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Allen and Glickman begin Part 2 of this section of the Handbook by examining restructuring and renewal as strategies of educational change. They draw on their own experience of establishing and working with The League of Professional Schools in order to do so. Schools belonging to this league commit to “a belief in the powers of democracy to guide school restructuring in order to bring about on-going school renewal that focussed on students.” Changing the governance of the school to more shared, democratic forms is regarded as one fundamental way of enacting this belief. Allen and Glickman describe The League of Professional Schools and provide research evidence on its processes and effects as a form of school restructuring. Developing trust, creating understanding through action-research, and building a vision together characterize some of the core aspects of League school activities. Allen and Glickman flush out what these things mean in practice, and analyze the obstacles and difficulties that schools encountered and sometimes overcome when they tried to convert them into reality.

While strategies of school restructuring often attend to the governance and descision-making, timetabling and programming aspects of school life as a lever for change, school reculturing buries deep into the heart of human attitudes and relationships that hold the school together and move it forward (or fail to do so). Drawing on four school case studies, Lynne Miller describes how successful school reculturing involves schools and their staff moving towards building professional community, putting learning before teaching, engaging in inquiry as a guide to improvement, developing their own systems of accountability and standards of learning, taking a whole-school focus, and widening the responsibilities for leadership. Reculturing, Miller shows, is no easy matter. It depends on committing to long time frames, on the support of excellent principals, on teachers who are prepared to become leaders of their colleagues as well as teachers of their classes, on access to supportive networks outside the school, and so on. This chapter describes not only the theory and principles of reculturing, but conveys a vivid sense of what it means to try and reculture one’s school in particular cases.

This chapter by Joe Blase, focuses on the micropolitics of educational change, an emerging area of educational inquiry. After a brief review of the relevant theoretical literature, the micropolitics of stability and change is discussed. Selected general studies are described to illustrate the pervasiveness of micropolitics to life in schools. Micropolitical studies of 1980s and 1990s reform and general studies of 1990s school reform/restructuring are then reviewed. This review is used to demonstrate the central thesis of the chapter: Micropolitics is a fundamental dimension of school change in general and, as such, a chief target of most approaches to school restructuring. A framework of ideas for further research on the micropolitics of change in schools is described. Such research is needed because few direct studies of this important phenomenon actually exist.

One of the most neglected dimensions of educational change is the emotional one. Educational and organizational change are often treated as rational, cognitive processes in pursuit of rational, cognitive ends. If emotions are acknowledged at all, this is usually in a minimalist way in terms of human relations or climate setting, where the task of leadership is to manipulate the mood and motivation of their staffs, in order to manage them more effectively. The more unpredictable passionate aspects of learning, teaching and leading, however, are usually left out of the change picture. In this chapter, Andy Hargreaves makes a case for studying and energizing the emotions within the educational change process. Then, drawing on an empirical study of a group of change-oriented Grade 7 & 8 teachers in Canada, he describes how teachers’ emotional goals for and bonds with their students permeate teachers’ orientations and responses to all other aspects of educational change — such as curriculum planning, teaching and learning, and school structure. When the emotional aspects of teaching and educational change are considered seriously, Hargreaves argues, what is at stake in educational change and how best to manage it, will never look the same again.

How one approaches changing a school or an educational system depends, fundamentally, on one’s views about what kinds of places schools really are or should be. In this chapter, Tom Sergiovanni describes three dominant perspectives on schooling and the change strategies that spring from them — schools as bureaucratic organizations, schools as market systems, and schools as communities. In each of these models, Sergiovanni describes how different forces of change can be used to leverage change in schools — bureaucratic forces of rules, requirements, procedures and outcomes; personal forces of leadership and personality; market forces of choice and competition; professional forces of self-set standards, codes of conduct and norms of service; cultural forces of values and relationships; and democratic forces of contracts and commitments to the common good. Sergiovanni then charts how these forms and forces of schooling play themselves out in different patterns of reform — evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of each. In the end, he argues, “deep changes in schools, may well require that the basic metaphor for the school itself be changed from formal organization or market to community”.

One of the greatest clichés of educational change, indeed of our time, is that of authenticity. There is no shortage of advocates for authentic leadership, authentic learning and authentic assessment. In this chapter, Debbie Meier cuts through the hackneyed phrases to ask what, if anything there is to this idea of authenticity, and to the idea of authentic learning that motivates many change efforts. What is authentic and what is artificial, Meier asks? How can anything in schools be truly authentic, when schools by their nature, are so artificial? Are authentic things necessarily good and inauthentic ones bad? How do we decide on these things? Meier teases her readers with examples that provoke creative discomfort around the idea of authenticity, which she uses to push the discussion much further than other writers in the area have done. In the end, she finds some of the answers to these demanding conceptual questions in practice and draws upon her own experience of transforming Central Park East school in New York to do so. It is here, she shows, in attempts to build powerful, meaningful learning for students in disadvantaged neighbourhoods that the possibilities of authenticity are ultimately to be found.

The avant-garde of educational change theory is the idea that schools be treated and developed as learning organizations which do not pursue fixed plans in pursuit of set goals, but structure and develop themselves so that they and their members can continually learn from experience, from each other and from the world around them, so that they can solve problems and improve on a continuous basis. In this chapter, Mulford takes this field of organizational learning, describes its key principles, discusses some of the research evidence that is beginning to emerge in relation to it; and engages critically with some of the field’s claims and their limitations. Mulford’s chapter is neither blindly euphoric nor sweepingly dismissive of organizational learning theory. Instead of uncritically applying the general theory to education as many other writers and advocates of educational change have done, he presents one of the few critical appraisals of the field and its relevance that have yet been written.

One of the toughest nuts to crack in educational change is policy itself — not this policy or that policy, but the basic ways in which policy is conceived, developed and put into practice. In this chapter, Linda Darling-Hammond outlines a new paradigm for educational policy better suited to the complexities of our times. In place of top-down, linear approaches to educational policy and its implementation, Darling-Hammond argues for a more inclusive approach to policy that combines and integrates bottom-up and top-down approaches in a framework that will be more empowering for all. Darling-Hammond argues for policy processes that create political consensus, ensure equity, develop and enforce standards and build local capacity, school-by-school for people who work in the front lines of our classrooms. Policies she says, should be more concerned with learning than compliance, as much about support as pressures and demands. She closes her chapter with specific instances of where such new paradigm policy processes in education are already beginning to emerge.