Still don't know what I was waitin' for
And my time was runnin' wild
A million dead end streets and
Every time I thought I'd got it made
It seemed the taste was not so sweet
So I turned myself to face me
But I've never caught a glimpse
How the others must see the faker
I'm much too fast to take that test...

-- David Bowie, Changes (1971), an unwitting ode to US education reform?

The purpose of this work was to conduct a literature review on the use of change management — a common term of art for a widely researched and employed set of processes in organizational behavior — to implement education reform in the United States.

Unfortunately, rather than finding examples of these processes in practice or gaps in the literature examining them, I found gaps in the practice and a plethora of examples in the literature where US education reform efforts appear to have failed precisely on that account.

Therefore, by the conclusion of this review I found myself asking, like Mr. Bowie’s stuttering evocation of a perpetually postponed change:

• What are we waiting for?
• Why do we insist on running wild down predictably dead end streets?
• When are we going to face ourselves, stop trying to outrun that test, and actually -- is it that frightening to say? -- ch-ch-ch-change?

To catch a glimpse of how little the US has it made in terms of ed reform, this literature review has been organized according to three sequential questions:

1. What is change management?
2. What has been US ed reform?
3. What do the answers to 1 & 2 suggest: does ed reform equal or require change management?

As you may surmise from this introduction, we conclude with a paradoxical caution for would be US education reformers: ceteris paribus, "plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose" (i.e., if US ed reform continues its current course, "the more things change, the more they'll stay the same").

Image 1. As a business concept, change management is so popular, writing on the topic has warranted two dedicated volumes of Harvard Business Review's "Must Reads" series. © HBR

As (literally) illustrated by the Change Management Institute's quick-draw animation below (Video 1, especially at 1:21), change management is a business discipline focused on navigating change by exploring three key questions:

1. Who will the change affect?
2. How will those effects be felt by those various stakeholders (e.g., threat, opportunity, ambivalence)?
3. What will the change deliver and when?

Furthermore, the goal of this inquiry is to enable leadership to:

• reduce uncertainty, confusion, and consequent human angst
• increase acceptance and adoption of the proposed changes

As such, "change management" is both a profession -- meaning that it is a discipline in which internal or external consultants can specialize through study and experience, and consequently offer as a service -- as well as an organizational capacity that will determine whether in the face of changing circumstances an enterprise will thrive, survive, or dive.

VIDEO 1: © Change Management Institute (2021).

As Video 1 concludes, successful change management will look like the following image capture below (Image 2).

Image 2. A picture of successful change management. © Change Management Institute (2021).

As may be gleaned from the top and bottom entries on that graphic, change management may be a misnomer, as when done right it is not really management, but a facet and style of leadership, as described below by Dr. John Kotter, Professor Emeritus at Harvard Business School and founder of Kotter International, a management consulting firm based upon his HBS-developed ideas that -- as he self-proclaims -- makes him The Authority on Change (Video 2 intentionally auto-starts at 1:40). Dr. Kotter's main point is that "management" in this context has come to ironically imply a constraining of change, to ensure personnel aren't lost, budgets aren't blown, and marketing doesn't make promises production can't keep. He originally conceived of change management as just the opposite: a catalyst to change, an engine for innovation and growth that drives an organization forward through its evolving landscape. Hence his more recent avocation of the term, change leadership.

VIDEO 2: © Kotter International (2012).

Now, at this point you may be saying to yourself, "I understand change management -- or leadership -- as it's been described, and by that description I can see how it applies to school management and school leadership in the context of changing student populations, academic-industry expectations, and technology, not to mention societal needs and demands of education."

However, you may also be asking, "isn't everything that's been defined and descibed above  common sense, fairly self-explanatory, and therefore not in need of the ivy league degrees to explain and high-priced consultants to implement it?"

