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In twenty five years of teaching graduate students about schools and ways of improving them — for both students and their teachers — I have sent many of them to “review the literature on change”. Inevitably, faced with the confusion of selecting from hundreds of books ranging from theories of planned change to the history of particular movements in education, dealing with problems of leadership, school culture or attempts to define the “meaning” of educational change, and even offering a variety of organizational strategies to effect change — they ferret industriously through this literature struggling to make some sense of it all. What is the genesis of these ideas? Where do they come from? How can students come to understand the development of this field of educational change from its seminal “roots” to its contemporary questions — many of which are branches of trees that were planted long ago and that have, in seemingly erratic and unsystematic ways, grown up over time? Perhaps this modest collection of essays will help them — and us — to gain a more incisive understanding of this field, a field that has its roots in “history and biography and their intersections within . . . society” ().

My interest in educational reform has very personal roots. Needless to say, the roots of the educational reform movement require a social-historical explanation but, I assume, that kind of explanation can be illuminated by personal accounts which, albeit idiosyncratic, says something about the social-historical context. I have long been intrigued by the fact that some of the more well known participants in the reform movement come from very different backgrounds and life experiences. It is my impression that the number of these participants is greater than in any previous era. That in itself points to the importance of a distinctive social-historical context. For what it is worth I begin with a personal account.

I’ve been working at understanding change in schools for more than forty years. Being given a license to reflect on my intellectual adventures in the study of school change — in public — is a delightful and faintly alarming charge. I need to avoid sheer narcissism on the one hand, and detached encyclopedic syntheses on the other. And not succumb to the old codger’s temptation to claim pioneering knowledge that has been ignored by recent young upstarts! These risks bring a certain frisson to the enterprise.

Why are policies not implemented as planned? Why are classroom practices so hard to change? The “implementation problem” was discovered in the early 1970’s as policy analysts took a look at the school level consequences of the Great Society’s sweeping education reforms. The 1965 passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), with its support for compensatory education, innovation, strengthened state departments of education, libraries and, subsequently, bilingual education, signaled the substantive involvement of the federal government in local educational activities. ESEA’s comprehensive intergovernmental initiatives meant that implementation no longer was just primarily a management problem, confined to relations between a boss and a subordinate, or an administrator and a teacher, or even to processes within a single institution. Implementation of the Great Society’s education policies stretched across levels of government — from Washington to state capitals to local districts and schools — and across agents of government-legislative, executive, administrative. As federal, state and local officials developed responses to these new education policies, implementation issues were revealed in all their complexity, intractability, and inevitability.

Twenty one years ago — in 1975 — I went to work with the now famous child psychiatrist Professor Sir Michael Rutter and with Dr Barbara Maughan and Dr Janet Ouston on a new study of secondary schools being planned for later that year. The study was published in 1979 by Open Books in the United Kingdom and Harvard Press in the United States under the title Fifteen Thousand Hours: Secondary Schools and their Effects on Children ().

By intent, this essay has several major guiding assumptions. First, it has an autobiographical flavor, that is, it attempts to capture an individual’s thoughts and activities from the early days of educational reform in the mid twentieth century. “Being around” and “involved” at that time carries its own kind of insight and testimonial. Second, an early case study of Kensington, an innovative elementary school, () caught the imagination of a number of educators in schools and universities. Third, such an event — an innovative school and a book length monograph describing and conceptualizing the first year — had its own antecedents and consequences. Stories and conceptualizations became strands of educational innovation and change in their own right. These strands are a part of this small piece of educational history. This essay speaks to those as well. Fourth, the very task of writing about these events is a creative process and takes the author and reader into unexpected directions, yielding more ideas about the nature of educational idealism, realism, and school reform. Such are the tasks of this essay.

The concept of school based curriculum development has been central to my professional concerns and ways of thinking about educational change since the late 1950’s. It had two main tributaries: my early experience and dialogue with colleagues as a secondary school teacher in London; and the interest I took as a graduate student in Australia, the U.S. and England in the educational philosophies of John Dewey and Alfred North Whitehead and the international movements of progressive education with their eighteen century roots in the Enlightenment and the Romantic Movement.

Things can work out in ways we do not expect. In writing , I hardly foresaw a time when I would be asked to reflect on it in the context of educational change. But since doing so seems to be a good idea to the editors of this volume, and since I trust their judgment, I decided to give it a whirl.

In all honesty I had not read , co-authored with Neal Gross and Marilyn Bernstein, from cover to cover since my review of the page proofs for its publication in 1971. With a touch of pride, my reaction after completely rereading it was that we had reached quite a few conclusions in the book that were important to the field of planned educational change. My reaction, to be sure, made the writing of this chapter much easier than otherwise would have been possible, especially since it also seemed clear to me that these conclusions remain relevant today.

Lake Victoria, the largest lake in Africa, was once a high quality food source as well as an important field site for studying evolutionary processes. Not any more. The Ugandan government decided to improve the fishery several decades ago by introducing hearty and cacheable perch from the Nile River. It turned out, however, that these fish can reach monstrous proportions (up to 6-1/2 feet and 175 pounds) with an appetite to match. About 10 years after these perch were introduced, they began showing up in increasing numbers in the nets of fisherman trying to catch any of the 300 varieties of smaller, more desirable fish in the lake. Soon, the perch wiped out almost two-thirds of the fishery and left a number of the individual species extinct.