School districts that have begun to restructure their schools face some extraordinary challenges. Like Poland, East Germany or Hungary, they must create new and viable institutions to replace old ones that are dying. And they have to muster and maintain support for the risks they're taking. But one of the biggest problems for school leaders in these districts is isolation. Places where restructuring is more than a vogue word are still very few, and most of them are surrounded by school districts where it's business as usual. So, like teachers isolated in their classrooms, reforming districts have not had many chances to exchange ideas and criticism with their peers - that is, not until recently. A new group of urban school districts engaged in restructuring, the Urban District Leadership Consortium (UDLC), is working to end this isolation, and it may have other implications for the future of restructuring.
UDLC now has 20 member school districts -- which doesn't sound like much until you discover that their students comprise about 10 percent of the school population of the U.S. and a significant percentage of the minority students. The group was started by AFT, but it is open to any school district interested in restructuring, with one proviso: The team the school district sends must include the school board chairman, superintendent and teacher union leader -- the trio that has to be involved if school restructuring is to go anywhere.
UDLC meetings provide a forum where members can talk about the progress and problems of school restructuring in their districts. They can compare strategies and get new ideas, and they can measure their achievements against what other school districts have been able to do. Not every school district in UDLC is at the same point in restructuring, so places that are relatively new to the game can take advantage of the experience of districts that have been working at the process for a while. Getting to know people in other restructuring districts whom you can call when you have a problem is another way in which the meetings help members, and UDLC hopes to expand the networking function by hooking into an electronic network.
Besides allowing for an exchange of ideas and a kind of reality check, UDLC meetings help members pull back and gain perspective on what's happening in their own schools -- and perhaps get back in touch with the real aims of school restructuring. When you're busy dealing with the daily problems that come with trying something new, it's easy to get lost in the process of reform and lose sight of its goal: improving student learning. The outside experts who speak to UDLC meetings on subjects relevant to restructuring and the visits to experimental schools are important in helping create this perspective. For example, teams recently heard Anthony Bryk of the University of Chicago talk about the relationship of school governance of student achievement and Pascal Forgione of the Connecticut State Department of Education describe Connecticut's work with alternative types of student assessment.
In fact, this tendency to get caught up in process issues can be a serious danger to any attempt at school restructuring. It's exciting to persuade people who formerly saw each other only as adversaries to sit down and discuss how their schools should be run - and it's an essential first step to changing public education. But as Adam Urbanski, president of the Rochester Teachers Association/AFT and member of Rochester's UDLC team, points out, the success of school restructuring will be judged by the changes it brings to the classroom; its measure will be how well children are learning. And the enterprise will fail if reformers - at the school or district level - get so involved in opening up channels of communication that they forget what they're supposed to be communicating about.
School restructuring will also fail if it is limited to a few districts. The problems in our education system are general: The majority of our 17-year-olds - students who are about to graduate from high school -- cannot write a simple letter of application for a job, do a multi-step math problem or arrange a group of fractions in size order. So our solutions have to encompass 16,000 school districts not 20 or SO.
At the same time, trying to reconstruct our schools on a totally different model from the one with which we are familiar is a terribly difficult job. It's almost as tough for us as it is for Poles and Hungarians to reconstruct democratic and free market institutions after 40 years of communist rule and maybe even tougher -- because the Eastern bloc nations have models to draw from, while we have no experience with the kinds of schools we are trying to build.
The solution of these problems is certainly not obvious, but a group of restructuring school districts acting as a testing ground for new models of schooling could help build that experience. And with something to guide them, districts that were not willing to blaze the trail might be willing to follow after -- and might even be able to improve on what the pioneers had done. In short, by trying out various strategies and discovering which ones improve teaching and learning, a group of districts committed to school reform -- like UDLC -- might eventually become the critical mass in a general acceptance of school restructuring.