Perhaps, but before we make that call, let's give Dr. Kotter the benefit of the doubt that there is a dearth of change leadership, and with that context, consider what happens for most organizations when circumstances require them to undergo change, as described below by Mary Meaney, Senior Partner and member of the Global Board of Directors for the prominent consulting firm McKinsey & Company (Video 3).

VIDEO 3: © McKinsey & Company (2014).

Ms. Meaney points out that:

• 70% of organizations' change efforts fail.
• 70% of the time, that is not due to wrong strategy or overwhelming circumstances, but the organization's failure to orchestrate change as captured in image 2 above.
• Often the reason organizations fail to orchestrate change as captured in image 2 is because leadership assumes that everyone else intuitively sees, understands, and agrees with their notions of what needs to change, why, and how it is to be done; in other words, they believe their vision is common sense, and should therefore translate into common practice among their employees, even if it isn't communicated -- an assumption that is antithetical to the very idea of change management .
• The tragedy in all this is that transformation is increasingly necessary for organizations to survive, let alone thrive, but the structure of successful transformation is complex, and (as defined beginning at 4:15), often difficult for vested interests in the organization to objectively address.

With this background on change management, now let us turn to examine the diverse efforts that have been collected in the US under the big umbrella term of "Ed Reform".

As acknowledged at the end of the last section, US "Ed Reform" is a rather umbrella-like term under which a lot of disparate -- and even seeming mutually exclusive -- initiatives might be crammed; so many, in fact, it might beg the question whether education reform in the US can have a clear definition.

Are we reforming:

• What we teach -- as in a return to the "3 Rs" or a new emphasis on career and technical education, a focus on facts or the acquiring of skills?
• How we teach -- as in turning back to traditional didactic pedagogy, better embracing contemporary authentic approaches, abdicating both of these in favor of transformative practices, or some surgical application of all three?
• Who we teach -- as in the individual or the masses, to those in the middle or the students with the greatest gifts and needs, to a student culture determined by content or a student culture that determines its content?
• Where and when we teach -- as in at desks within the four walls of a classroom, on devices, through work-based experiences, or some other form of ubiquitous learning?
• Why we teach -- to satisfy parents, employers, students, or society (as if any of those are homogenous)?

Arguably, whatever answer one gives to these questions, everyone is on the same page as far as desiring better post-graduation outcomes for individual students in terms of maximum career options and opportunity, as well as a students' collective competitiveness vis-à-vis their counterparts in other countries.

However, to borrow language from our change management discussion, that common sense answer to what we all desire has not readily translated into common educational practices from amongst the plethora of "reform choices" bulleted above. More concretely, our educational scenario might remind you of the frames below (image 3) from McKinsey & Company's presentation (Video 3), during which Mary Meaney recounted her power company client's assumption that they possessed and had communicated a clear vision and strategy for their business. In that case, when separately and anonymously surveyed, all twelve members of senior management answered, "Yes, we have a clear and compelling strategy for our business," but when that same survey asked them to identify which among six choices was their company's actual strategy, ten of them failed to do so!

Image 3 (Capture from Video 3). "Yes, we have a clear and compelling strategy, we just can't pick it out of a lineup!"

Is this scenario analogous to US ed reform?

It would seem so considering veteran education reporter John Morrow's characterization  of US ed reform as a history of "attempts at changing that really don't change things" due to leaders (a) confusing symptoms with issues and consequently (b) adopting school-level activities that are incongruent with overarching goals  -- i.e., no clear and compelling strategy anyone could pick out of a lineup. (Video 4 at 1:00).

 Video 4: "Addicted to Reform" educational author John Morrow. © PBS NewsHour (2017)

Later in the video (2:30) the interviewer asks -- regardless of political party -- "is it even agreed upon what we're after anymore?", to which Mr. Morrow answers, "No, we don't have that conversation."

This sounds like the classic change management mistake Ms. Meaney warned against with her power company example. Furthermore, Mr. Morrow's finding flies in the face of image 2's first and final priorities for change management success: that leaders begin by consciously engaging in conversations about the changes in order to end with change processes that are managed in partnership with those who are affected by the change, as opposed to top-down directives.

