Although an inherent part of any education system, change and reform gained a concerted focus in the latter half of the 20th century. The need was felt to formalize and regulate the change agenda in different education systems internationally and it culminated in different movements in the education system such as the school effectiveness, school improvement and school reculturing movements. Out of these reform movements, the school improvement movement has special relevance for this study. It was in late 1970s and early 1980s when school improvement initiatives emerged as a distinct body of knowledge (Potter et. al, 2002), but it remained a free-floating approach to school change concentrating largely on the
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concepts of organizational change and school self-evaluation without any reference to the specific cultural contexts. The 1990s saw an integration of the concepts of school improvement and school effectiveness (Purkey and Smith, 1985: Riddell, 1997). In this decade, standards-based reform and concern for student achievement culminated into widespread and sustained improvement efforts in Western democratic systems (Sullivan and Shulman, 2005: Halsal, 2001). More recent emphasis on school improvement has been through improvement in students’ outcomes, teachers’ behaviours, and school culture (Potter, et al. 2002: Patchen, 1991). The prevailing reform agenda with full political backing in US, Canada and UK is about tackling underachievement in difficult and disadvantageous circumstances as a matter of social justice (Harris, 2006) as well as also seeking to raise overall achievement to ensure a highly skilled population for a globalized economy.
This school improvement reform agenda has been characterised by Hopkins and Reynolds (2001) as comprising three distinct but not mutually exclusive phases. The early phase starting in the 1980s was a bottom up approach to school improvement and focused on people practising in the field, self-evaluations of schools and site based improvement councils in some countries. The power of the school was enhanced at the expense of the power of local education bodies in almost all English speaking developed countries like Australia, New Zealand, Canada, USA and UK except Scotland. Though organizational change, self-evaluation by schools and the ownership of change were the hallmarks of this phase, yet it was ‘loosely conceptualised, under theorized’ and was not a ‘systematic, programmatic and coherent approach to school change’ (Hopkins and Reynolds, 2001, p 459) as the link between the students’ learning outcomes and reform initiatives was missing. The second phase began in early 1990s and the organizational change and classroom level change emerged as a predominant focus. Students’ learning outcomes were at the heart of all reform initiatives and culminated in the form of a focus on curriculum, instruction and the management of these two. Accountability and standards appeared as rigorously pursued targets in the educational landscape, though with no link to improved school performance.
The third phase emerged out of growing evidence that ‘the relationship between school improvement and increased student achievement remains weak and contestable’ so now it was felt there was a need ‘to draw upon its most robust evidence and to produce interventions that were solidly based on tried and tested practices’ (Harris and Chrispeels, 2006, p 67).
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Hopkins and Reynolds (2001) identified five key features of these third wave school improvement initiatives. These are:
• a focus on classroom level change and students’ learning outcomes
• a focus on change in skills, attitude and behaviours of teachers to bring in classroom change
• the provision of infrastructure and creation of suitable environments as mechanism for change
• capacity building of not only individuals but schools as learning developing organisations as well
• attention to process and outcome combined with cultural change to be sensitive to the influence of improvement programs on practitioners and their practices
Harris and Chrispeels (2006) have added another feature to this phase of educational improvement, which they say has evolved, that is the ‘deepening awareness of the critical nature of context and political influence on school improvement’ (p 9).
In the wake of this development, now more differentiated and ‘finely grained’ approaches to educational change have been developed to account for different socio-economic backgrounds and the variable change capacity of different schools. According to Harris and Chrispeels (2006) the fourth phase of school improvement evolving in many countries, is an effort to balance top down and bottom up approaches to reform for the attainment of national educational goals. Now there is an increased recognition of ‘the nested nature of schools in systems’ and politicians are specially concerned to ‘scale up’ the success of individual schools in reforms and both these factors have resulted in system changes at the national level and renewal of the role of local education bodies. Chrispeels and Harris (2006) see the possibility of the fifth phase of school improvement evolving from the research literature, which is the creation of networked learning communities (schools) generating and sharing knowledge in collaboration, innovating collectively and striving to plan improvement in the teaching learning process.
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Hargreaves (2009, p 185) has reviewed these phases of educational reforms as three ages namely the ‘age of optimism and innovation’ (until mid to late 1970s), ‘age of contradiction and complexity’ (1980s to early 1990s) and ‘age of globalization and standardization’ (from mid to late 1990s). There is an interesting dimension to this chronological development of educational change. All these phases of educational improvement and reform have neither been universal nor assessed successful. Further, there is a scarcity of resources and this has kept a large part of the world struggling to provide mass education.
While many developing countries are still fighting to attain universal basic and secondary education, industrialised societies have concentrated their reform efforts and resources in increasing quality, efficiency and accountability.
Accurate evaluation mechanisms have been developed at national and international levels to measure this progress. However, many of these efforts are reinforcing an existing education paradigm that does not necessarily meet the demands of the knowledge society of the 21st century. (Benavides et al, 2008, p 38-39)
It is crucial to be aware that the models for change and improvement may not be universal and further there are differences in the diversity of the educational reform focus and agenda, therefore, it is necessary to initiate research in different contexts. The concepts and standards of educational improvement, quality, achievement, performance and provision and access are relative to the reality of the context. Part of the focus of this study is to examine the meaning of these concepts and their associated strategies in a particular context. The impact of the differentiated phases and focus of school improvement efforts across different parts of the world and the influence of the peculiarities of different contexts forms the basis of this research study, which endeavours to explore the contextualized model of educational change management for an under developed country, Pakistan.
This argument for the diversity of the educational reform agenda and the development of the foci of these agenda in different parts of the world provides the setting to present the particular case of the educational reform initiative (the ESR programme) in the Pakistani education system within a broader picture of the challenges faced by the system to take forward this agenda of reform.
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