Introduction

The purpose of this chapter is to propose a theory to explain why educational reforms fail again and again and to advocate for a new approach to improving schools and student achievement in the US context. The chapter integrates four related sets of empirical studies. After describing the phenomenon of repeated failures of educational reforms and the intractability of school improvement, the first set of empirical studies is introduced to argue that the assumption of a “loosely coupled” system (thus, the approach to school improvement is to tighten the educational system via standards and accountability assessments) is untenable; rather, the educational system is bifurcated, with the state-district-school as one plate and the classroom as the other, resulting in a fault line between the state-district-school and the classroom and the failure of bridging the two tectonic plates. The second set of empirical studies illustrates that the relationship between the principal and teachers is characterized by the “win-win situation,” rather than the “zero-sum game.” Therefore, it is feasible to promote the concept of integrated school leadership to bridge the fault line. The third set of empirical studies finds that the construct and practice of learning-centered, integrated school leadership are positively related to student achievement. The fourth set of empirical studies reveals that the construct and practice of school renewal predict not only the current level but also the growth of student achievement.

Thus, to bridge the fault line via integrated school leadership, a new school improvement approach – with dual foci on the learning-centered, integrated school leadership as the “content” and school renewal as the “process” – is proposed. This chapter is a synthesis of the earlier four related sets of empirical studies, with relevant key results from these empirical studies presented. The four sets of empirical studies are synthesized for the first time to propose the bifurcation theory and to advocate a new school improvement model, with dual foci on both the content of learning-centered, integrated school leadership and the process of school renewal.

The Issue of the Intractability of School Improvement

How to improve our schools has been a perennial question in American education. In his classic piece, “Reform Again, Again and Again,” Cuban (Reference Cuban1990) lamented that educational reform had failed repeatedly. In explaining why educational change fails, he moved beyond the argument of a lack of rationality and focused on the political and institutional perspectives. Similarly, Sarason’s (Reference Sarason1990) book, The Predictable Failure of Educational Change, also noted the predictability of the failure of educational reform, primarily from the cultural perspective. So why is school improvement so difficult?

A common theme of the classic studies on the failure of educational reform is that educational reforms could not transform the classroom practice. On this topic, Cohen (Reference Cohen1990) has written an insightful essay on why educational change fails, called “A Revolution in One Classroom: The Case of Mrs. Oublier.” Oublier is a pseudonym based on the French word meaning “to forget.” Cohen studied the teaching practice of Mrs. Oublier, who enthusiastically embraced a new math initiative in the 1980s. She felt she was fluent in the new math language and successful using the new curriculum. However, when Cohen observed her classroom, he found that not much had changed. While her teaching did reflect the new math in many ways (e.g., she adopted the curriculum’s innovative instructional materials and activities), Mrs. Oublier “forgot” about the new math as far as her teaching practice was concerned, treating the new mathematical topics designed to help students make sense of mathematics as though she were teaching the old math curriculum. According to Cohen, she has revised the content but taught the class “in ways that discourage(d) exploration of students’ understanding” (p. 312), a phenomenon of old wine in a new bottle.

Cohen’s (Reference Cohen1990) case study was a good example of how difficult it is to change a teacher’s classroom instructional practices, even when teachers are enthusiastic about a new curriculum initiative. In concluding his article, Cohen identified the essence of the intractability of the school improvement issue as “whether federal, state, and district mandates to alter schooling will get past the classroom door” (p. 3).

One of the most systematic studies that illustrate how difficult it is for educational reform to penetrate through the classroom door was Goodlad and Klein’s (Reference Goodlad and Klein1975), Looking Behind the Classroom Door. The book was a summary of the data that Goodlad and his research team collected and analyzed while visiting hundreds of classrooms across the country. Goodlad and Klein (Reference Goodlad and Klein1970) first formulated ten reasonable expectations for classroom instruction based on whether the slogans of educational reform were translated into classroom-level practice. For example, one of the expectations was “individualized instruction,” but they did not see much of individualized instruction in classrooms. In fact, to their dismay, Goodlad and his team found that none of these so-called reasonable expectations had been translated into classroom practice.

