Professional standards trump 'loose coupling'

I recently read an article written in 2000 by Richard Elmore that has severely dented a concept that was important to school education in the English speaking world during most of my career as a principal. He wrote Building a New Structure For School Leadership to explain why large-scale 'standards-based reform' is critical to the survival of public education. The shocking aspect of this paper for me was his criticism of the concept of 'loose coupling' which I widely touted in the '80s and 90s. Elmore blames the notion of loose-coupling for much of our current troubles. Loose coupling was not a term on everybody's lips, but the concept was widespread.

"This [loose coupling] view, in brief, posits that the "technical core" of education, detailed decisions about what should be taught at any given time, how it should be taught, what students should be expected to learn at any given time, how they should be grouped within classrooms for purposes of instruction, what they should be required to do to demonstrate their knowledge, and, perhaps most importantly, how their learning should be evaluated, resides in individual classrooms, not in the organizations that surround them."

He then accurately describes the dominant culture of schools in the west for the last few decades where principals were promoted on their ability to do everything except focus on student outcomes.

"...direct involvement in instruction is among the least frequent activities performed by administrators of any kind at any level..."

We did everything we could to develop a culture and environment where students learnt successfully, but as Elmore explains, much of our work was to provide a buffer behind which teachers could engage privately in the mysterious business of teaching and learning.

Elmore then point to the groundswell of community demand for improved school standards and this has become obvious even in Australia since 2000. But he advocates a strong emphasis on accountability for teaching not as a weapon to punish poor performing schools, but as an accompaniment to a rigorous staff learning program.

"...standards-based reform hits at a critical weakness of the existing institutional structure, namely its inability to account for why certain students master academic content and can demonstrate academic performance while others do not. When the core technology of schools is buried in the individual decisions of classroom teachers and buffered from external scrutiny, outcomes are the consequence of mysterious processes that no one understands at the collective, institutional level. Therefore, school people and the public at large are free to assign causality to whatever their favorite theory suggests: weak family structures, poverty, discrimination, lack of aptitude, peer pressure, diet, television, etc.

So Elmore makes what I think is the best case for school reform that I have seen over many years. It is: build the human capital in the school on a large scale basis, remove the privacy veil from teaching and use rigorous assessment of learning to guide this process and demonstrate the teachers' and the schools' achievements.

Design Principles in this article for large-scale improvement in school systems are:

• Maintain a tight instructional focus sustained over time.
• Routinize Accountability for Practice and Performance in Face-to-Face Relationships.
• Reduce Isolation and Open Practice Up to Direct Observation, Analysis, and Criticism.
• Exercise Differential Treatment Based on Performing and Capacity, Not on Volunteerism.
• Devolve Increased discretion Based on Practice and Performance.

Elmore R, Building a New Structure For School Leadership, 2000 Albert Shanker Institute .