Ignoring these two imperatives for successful change management -- and the consequent uncertainty, confusion, and commensurate angst it must engender at all levels of the profession -- what then are the prospects for US ed reform in terms of better post-graduation outcomes for individual students and their global competitiveness as a collective?

In Video 5 below, EdWeek columnist and AEI Fellow Rick Hess paints a very dim picture based on past precedent.

Video 5: 20 Years of School Reform in 60 Seconds. © AEI (2019).

Namely, Hess demonstrates that state reports of gains in reading and math proficiency as well as graduation rates 1997-2017 appear grossly inflated when compared to national data, and disappear altogether when US students are assessed by parties without a vested interest in the outcome against international standards and in comparison with their international peers.

This disappointing finding begs:

• First, our original question -- what has been US Ed Reform? -- as, despite Messrs. Hess and Morrow's complaint that we've been addicted to a hodge-podge of maladaptive and ineffectual behaviors due to a 20-year string of misdiagnoses, that criticism still hasn't provided us with a clear definition of ed reform in the US, though perhaps that is their point: there isn't one;
• Second, a follow-up question: have these efforts made us look -- or were they at least intended to make US education look -- anything like those nations with better outcomes?

The following Vox news feature (Video 6) still cannot shed any light on our original question, but does suggest that the answer to our follow-up question -- particularly from the perspective of students' and teachers' daily experience -- is decidedly no. 

Video 6: Teaching in the US v. the Rest of the World. © Vox (2020).

According to this video's data comparison, what are the teacher and student felt differences between the US and the rest of the world?

1. US teachers work 19% more hours than the OECD average
2. US teachers spend 14.5% more of that work time in class with students, decreasing the share of time they spend preparing lessons, collaborating with fellow faculty, receiving professional development, or leading extracurricular activities
3. US students' performance on the Programme for International Student Assessment is only 1.3% above the OECD average
4. US teachers receive 35.4% less pay than the OECD average (adjusted for economic parity across countries), which is more out of sync than any other OECD nation in terms of matching salaries to other professions requiring a similar level of education and training
5. The US spends more per student than any other nation, but less than many as a percentage of GDP, with tremendous variation among states and school districts and a significantly greater proportion than other countries going toward non-educational costs like security
6. New US teachers are far more likely than their OECD counterparts to leave teaching before they reach 3 years of experience 

Considering that as of this writing Video 6 is less than two years old, was produced at the culmination of decades of major US ed reform efforts split almost equally between Democratic and Republican administrations, and pre-dates any anomalies that could be attributed to COVID-19 disruptions, these 6 points seem to suggest a US bipartisan ed reform mantra of "work harder, not smarter."

By contrast to that mantra, this Vox report concludes with the statement that, out of all the nations cited, the US "might want to take a few pages out of Finland's book."

Therefore, let's go to a third party -- the Australian Broadcasting Company -- to find out why that might be (Video 7).

Video 7: Why Finland's schools outperform most others across the developed world. © ABC Australia (2020).

Although it ends with the caveat that Finland has a "tiny, homogenous society" -- a caveat that is not true of all the OECD states that appear to be working smarter, not harder than the US -- Video 7 illustrates several practices that resonate with theories and concepts of "New Learning" as defined by this class (Cope, Kalantzis, 2016), and which stand in stark contrast to my experience as a US educator and parent, as well as, ironically, many of the means prior US ed reform efforts have adopted in their fruitless attempts to achieve Finland's enviable outcomes:

• Less time in traditional classrooms
• Teacher autonomy with regard to pedagogy, technology, and content that will be used to meet state standards
• Student empowerment through project-based learning and outside-of-classroom experiences
• Work-based learning opportunity in the school, pre-high school
• College-like free space for students' self-governed recreation, pre-high school
• Free food for everyone without qualifying metrics for families, schools, or districts
• Equal funding for all schools, with fees and fundraising prohibited
• Exams are used by schools to assess their individual support of students against objective benchmarks/standards, not for high-stakes school-to-school comparisons
• Undergraduate schools of education that are highly selective, with admission rates on par with US ivy league universities
• Parents that consequently trust teachers as professionals and do not have angst about which school to send their children

Considering that these practices are congruent with what constitutes "New Learning" -- which is itself a response to changes in technology, society, and human movements that educators could not have considered even forty years ago (Cope, Kalantzis, 2016) -- Finland's education system likely did not start out looking like this. In other words, the world changed, and, it seems, Finland's education system changed with it. Successfully.