The issue of the intractability of school improvement continued to be revisited after the seminal work by Goodlad, Cuban, and Cohen. For example, Spillane (Reference Spillane1999) demonstrated the complexity of changing teachers’ instructional practices. O’Day (Reference O’Day2002) suggested that teachers are inclined to metaphorically and literally “close” the classroom door “as a coping strategy that potentially allows them to focus, but it also leads to isolation” (p. 301). Shen and Ma (Reference Shen and Ma2006), using a nationally representative sample of teachers from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) Schools and Staffing Survey, investigated the relationships among the state’s curriculum guidelines, schools’ curriculum, and classroom teachers’ instruction and found that the influence of states and schools stopped at the classroom door. Later, Bryk et al. (Reference Bryk, Sebring, Allensworth, Luppescu and Easton2009) noted that teachers tended “to determine their own objectives and enact instruction accordingly, leading to variation within the same school” (pp. 264–265).

Therefore, one of the reasons that we “reform again, again, and again” – to use the title of Cuban’s (Reference Dane and Schneider1990) article – is that educational reform agendas have not been translated into classroom practice. This begs the question: Why is it so hard to translate educational reform agendas into classroom practice? Why has our field not prioritized bridging the fault line in the bifurcated educational system?

The Theory of Loose Coupling

Weick’s (Reference Weick1976) loose coupling theory has been used to explain the intractability of school improvement. Weick’s seminal paper, “Educational Organizations as Loosely Coupled Systems,” defined “loose coupling” as events that are attached to each other to a certain extent, yet each retains its discrete identity. Over the years, several researchers have studied the application of loose coupling in education, notably Hautala et al.’s (Reference Hautala, Helander and Korhonen2018) recent integrative review of the literature. As a result, a general mental model that educational organizations are loosely coupled has emerged and essentially become the consensus model.

There have been a variety of reactions to the loose coupling theory applied to educational systems. One school of thought regards loose coupling as a problem to be solved and is interested in employing approaches to tightening the loose coupling (e.g., Fusarelli, Reference Fusarelli2002; Lutz, Reference Lutz1982; Morley & Rassool, Reference Morley and Rassool2000; Smith & O’Day, Reference Smith, O’Day, Fuhrman and Malen1990). The systemic change movement is an example of this approach. Smith and O’Day (Reference Smith, O’Day, Fuhrman and Malen1990), for example, regarded the “fragmented, complex, multilayered educational policy system in which they (schools) are embedded” as a “fundamental barrier to developing and sustaining successful schools in the USA” (p. 237). They argued that efforts must be made at the state level in order to target the whole system through an alignment of the intended changes on standards, curriculum, and student tests. By targeting the whole system, the reform efforts could be more consistent and effective. The fundamental assumptions of the systemic change movement are that (a) only systemic reform can tighten the school system and (b) these reform efforts will indeed penetrate all the way down to the classroom level.

Generally speaking, educational reform policies at the federal and state levels in the last twenty-five years have gone down this path of tightening the loosely coupled system. Clinton’s Improving America’s Schools Act of 1994 established curriculum standards for mathematics and English language arts (ELA), among others. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 required, based on curriculum standards, statewide testing and accountability measures for schools, principals, and teachers. Obama’s Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015 continued the accountability measures. The strategy in the earlier reauthorizations of the Elementary and Secondary School Act and ensuing state policies was first to develop, promulgate, and implement curriculum standards. Once the curriculum standards were in place, statewide testing of student achievement became possible. With the data from statewide testing, policies were proposed and implemented to hold schools, teachers, principals, and other educators accountable. All of these policy efforts have aimed at tightening the loosely coupled system. As Mason (Reference Mason2001) summarized, the core logic of systemic change is to align a system of standards and instructional guidance at all levels of the educational system, and the alignment is reinforced by accountability measures based on mandatory statewide standardized testing.

Given the seemingly unsuccessful development and implementation of systemic change, researchers have sought to understand how standards-based policy and practice have played out at the district and school levels and have influenced teaching and learning in the classroom (Mason, Reference Mason2001). Shen and Ma’s (Reference Shen and Ma2006) study used nationally representative school and teacher samples from the NCES Schools and Staffing Survey to investigate “how the systemic change theory transpired when it was applied to the technical core of teaching and learning” (p. 235). They found that, from the states’ guidelines, to the schools’ curriculum, to classroom teachers’ instruction, systemic change was able to penetrate all the way down to the school level, but again stopped just outside the classroom door.

