American School Reform Movement

School reform has been in the American limelight for a while now, the articles “’Crisis in Education,’ ‘What Went Wrong with U.S. Schools,’ and ‘We Are Less Educated than Fifty Years Ago’” (1) were all published around 1957. Around this time, America started to fall behind in global events like Sputnik’s launch and Japan taking the lead as an economic powerhouse were noted by critics as examples of the decline of American schools. In 1983, the National Commission on Excellence published a report, A Nation at Risk, that backed up these critics and also “served as a catalyst for a flurry of school improvement initatives…known collectively as the Excellence Movement” (3). The Excellence movement excelled in providing a direction for U.S. education
to go in, but failed to bring any new ideas to the table. The focus of the movement was to intensify the existing school system, like longer days, but offered no change to the current running of the American school system which led to the movement being deemed a failure. From the ashes of the Excellence movement rose the Restructuring movement, this movement focused on two methods of change.
The first method was creating a set of national standards and goals, so in “1989 President George Bush convened the nation’s governors for a summit meeting on education” (4) and they created “Goals 2000.” These goals focused on raising graduation rates, preparing students for the global workforce, and raising literacy rates. The second method was allowing schools to have more freedom to practice different methods of teaching to determine which was the most effective; this movement was accompanied with “considerable optimism as it grew to become synonymous with school reform in the early 1990s” (7). While this movement was opposite that of the Excellence movement with its job-site reform, it to ultimately failed due to not focusing on the students. The failures of both these movements has caused educators to have their doubts on whether or not the American school system can be saved, but there are several scholars who have proposed why these movements are failures and how new movements can avoid them. Scholars have cited that past movements have failed because of complex the American school system is, the unfocused goals, the ambiguity of the intended results, the lack of perseverance, and the lack of a willingness to follow through with the
process.
Scholars now offer a new method of change that is “’closer to the truth than ever before’” (15) and they call them professional learning communities. Professional learning communities are setup as free-flowing, yet structured environments. Professional learning communities (or PLCs) ask participants to create common goals and work towards them using data they have collected as an organization. The communities are action oriented with a unified vision, work in collaborative teams, and are constantly improving. These communities are completely different from previous movements because it focuses on education as a whole and asks all participants, from the head of the school board to the parent, to work towards a common and agreed upon goal.