Which raises the question why were they successful -- how did they navigate that change -- or, more specifically, in contrast to the US, did they use change management? 

Image 4. (Infosys, 2021)

Picking up from our last section, we will divide its concluding question into two related lines of inquiry:

• First, did the process of Finland's ed reform meet the business school and consulting community criteria to constitute "change management"; and if so, 
• Second, by comparison, do the processes of other attempts at ed reform and their outcomes, particularly those in the US, suggest that meeting "change management" criteria is a requirement for ed reform to succeed -- indeed, for ed reform to even exist?

To begin, let's first look at the process -- not the content -- by which Finland reformed its educational system over the last forty years, as described at a Harvard University Graduate School of Education symposium by that country's Director General of the Centre for International Mobility and Cooperation, Pasi Sahlberg. (Video 8).

Video 8: (Sahlberg, 2013).

Although an excellent presentation from start to finish, due to its length I will provide time stamps to draw the reader/viewer's attention to select points relevant to our particular question. (Table 1).

Table 1. Evidence of Change Management Processes in Finland's Ed Reform (Author's analysis of Video 8).

The evidence for this final point at time stamp 00:28:00 -- that Finland's change processes were managed in partnership -- might sum it all up. As Dr. Sahlberg defines it, the US' marketization approach to ed reform issues edicts and measures accountability from the top, leaves everything to chance at the school-level, and then lets students, teachers, and parents vote with their feet -- to the extent they can afford to -- by migrating to the test-confirmed "winners" amongst the consequent school-to-school competition. As Dr. Sahlberg states, any ed reform effort that depends on having "winning" and "losing" schools can never achieve ed reform as Finland defined it: a great school for each and every child. This goal is very different from merely aspiring to have the best international test scores once you've averaged out your entire student population. To achieve Finland's nationalistically more humble, but on an individual student level far more aspirational goal, only a professionalization approach -- while still contingent on the content of reform -- is not self-defeating. Like the picture that prefaces this section (image 4), Finland's professionalization approach as defined by Dr. Sahlberg converts marketization's competitive game of chance into a collaborative commitment to change. Change managment is inherent to the processes professionalization employs. More specifically, listening to the whole of Dr. Sahlberg's presentation, particularly his responses in the Q & A that starts after the hour-mark, it is clear that Finland sees their "best in the world education" not as a status to which they either strove or arrived, but merely a coincidence from an ongoing process not unlike the more detailed description of change management's "escalator" steps below (image 5).

Image 5. (Everest Marketing, 2019)

Thus, the answer to our first line of inquiry --  does the process of Finland's ed reform meet the business school and consulting community criteria to constitute "change management"? -- is a resounding "Yes."

Furthermore, Dr. Sahblerg's contrast of Finland's "change management-esque" professionalization approach with that of many other nations' -- primarily the US' -- marketization approach suggests the answer to our second line of inquiry as well: successful ed reform equals change management; change management is a requirement for ed reform to even exist. Dr. Sahblberg makes this clear (Video 8 at 00:34:37): regardless of their relative ranking, all countries who have adopted the marketization approach to ed reform have seen a decline in their key educational performance indicators.

Image 6 (Capture from Video 8). Although this chart is specific to math, Dr. Sahlberg states the same findings for science and reading: OECD countries who have adopted the contrary-to-change-management marketization approach to education reform have all seen a decline in student outcomes, across all PISA-tested subjects.