A Bifurcated Educational System

Empirical studies have continued along this line over the years, testing the relationship between the district and school, and between the school and classroom. As mentioned earlier, Shen and Ma (Reference Shen and Ma2006), studying the relationship among the state’s curriculum guidelines, schools’ curricula, and classroom teachers’ instruction, found that the state’s curriculum guidelines and schools’ curricula were tightly aligned and that the influence of states and schools stopped at the classroom door. Later, Shen, Gao, and Xia (Reference Shen, Gao and Xia2017) found that the relationship between the school and the classroom in data-informed practices was loose. The summary of the earlier empirical findings, all based on multilevel analyses of nationally representative data, suggests that the educational system is not loosely coupled throughout, as previously thought. Instead, the technical core of the educational system is “bifurcated” – with tight coupling from the state level to the district level and to the school level, and loose coupling from the school level to the classroom level. Borrowing a metaphor from geoscience, it appears that the educational system is composed of two “tectonic plates.” One plate includes the state, the district, and the school, and the second plate is the classroom. These two tectonic plates are separated by a “fault line” between them. As documented in previous studies (Bryk et al., Reference Bryk, Sebring, Allensworth, Luppescu and Easton2009; Cohen, Reference Cohen1990; Goodlad & Klein, Reference Goodlad and Klein1975; O’Day, Reference O’Day2002; Shen & Ma, Reference Shen and Ma2006; Spillane, Reference Spillane1999), “the fault line” is an important reason for the perennial phenomenon of the failure of educational reform because the practices advocated by the reform fail to materialize in the classroom.

The theory of bifurcated systems challenges the conventional wisdom that the educational system is loosely coupled and calls into question the dominant reform agenda for the last twenty-five years, which advocated tightening the system via curriculum standards, accountability tests, and evaluation as the way to improve the K-12 schools. In other words, one of the major issues in educational policy today is that policy initiatives at the federal and state levels are not consistent with the nature of the educational system. As far as the technical core of the schooling – teaching and learning – is concerned, the schooling system is tightly coupled from the state to the school level, but it becomes loosely coupled where classroom-level teaching is concerned. This bifurcation explains the perennial phenomenon of “teachers closing their classroom doors” (Goodlad & Klein, Reference Goodlad1975), “reforming again, again, and again” (Cuban, Reference Dane and Schneider1990), and the non-event of “revolution in a classroom” (Cohen, Reference Cohen1990).

Classroom Door as a Fault Line and the Role of Principalship and School Leadership

To continue the metaphor of tectonic plates, the theory of bifurcated systems indicates that there is a fault line between the school/principal level, on the one hand, and the classroom level, on the other. Among other implications, the fault line points to the importance of the role of principalship and the concept of integrated school leadership in bridging the fault line.

The Role of Integrated School Leadership

Given the multiple roles that principals play, they are hailed as “superheroes” (Celio & Havey, Reference Celio and Harvey2005). However, principals alone cannot bridge the fault line between the school level and the classroom level. Therefore, we need to promote a strengthening of school leadership through the integration of principal and teacher leadership.

In the literature, there is much evidence about the effect of principal leadership (Leithwood & Louis, Reference Louis and Marks2011; Leithwood et al., Reference Leithwood, Louis, Anderson and Wahlstrom2004; Marzano et al., Reference Marzano, Waters and McNulty2005) and teacher leadership on the success of students and schools (Harris & Muijs, Reference Muijs and Harris2003; Reeves, Reference Reeves2008; Wenner & Campbell, Reference Wenner and Campbell2017; York-Barr & Duke, Reference York-Barr and Duke2004; Zepeda et al., Reference Zepeda, Mayers and Benson2013). However, these theories and models of principal leadership and teacher leadership have been developed on separate and distinct tracks, with studies tending to focus on one and ignoring the other. When principal and teacher leadership are treated separately in either research or practice, it is difficult to estimate the interactional effects of principal leadership and teacher leadership (Leithwood & Jantzi, Reference Leithwood and Jantzi1999, Reference Leithwood and Jantzi2000). This limitation is not surprising given the classic understanding that the impacts of principal leadership tend to be mediated through teachers, particularly when concerning student achievement (e.g., Hallinger & Heck, Reference Hallinger, Heck, Leithwood and Hallinger1996a, Reference Hallinger and Heck1996b, Reference Hallinger and Heck1998; Leithwood & Jantzi, Reference Leithwood and Jantzi2000). To date, very rarely has research focused on the integration of principal leadership and teacher leadership, which can be referred to as “integrated school leadership.”

