).

Policy makers, private funders, and community leaders have become more knowledgeable about the role the social environment plays in youth development. As those in power positions gain broader perspectives of what goes into educating America's youth the focus is shifting away from fixing individuals who fail, to fixing the systems and institutions responsible for those individuals. This idea of accountability is antipodal to the traditional American approach and is representative of a Japanese management style. The Japanese believe it is better to "Fix the problem, not the blame (Rowley, 8)." Any failure is the result of the process not the person. Everyone makes mistakes and there are a lot of mistakes that can be made. Japanese business has thrived because of the beliefs that if you fix the process/system so that the mistake cannot be made again, you will have succeeded in fixing all the people.

It wasn't until the late 1990s that reformers began to recognize the need to change systems at both the school level and at the district and state levels. The Annenberg Institute for School Reform was charged with convening a national taskforce to examine the question of how to redesign districts so that a large number of high-performing schools could flourish. The taskforce was designed with the hope that it would be able to pinpoint key kinds of supports and services that districts provide to schools and how those supports need to be rethought in light of President Bush's push for standards-based accountability. It was within this context that the FTF initiative was adopted in Kansas City in 1996 (Annenberg, 10).

The IRRE looked at research on the different features of a whole-school reform, organizational change, and research on youth development and created its own plan for initiating and supporting change through district-wide restructuring and realignment of resources, FTF. FTF is a comprehensive school reform characterized by principles of developmental psychology that address the need for humans to feel competent, autonomous, and related, and the premise that meeting such needs in social contexts promotes positive development (Moles, 2). FTF aims to fix problems in American schools on a macro level, by changing school structure, pedagogical practices, teacher accountability, and governance to create environments in which students and adults are engaged in active learning (Gambone, 3).

Successful school reform in the FTF model depends on three general conditions: strong, long-standing, and mutually accountable relationships among school staff, students, and families; effective instructional practices that engage students in "rigorous and meaningful academic content;" and alignment of resources like time, money, people, and facilities in order to support the first two conditions (Connell, 45).

The FTF theory of change is a framework that proposes a set of early, intermediate and long-term changes needed to produce system-wide, significant improvement in student outcomes (IRRE website). Starting with the longer-term outcomes desired for youth, the model works backward to the developmental milestones in education needed to achieve these outcomes, outlines the supports and experiences required to achieve these milestones, describes the school-building restructuring necessary to ensure these supports are in place for both students and adults, and outlines the district-level activities required to create the conditions and capacity for system-wide change. By starting at the end and working backwards FTF mirrors the strategic planning practices in place by major universities and businesses all over the world, like consensus building, vision, and assessment of goals (Connell, 95).

What are the long-term goals for youth? The FTF framework starts with this question. Long term outcomes like decent jobs, good relationships, and the ability to contribute to the community in positive ways are the policy goals that the IRRE identify as the most important long term goals for educating children in America. These conclusions call for positive outcomes in the early school-aged years. With that in mind the second question in the regression model is produced; what educational outcomes lead to these long-term goals?

"Children must master the ability to be productive

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