Design-Based School Improvement in Cross-National Comparison

• In Event: Design-Based School Improvement: Perspectives From Chile, the United States, and Germany

Abstract

The symposium compares cases from three countries that differ in levels of economic development, centralization of education policy, and degrees of teacher professionalism. Chile, the South-American case, has a history of combining extreme marketization of educational provisions with a high degree of centralized education policy which leaves teacher professionalism weakly developed (Falabella & de la Vega, 2016). Central directives and management dominate school improvement efforts. Within the United States, the state of California is a ‘weak’ state (Cooper et al., 2008), in which soft-touch state policies, district managerialism, and localist lay politics (Fuller, 2015) constrain the terrain for teacher professionalism. Germany, the country least influenced by neoliberal education policy, ascribes to a model of tight legal control but ample teacher professionalism in matters of school life (Terhart, 2011). In all three countries, design-based school improvement efforts have expanded. The logic of design-based school improvement is on the face of it rather rationalistic. Schools, when they are exposed to this logic do not usually start as a blank slate. Rather, they embed this logic into school improvement mindsets (Authors, 2019) that have been forged in the organizational-structural conditions of their respective national context.
In the Chilean case, feeble professionalism and strong state centralism (at least for public schools) has resulted in a dynamic of school improvement in which the initiative originates from central institutions (Authors, 2018). This poses challenges for an improvement logic that banks on the strength of internal recognition of school-specific needs and the capacity of school leaders and teachers to communicate about them. In the U.S. case, a managerialist model of district-facilitated program adoption, training, implementation, and monitoring by administrators prevails as an improvement dynamic in districts under performance pressure (Spillane & Thompson, 1997). This dynamic shortchanges powerfully motivating change drivers beyond the expectation that school practitioners ‘buy in’ to a given program to ease implementation. In Germany, traditional teacher professionalism has created a dynamic of selective individual appropriation of change initiatives with relatively little consideration for unifying organizational necessities.
A Preview and Pointers for a Cross-case Comparison
Given differences among the three country cases in governance, teacher professionalism, and school improvement mindsets, design-based school improvement faces different tasks for the ‘next level of work.’ In Chile, it was found that as a precondition of identifying shared urgent problems of practice, teachers’ voice needs to be awakened and facilitated, and hierarchies need to flattened in the problem-solving process. In the U.S. case, design-based approaches require a minimal strategic focus at the district level and a balancing act between program implementation, as expected by districts, and recognizing authentic problems of practice unique to schools. In the German case, in order to mitigate strong professional individualism, design-based approaches require the creation, or strengthening, of an organizational ‘container’ for the work that makes DBSI a shared collective process among school faculty. These emphases specific for one country are not unknown in the others, but are most pronounced in respective RPP.

Author

• Rick Mintrop, University of California - Berkeley