Through comprehensive literature reviews, Hallinger and Heck (Reference Hallinger, Heck, Leithwood and Hallinger1996a, Reference Hallinger and Heck1996b, Reference Hallinger and Heck1998, Reference Hallinger and Heck2011a, Reference Hallinger and Heck2011b) developed a typology of leadership effectiveness: (a) the direct-effect model (teachers do not interact with principals), (b) the mediated-effect model (teachers passively mediate principals’ influence), and (c) the reciprocal-effect model (teachers actively interact with principals). Hallinger and Heck (2010) argued that both the direct and the mediated effects do not fully capture the leadership effects and suggested a reciprocal-effects model to account for the interaction between principal leadership and teacher leadership.

Moreover, given the bifurcated system and the fault line between the school/principal level and the teacher/classroom level, it is more constructive to develop and practice integrated school leadership. Shen and his colleagues conducted an extensive literature review and mapped out the dimensions of integrated school leadership based on comprehensive reviews of the literature. From it, they developed a typology of seven dimensions of learning-centered leadership to understand integrated school leadership, as well as an instrument to measure it (see Figure 1.1 and Table 1.1) (Shen & Burt, Reference Smith, Cobb, Farran, Cordray and Munter2015; Shen & Cooley, Reference Shen, Cooley, Sanzo, Myran and Nomoore2012, Reference Shen and Cooley2013; Shen et al., Reference Shen, Ma, Gao, Palmer, Poppink, Burt, Leneway, McCrumb, Pearson, Rainey, Reeves and Wegenke2018).

1.1

Seven dimensions of learning-centered school leadership

Table 1.1Seven dimensions of learning-centered school leadership and empirical evidence

Table 1.1 Long description

Table shows the Seven Dimensions of Learning-Centered School Leadership from A to G with corresponding elements from the Balanced Leadership model and elements from other research. The dimensions covered are A, Passion and commitment for school renewal, B, Safe and orderly school operation, C, High, cohesive, and culturally relevant expectations for all students, D, Coherent curricular programs, E, Distributive and empowering leadership, F, Real-time and embedded instructional assessment, and G, Data-informed decision-making.

* Elements from Marzano et al. (Reference Marzano, Waters and McNulty2005)

Figure 1.1 indicates that (a) commitment and passion for school renewal are at the center of learning-centered school leadership and that (b) data-informed decision-making supports the key substantive dimensions of (c) safe and orderly school operation, (d) high, cohesive, and culturally relevant expectations for all students, (e) distributive and empowering leadership, (f) coherent curriculum, and (g) real-time and embedded instructional assessment. Table 1.1 shows the literature base for the seven dimensions of learning-centered school leadership.

These seven dimensions are the integration of principal and teacher leaders because the dimensions encourage principals and teachers to enter each other’s sphere of leadership. Based on the seven-dimension typology of school leadership, Shen et al. (Reference Shen, Ma, Gao, Palmer, Poppink, Burt, Leneway, McCrumb, Pearson, Rainey, Reeves and Wegenke2018) developed and validated an instrument that can be used to measure the collective effort of principals and teachers who exercise their own unique leadership to generate integrated school leadership. It is an instrument called “Learning-Centered School Leadership,” which has the earlier seven dimensions or subscales (Figure 1.1 and Table 1.1). Their empirical research indicates that the instrument has sound psychometric properties, including using the subscales and the whole scale to predict school-level student achievement as measured by the state’s standardized accountability tests (Shen et al., Reference Shen, Ma, Gao, Palmer, Poppink, Burt, Leneway, McCrumb, Pearson, Rainey, Reeves and Wegenke2018). In other words, schools that have higher ratings on these dimensions tend to have higher school-level student achievement.

The seven learning-centered leadership dimensions illustrated earlier are examples of integrated school leadership, a combination of both principal and teacher leadership (Shen et al., Reference Shen, Ma, Gao, Palmer, Poppink, Burt, Leneway, McCrumb, Pearson, Rainey, Reeves and Wegenke2018). They illustrated an image of distributive leadership, but with a content focus, that is, emphasizing those dimensions of work associated with student achievement. They also represented what Cohen (Reference Cotton2011) discussed as “capacity” to address the issues associated with the fragmented education system. The construct of integrated school leadership includes the elements of, for example, principal’s instructional leadership (R. D. Goddard et al., Reference Goddard, Goddard, Kim and Miller2015; Y. L. Goddard et al., Reference Goddard, Goddard, Bailes and Nichols2019) and teacher leadership (Sebastian et al., Reference Sebastian, Allensworth and Huang2016, Reference Sebastian, Huang and Allensworth2017; Shen, Wu, Reeves, Zheng, Ryan, & Anderson, Reference Anderson, Leithwood and Strauss2020). The seven dimensions illustrated earlier are just examples of integrated school leadership. More indicators of integrated school leadership should be developed based on practice and research.