No wonder he has labeled the marketization approach with the acronym "Global Education Refrom Movement": GERM. Its infection precludes adopting a healthy professionalization (i.e., change management) approach that enables the possibility for ed reform to thrive; it unfortunately appears to be highly contagious among OECD countries; and, if Video 4 with Mr. Morrow is to be believed, even seems to be addictive. (PBS NewsHour, 2019).

Is there further evidence for this in the literature?

Exhibit A would be the fact that, despite the aforementioned plenitude of consultants and business writing on change management by that specific term of art (see, for example, Image 1, showing that just the best writing on the topic in recent years has generated two volumes in Harvard Business Review's "Must Read" series), using Google Scholar to conduct multiple searches using a variety of criteria to find any mention about the use of change management in education or education reform turns up a dearth of findings. The few one does find are often not from the US or other OECD countries, nor necessarily focused on the types reform that is the focus of this work (e.g., Hechanova, 2012; Hutton, 2017). To the contrary, one of the most recent and on point works to be found (White & Johnson, 2018), instead of offering any example of change management's use in US ed reform, states that "the education sector is lagging behind many professions" with regard to implementing change management, hence "historically, large-scale reform in schools has been shown to be extremely difficult ... due to the schools’ resistance to external and top-down directives." White & Johnson then proceed to provide fictional examples of how individual schools could independently use change management processes to respond to the "external and top-down directives" of an educational system that does not. Although a useful exercise, the implication is that -- as they showed no compunction about discussing specific schools and schools systems in other parts of their book chapter -- as recently as 2018, White & Johnson were struggling to cite a single US example of change management's systemic use in ed reform. 

Exhibit B would therefore be the more abundant literature on principal training and improvement, to which I turned for at least evidence of change management's use even if by some other name or description, as Dr. Sahlberg himself did not use this business term despite Finland's clear demonstration of its processes. However, once again, these articles only further proved Dr. Sahlberg's point and offered explanation for the disconcerting findings of Messrs. Morrow and Hess in Videos 4 and 5 above, respectively. Namely, Liebowitz & Porter (2019) cite that "a multiyear RAND Corporation evaluation of New Leaders, a highly selective, practice-oriented, alternative pathway" to principal certification demonstrated an impact on student reading and math for which "the effects are relatively small and vary substantially in magnitude and direction across district settings." Although Liebowitz & Porter's own meta-analysis of principal improvement programs seemed more promising, it must be noted that their's was from an international sample of studies, not specifically the Sahlberg-labeled "GERM" nations.

To the contrary, the best evidence Liebowitz & Porter provided for principal training/improvement as facilitating change management was when, together with "the Wallace Foundation, six large, urban U.S. school districts participated in a series of reforms to improve the principal 'pipeline' by developing strong leadership standards, providing preservice training (either internally in alternative programs or through higher education partnerships) aligned to these standards, recruiting widely and hiring selectively, and evaluating and supporting principals according to these standards. A RAND evaluation found that students of school principals hired through this pipeline improved their math and reading scores by 6- and 3-percentile points, respectively, compared with match-comparison principals ... and were also more likely to remain in their roles for at least 3 years." (Liebowtiz & Porter, 2019).

However, a careful reading of the direct reports on this project (Arcaria et al., 2013; 2015; 2016) suggests that the operative term in that paragraph is "hired": only principals or teacher-administrator principal-aspirants that were already deemed highly effective were allowed to participate in these pipeline programs. Therefore, it can be questioned how much "change" these programs promoted, as opposed to just buying the best team in baseball, frontloading their rosters with all-stars who would probably have outperformed their peers anyway. This seeems particularly true upon further reading, as there was not only wide variation in methods among the Wallace Foundation-funded principal preparation programs, but sometimes even diametrically opposite approaches. (Arcaria et al., 2013; 2015; 2016). Furthermore, when that admitted preparation-variation is combined with the fact that this pipeline project did not address the ed reform environment in which these principals had to labor on the district, state, or national level (see also, Yan, 2019), it clearly runs contrary to Finland's professionalization approach. In Finland, the preparation is standard, but then principals and teachers are given great autonomy later to personalize education as trusted, responsible professionals (ABC News - Australia, 2020; Sahlberg, 2013). The Wallace pipeline seems to remain congruent with the marketization approach: multiple paths of teacher-principle preparation that are then assessed through a test-based accountability that is only possible when the students' education has been standardized (i.e., de-personalized). 

