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Who Moved My Cheese? (Johnson, 1998), a parable of how mice and humans explore how to cope with change, sold six million copies and is now available in a teen version. Change always has been and always will be an inevitable topic of conversation, research, and angst! We educators spend many of our waking (and sometimes nonwaking) hours thinking about how to create and manage change in our schools. The efficacy of our efforts falls on a wide continuum from success to failure depending on any number of complex reasons.
As a teacher of 13 years and a central office administrator for 20 years, like my colleagues, I wanted the best for students. I, too, saw pockets of brilliance in selected classrooms but not a system wide means of ensuring student success. Like many of you, I championed staff development as the primary means of improving student learning and I still do. What I failed to have in place in all my attempts to make schools better, however, was a framework to ensure continuity and support.
In my last two years in the Three Village Central School District, prior to my retirement in June 2002, we joined the Standard-Bearer School District Network with the Center for Leadership in School
Reform (CLSR). This was made possible because of the leadership of Superintendent John Sonedecker, Board President William Connors, Administrator Union President Deborah Blair, and Teacher Union President(s) Sheila MacFadyen and her successor Claudia Reinhart. The purpose of this article is not to sell CLSR but rather to emphasize the importance of attending to critical factors if you want to change an educational system or even a part of that system.
When it first was published, the Educational Leadership (September 1993) issue on systemic change started the conversation in our district. Three Village established a steering committee of staff, students, parents, university professors, and community members whose role it was to lead the improvement effort. Peter Senge's work, The Fifth Discipline (1994), became our guide for creating a learning organization. We created a vision and a mission developed by the community after five community forums on the future. The then Commissioner Tom Sobel led the last forum, providing an important educational application to the previous presentations. So far so good.
In successful districts, finding a purpose for changing what one is currently doing is a difficult first step. Despite the comprehensive vision and mission statement that had been created, ironically, the steering committee was unclear about the purpose for their work. The lack of understanding of the larger school community, therefore, was inevitable. The steering committee members held different views on what needed to be done and, therefore, found it difficult to make a compelling argument for the need to change. As the chair of this committee, I struggled with how to direct the committee's work.
In retrospect, we lacked a clear understanding of those organizational features in a district that
contributed to and detracted from the capacity of the schools to support and sustain change. But, through the work of Dr. Phillip C. Schlechty and his associates at CLSR, Three Village and the other districts nationwide that are part of the Network, have a framework of 10 System Standards to guide their efforts. All of the other nine System Standards support Standard 3, which is designing lessons for students that (Continued on page 3)
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