Moving toward School Renewal: A New Approach to School Improvement

A second principle for school improvement in the bifurcated educational context is the school renewal process, which emphasizes implementation integrity by placing less emphasis on the accuracy and completeness of applying a program model and more on the internal conditions and external pressures of a given context. This is counter to conventional lines of research and practice that focus on implementation fidelity, which emphasizes the extent to which a project follows a prescribed model (Bond et al., Reference Bond, Evans, Salyers, Williams and Kim2000). Proponents of implementation fidelity assert that if we “faithfully” carry out the innovations, we will see results. However, given (a) the bifurcated educational system (i.e., the loose coupling between the school level and the classroom level) and (b) the unique ecology of the implementation sites, to “faithfully” carry out prescribed educational innovations becomes a fantasy that has repeatedly resulted in the failure of educational reform.

Scholars (e.g., Goodlad, Reference Goodlad1975a, Reference Goodlad1975b; Shen, Reference Spillane and Coldren1999; Shen & Burt, Reference Smith, Cobb, Farran, Cordray and Munter2015; Soder, Reference Soder1999) have been advocating for a model of school renewal to initiate and sustain educational change. There has been sustained research and practice on this topic, with contrasts between “school reform” and “school renewal” developed. For example, Goodlad (Reference Goodlad1975a, Reference Goodlad1975b) distinguished the research, development, dissemination, and evaluation (RDDE) process (associated with school reform) and the dialogue, decision, action, and evaluation (DDAE) process (associated with school renewal); Soder (Reference Soder1999) observed that “you can tell people what to do [reform], or you can let people determine their purposes and ways to achieve them [renewal]” (p. 568). The differences between “reform” and “renewal” could be summarized in Table 1.2.

In most studies on program effects, fidelity was measured as a moderator to explain the variation of the program effects across different sites. Carroll et al. (Reference Carroll, Patterson, Wood, Booth, Rick and Balain2007) developed a two-facet framework for implementation fidelity: adherence and moderators. Adherence is the bottom-line indicator of implementation fidelity, which includes four elements: content, coverage, frequency, and duration. The following factors may also influence the degree of fidelity: intervention complexity, facilitation strategies, quality of delivery, and participant responsiveness.

However, Bryk (Reference Bryk2016) has indicated that in the social sciences, improvement programs are often designed with high complexity, which involves multiple roles, processes, and tools, as well as interactions among people, and change agents in these improvement programs face a wide range of factors in their organization and local context. In many situations, the program effects are often moderated by these local contextual conditions. Therefore, when designing an improvement program, we must consider what we care about: to know the true effect of our program or to improve a situation using this program. If we emphasize the first purpose, we may care only about the nature of the program itself, while in the latter, we must focus on “the implementation demands that the intervention places on local contexts and organizational structures” (Bryk, Reference Bryk2016, para. 4). Under the first purpose or in a situation Bryk (Reference Bryk2016) called “Simple-Simple,” where the programs are well defined by explicit sequences of steps and require little change in broad organizational process, implementation with fidelity is the right concept to apply. However, in complex situations, “successful implementation requires learning how to get this intervention to work reliably in the hands of many different professionals working in varied organizational contexts; it is a problem of local adaptive integration” (Bryk, Reference Bryk2016, para. 9). Thus, in those circumstances, it is more sensible to adopt the idea of implementation integrity.

Implementation integrity puts less emphasis on the accuracy and completeness of applying the program model and focuses instead on the given internal conditions and external pressures, that is, what are the most appropriate things to do? That is why the renewal model emphasizes the creative tension between the external and internal influences, a non-linear and vaguely goal-oriented path, implementers as active developers, and the process of DDAE (Shen & Burt, Reference Smith, Cobb, Farran, Cordray and Munter2015). Even though some researchers argued that the adaption of implementation to different sites may comprise the program’s efficacy, the rigid adherence to program procedures is counterproductive to the renewal process (Dane & Schneider, Reference Dane and Schneider1998). Moreover, Shen, Yang, Cao, and Warfield (Reference Shen, Yang, Cao and Warfield2008) suggested that the adaptations promote program fidelity rather than competing with it. Thus, in education settings, the idea of implementation integrity is more reasonable and feasible given the complex local contexts (LeMahieu, Reference Mason2011). Finally, implementation integrity empowers schools, principals, teachers, and others to reconceptualize with critical thinking and be creative in developing renewal activities in their unique settings.