Therefore, the Wallace Foundation's principal pipeline does not qualify as an application of change management, and, to a lesser degree, its outcomes remain suspect, at least with regard to attribution. Theoretically, that may be why -- despite its high-profile execution 2010-2016 -- it was not cited as an example of change management in education by White & Johnson (2018).

Other recent articles boasting of education reform through principal (leadership) improvement are even more problematic. The National Governors Association white paper "How Maryland Policymakers Are Working Together to Improve School Principal Quality" (Carlson & Rowland, 2017) gives a good breakdown of the problem and what the state has done, but then abdicates offering any data to back up its "lessons learned" and makes no mention of their activities' impact on student outcomes. Similarly, Tingle et al. (2017) seem to just assume that the principal/leadership development programs they examine are good and that the principals who passed through them are effective, limiting their presentation and analysis solely to subjective survey data of what those principals liked or found, in their opinion, effective about the programs they attended.

An article from Sweden took that same hollow  approach (Jerdborg, 2021), which is effectively shot down by a compatriot's examination of half a century of Swedish principal training through a wide variety of methods, the upshot of which is that although such training did have an effect on principals and their practice as individuals, it had no effect on their schools or student outcomes, regardless of method, largely due to what that researcher deemed a lack of chain of command communication and implementation. (Norberg, 2018). In other words, the content of change may or may not have been good, but the lack of change management processes prevented the reform from happening. 

Perhaps that example from another GERM-infected country explains the contrast between (1) all the "effective US state programs" cited by the Education Commission of the States without substantiation (Pechota & Scott, 2020) or the Learning Policy Institute paper "Supporting Principals' Learning" (Sutcher et al., 2017), and (2) the lack of such effects in the broader US data (PBS NewsHour, 2017; Hess, 2019; Sahlberg, 2013). A particularly poignant note about the Sutcher et al. (2017) article is that one of the "effective programs" it highlights is New Leaders, for which, as discussed above, White & Johnson (2018) found that the "magnitude of these effects are relatively small and vary substantially in magnitude and direction across district settings."

Indeed, it appears that business professors and consultants have spoken more about change management's potential in education than educators are even aware of that concept's existence (see appendix).

Therefore, we may conclude from a review of the literature that there is evidence (Finland) that education reform exists where there has been change management, and even more evidence that it does not exist where change management is absent, the US being the example par excellence. 

This literature review reveals that:

1. Change management is a widely researched and employed set of processes in organizational behavior;
2. When change management processes have been integral to a nation's education reform movement, dramatic improvement in key education performance indicators have been realized (e.g., Finland);
3. Change management processes do not appear to have been explicitly or even implicitly employed in most OECD nations' education reform efforts over the past two decades; and
4. To the contrary, many OECD nations, the US primary among them, have adopted a marketization approach to education reform, the processes of which are antithetical to those of change management.

Therefore, rather than identifying a gap in the literature, we have identified a gap in practice that explains why the US has nothing to show for twenty years of so-called education reform (PBS NewsHour, 2017; Hess, 2019), which may be summed up by the old French adage above: the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Thus, I had to change this section's original title from "Conclusion & Next Steps", as there are no next steps in the US' current direction that will realize the goals of education reform; to quote another idiom, this one ascribed to rural New England: you can't get there from here.

Instead, those who are serious about education reform need to stop, turn 180 degrees, and face the opposite direction before taking another step.

I believe theologians have a single word for that: Repent.