Blogg-Ed Indetermination

It took me a weeks longer than my usual pace of a book per week to read Robert Evan’s The Human Side of School Change: Reform, Resistance, and the Real-Life Problems of Innovation (Amazon citation). This was not because the book is hard to read, or uninteresting, or because I think the author’s premises are wrong. Quite the opposite in fact. It took me a long time to read because it caused me to really think and to reflect on my many years of experience in schools, universities, and the education industry.

Evans had me from the Introduction, where he states: “…the futility of school change is legendary. Perhaps no American institution has been reformed more often, with less apparent effect, than the school.” Harsh words perhaps, but resonant in me.

For 14 chapters Evans cites research from education, psychology, and business to describe how difficult it is for people and institutions in general to change, and how many of these difficulties are magnified within the school community. Despite millions of dollars and millions of person hours invested in change, “never have so many teachers and administrators worked so hard or so long and felt less rewarded or alone.”

Evans divides his book into three major sections:

1. The Nature of Change
2. Dimensions of Change
3. Leading Innovation

Each section is replete with examples of how difficult change is to manage. One could easily come away from this book feeling that the situation in schools is, at the end of the day, hopeless. But in his final chapter, entitled “Reach and Realism, Experience and Hope,” Evans brings those of us who are trying to affect change in schools to a better place. In a section that perhaps the Obama campaign subconsciously noted entitled “The Triumph of Hope,” Evans acknowledges that the pace of change in schools  can be discouraging, taking a generation or longer. A generation of hard, often thankless labor and persistence. He upends Samuel Johnson’s jest about remarriage by suggesting that such a triumph of hope over experience is precisely what we do need, and ends with a moving quotation from Vaclav Havel:

Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It’s not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how if turns out. It is this hope, above all, that gives us the strength to love and to continually try new thing, even in conditions that seem hopeless.

Evan’s book has given me much to think about, and perhaps much to write about. I am more committed than ever to change and innovation, but more clear-eyed about what can be accomplished under even the best of circumstances. Discouraged, no. Better equipped, absolutely!