One of the issues in improving classrooms is the personal, interpersonal, and organizational capacity that exists within the system (Mitchell & Sackney, Reference Mitchell and Sackney2011). Given the context of the bifurcation theory, the issue of the capacity at the school level, and particularly at the classroom level, becomes even more prominent. The constructs of bifurcation theory, integrated leadership, and school renewal have three implications for policy, practice, and research. First, these constructs provide a perspective that is different from the externally driven reform model, focuses more on the internal responsiveness, and blurs the lines of teacher leadership and principalship to align and increase the capacity at various levels. Second, these constructs also point to those practices that are consistent with school improvement in the context of the bifurcation theory, integrated leadership and school renewal, such as engaging in (a) working in learning communities according to Mitchell and Sackney’s (Reference Mitchell and Sackney2011) framework (e.g., “the construction of knowledge” in personal capacity, “building the team” in interpersonal capacity, and “leadership for learning” in “organizational capacity”), (b) practicing along the dimensions measured in the instrument titled “Orientation to School Renewal” (Shen et al., Reference Shen, Ma, Mansberger, Gao, Palmer, Burt and Whitten2020), and (c) going outside the school walls to create networked improvement communities (Bryk et al., Reference Bryk, Gomez and Grunow2010; Chapman, Reference Chapman2008; Chapman & Muijs, Reference Chapman and Muijs2014; Wohlstetter et al., Reference Wohlstetter, Malloy, Chau and Polhemus2003). Third, more research is needed to promote the practices of integrated leadership and school renewal in the context of the bifurcation theory. Developing and validating practices for integrated leadership and school renewal to enhance the capacity at various levels should continue to be at the core of the school improvement efforts.

Moving into the Future: Promising Evidence

Two groups of promising evidence start to emerge when employing “school renewal” as an approach for school improvement in the context of the bifurcated educational system. The first group of evidence is the positive correlation between the school’s level of renewal activities and student achievement. Working with more than 120 principals and 360 teacher leaders over the years, Shen and his colleagues have gradually distilled the seven dimensions of school renewal (see Table 1.2). They took one more step and developed and validated an instrument called “Orientation to School Renewal” (Shen et al., Reference Shen and Wu2024). Through the validation process, they found that the instrument has good psychometric properties. As to factorial validity, the comparative fit index (CFI) was 0.931, the Tucker-Lewis index (TLI) 0.913, and the standardized root mean square residual (SRMR) 0.037, all indicating good data-model fit. As to reliability, the internal consistencies (Cronbach’s alpha) across the seven factors of school renewal ranged from 0.807 to 0.923 and for the whole instrument 0.974, all above the typical 0.80 cutoff value. Therefore, the mental model of the seven dimensions of school renewal has good factorial validity and reliability, and the seven dimensions of school renewal are supported by the empirical data.

More importantly, Shen and his colleagues went one step further to test the predictive power of the instrument and found that the ratings on the school renewal instrument, both the subscales and the whole scale, are generally able to predict not only the school’s current student achievement but also the growth in student achievement on the Michigan Student Test of Educational Progress (M-STEP). In other words, if a school is rated higher in terms of the level of the school renewal efforts as measured by the instrument, the school’s student achievement level tends to be higher and grow more. For example, as to the gain in student achievement, a one-unit increase (on the measurement scale of 1–6) in school renewal efforts was associated with 4.23 and 2.74 percentage points higher from the prior to the current year in terms of the gain in proportion of students who reached the proficient and advanced categories in mathematics and ELA, respectively, at the grade level. They also found that the multiple regression models accounted for 65 percent of the variance in gains in the proportion of students who reached the proficient and advanced categories in mathematics at the grade level and between 62 percent and 64 percent of the variance in gains in the proportion of students who reached the proficient and advanced categories in ELA at the grade level. These percentages were highly substantial, indicating great performance of the multiple regression models in accounting for the variance in gains in the proportion of students who reached the proficient and advanced categories in both mathematics and ELA at the grade level (Shen et al., Reference Shen, Ma, Mansberger, Gao, Palmer, Burt and Whitten2020). Therefore, the instrument could be used as a tool to guide and monitor the school renewal process, an effort that is effective given the context of the bifurcated system.

