Amy M. Hightower, Center for the Study of Teaching and Policy
January 2002
This report describes the efforts of the nation's eighth largest school district to use the coercive power of bureaucracy to create an education system grounded in effective principles of teaching and learning. The author, Stanford's Amy Hightower, notes up front that she is trying to meld two characterizations-districts as bureaucratic and districts as learning-centric-that have traditionally been seen as polar opposites. For the better part of two decades the bureaucracies of large, urban school districts have been vilified by education reformers as "dysfunctional dinosaurs," "intransigent," and "beyond reform." Hightower claims that a small set of divergent examples now challenges the image of school districts as irrelevant, hopelessly disjointed, and bureaucratically hamstrung. One such example is San Diego. In March 1998, Alan D. Bersin, a former U.S. Attorney, was named as the city's new superintendent and charged with pulling the school system out of its "organizational rut." One of Bersin's first acts was to recruit educator Anthony Alvarado to serve as his Chancellor of Instruction and co-leader of reform. This dynamic duo declared that the "status quo was no longer acceptable." They made clear that they would use their bureaucratic power to refocus the system on instructional issues. They set about to "jolt the system." They opposed those who advocated incremental reforms and used every available mechanism of coercion to transform a system entrenched in standard operating procedures to one where administrators, principals, and teachers worked together to improve instruction across the city. Bersin's chief of staff succinctly expressed the bottom line: "There are two types of people in this [district] community. There are the teachers and those who support teaching....And if you can't fit into one of those two categories, if you can't accept your role in one of those two categories, then you need to leave." Their strategy has its critics. A top-ranking administrator argued (upon exiting the system) that an "era of intimidation" had begun. Teacher unionists asserted that reforms were being forced on them. Despite the dissent, Hightower writes, the San Diego City Schools show how a district can employ bureaucratic methods to destroy a dysfunctional culture and create something grounded in effective learning and teaching. But, she adds, despite initial success-SAT-9 scores increased three years in a row-it is too early to know whether these changes will prove durable. This report is available at http://www.ctpweb.org.