The second group of evidence to support the concept of “school renewal” is the actual school improvement that took place in schools. Through the Learning-Centered Leadership Development Program funded by the School Leadership Program of the US Department of Education, fifty schools were engaged in the school renewal process as described in Table 1.2 to develop, implement, and evaluate school renewal activities. As a result, evidence of positive effects emerged. First, participating schools reported that the school renewal process helped the development of the renewal activities and that the renewal activities were sustained. About one year after the schools completed the project, 73–93 percent of the principals surveyed chose “most of it” or “all of it” regarding whether the renewal activities developed and implemented along the seven dimensions of learning-centered school leadership were sustained (Reeves et al., Reference Reeves, Palmer, McCrumb, Shen and Sanzo2014). One of the reasons for the sustainability is that the renewal activities were developed together by the principal and teachers to address the unique needs of the school. Second, principal leadership has been statistically significantly improved as measured by (a) Vanderbilt Assessment of Leadership in Education (VAL-ED) and (b) Data-informed Decision-Making on High-Impact Strategies (DIDM). Compared to principals in the control group, those in the experimental group improved over a 2.5-year period by 0.52 more on a 5-point scale for VAL-Ed and 0.42 points more on a 4-point scale for DIDM. Both results were statistically significant. Third, the successful school renewal activities and the learning from these cases were documented in eight case studies, with the school as the unit of analysis (Shen, Reference Shen, Shen and Burt2015). The summary across these eight case studies suggested that school renewal activities penetrated classroom doors and improved student learning in these high-needs schools by (a) having integrated school leadership to blur the line between principal and teacher leadership, (b) facilitating teachers’ investment and engagement in initiating and implementing school renewal activities that have implications for classroom instruction, and (c) improving the overall climate of the school, particularly the expectations for teachers and how to meet these expectations (Poppink, Reference Poppink, Shen and Burt2015).

Summary

Educational reforms fail again and again. One major reason for the failure is the absence of bridging the fault line between the two tectonic plates in the bifurcated educational system. The dominant educational reform initiatives in the last twenty-five years have focused on the mechanisms for tightening the loosely coupled educational system. This focused attention on curriculum standards, statewide accountability testing, and evaluation of the school and educator was based on the misguided conventional wisdom that the educational system is loosely coupled from the state down through to the classroom. Instead, the educational system is a bifurcated system, with the connected space between the state, district, and school being one tectonic plate, and the classroom another tectonic plate, with a fault line between the two. The theory of bifurcated systems not only explains why educational reforms stop at the classroom door but also raises the key issue of how to bridge the fault line between the two tectonic plates.

In the context of the theory of bifurcated systems, two principles are proposed for school improvement. The first principle is to integrate principal leadership and teacher leadership to develop and practice the construct of integrated school leadership. One model for the school leadership is the seven dimensions of learning-centered leadership. The second principle is the renewal process that emphasizes implementation integrity, versus the reform model that emphasizes fidelity. Reform stops outside the classroom door, while the renewal process penetrates it, helping to transform classroom instructional practices that increase student achievement. The first principle focuses on the content, and the second on the process. The combination of these two principles helps bridge the fault line and improve our schools. The improvement of our schools is reflected in not only enhancing learning for all students but also achieving equity within and between schools for various subgroups of students based on gender, race, language, socioeconomic status, specialized service designations, and others.

The empirical bases of the current article – such as (a) the structural nature of the school system (loosely coupled, tightly coupled, or bifurcated), (b) the nature of the relationship between the principal and teachers in various professional domains (a zero-sum game or win-win situation), (c) the seven dimensions of learning-centered, integrated school leadership, and (d) the seven dimensions of school renewal – have been developed solely in the US context, which is a limitation of the current chapter. Similar studies could be conducted in other countries to investigate, for example, the structural nature of the school system, the nature of the power relationship between the principal and teachers, and leadership constructs and practices based on the findings on the structural nature of the system and the power relationship in the system. The findings from similar studies in other countries could yield insights for school improvement, particularly for how to raise student achievement. A new topic for research – how to improve the relationship between and among various levels of the structure of the educational system to enhance student achievement – appears to emerge.