RESTRUCTURING

Our nation's schools enter a new decade in ferment over what should be done to improve their service to children. The 1980s brought a series of compelling reports about needs and failures. They told us that our students were not performing nearly as well as those in other economically advanced democracies and that without drastic measures, our teaching force was likely to diminish in both numbers and quality. They have also told us that disadvantaged and minority children are not succeeding as well as they should.

The American Federation of Teachers welcomed their challenge. In 1986, by a special order of convention business, the AFT passed the Task Force on the Future of Education report, "The Revolution that Is Overdue." In it we argued that beyond the setting of higher standards, modest increases in salaries and newfound business and citizen interest in schools we needed "a second stage of education reform" that should seek "the restructuring of public schools to promote student learning."

Since then many of our locals, joining together with their local boards and administrations, have begun bold initiatives to alter school structures. For some these changes have brought shared decision making and new responsibilities to all staff. Some of their daring has brought them into the national spotlight.

It has been the AFT's hope that such an opening of the policy process would expose all involved to new advances in our understanding about how children learn. We have come to envision schools where together all who work in the schools take up these insights and remake their schools to match them.

We now recognize that our ideals and our best efforts must be matched with a very long-term effort. It will take time to change the education traditions of 50 states, 16,000 school boards and hundreds of thousands of schools.

The path is very difficult for many complex reasons. We believe the most important are these:

These changes are indeed revolutionary. They demand new roles and radically different relationships among school employees. They entail a change in the very culture of schools.  Their planning takes extraordinary amounts of time that must be used while existing responsibilities must also be met. It is as if school people were pilots trying to redesign an airplane while flying it.

There is substantial opposition to restructuring by many people in schools and within the general public.  Some school administrators fear loss of authority even as some teachers and others fear assuming more. Some parents and the public are suspicious of what they perceive as yet another fad and persist in wanting to simply improve upon the old and familiar way of doing things.

There are many who say they support restructuring but really want to do something else.  For some, the real motive may be to eliminate positions or to avoid the development of a collective bargaining relationship with the union.  Others are simply looking for quick fixes and positive test score results at a time when the whole nation has been mobilized to expect more from the schools.

The effort to restructure schools must face these serious systemic obstacles not only because restructuring is the right thing to do, but because the institution of public education continues to face threats to its very survival. The privatization movements for vouchers and tuition tax credits have not gone away.  With them on the horizon is a potential army of consultants and other self-appointed experts offering to remake schools in efficiency and production molds by sidestepping the democratic mechanisms for determining public education's form and substance. In response to this array of threats and obstacles the AFT reaffirms its commitment to restructure schools. We need to do this because:

Only total school change will create schools where children truly learn.  A continued pattern of incremental reform cannot deliver what we need-namely, students who can engage in complex problem solving, who can think, write and translate understanding into meaningful tasks.

Restructuring offers us a different way to face and solve our chronic problems; a different way to do what needs to be done.  The conditions we have traditionally and legitimately sought for teachers, and all other school employees-higher salaries, smaller class sizes, better working conditions-may be achievable in specific locals or states.  But, our problems with these kinds of issues cannot be solved on a national basis given the predicted supply and demand factors determining the size and composition of both student bodies and the teaching force.

Only complete school change will create schools capable of institutional self-renewal.  They will forever be able to incorporate the best of what is known and what is yet to be discovered about teaching and learning because they have permanently altered the way decisions are made.

We cannot make these schools without knowing what they look like. Here are some of the elements they contain:

• students who have taken the learning task upon themselves;

• classrooms or other learning spaces where students engage in learning that is customized, active and varied. It takes place across traditional grade groups, often disregarding typical class periods;

• teachers who stimulate and help to organize learning using a variety of settings, resources and practices by spending more time talking to each other and planning together;

• paraprofessionals and other school employees who are more involved than ever in the learning process;

• curriculum that is driven not by facts and information alone, but encourages students to explore essential and enduring concepts; and

• learning communities that are small enough to facilitate intense interaction among all their members, whether they be schools or schools within schools:

RESOLVED, that the American Federation of Teachers renew its efforts to create restructured schools by:

• Reaffirming its commitment to total school change.  We are determined to remain at the center of the movement to restructure schools because of its central importance to student learning and successful teaching.

• Urging our locals, state federations and individual members to reach out even more intensely to administrators and others who must assume some responsibility for shaping these schools. We may have taken too much upon ourselves. Teachers and other school employees cannot do this alone. We must do all we can to generate an atmosphere of trust at every level at which decisions are made so that school communities and districts can move forward together.

• At the same time we declare that a strong union with bargaining rights is the surest guarantee of the professional standards and purposes required for restructuring.

• Acknowledging that all of this is made even more difficult by the fact that it takes place at a time characterized by financial crunch, layoffs and wage freezes.  We congratulate our state federations and locals for what they have already accomplished given the odds against them.

• Committing our own resources to help our members engage in these efforts. The national AFT, state federations and locals will need the staff and programs to make restructuring possible; and

RESOLVED, that the making of schools truly capable of self-renewal will inevitably involve serious and prolonged work on the part of all of those the effort touches. Because these schools will have to restructure and function at the same time, they will require the additional funding resources necessary to make restructuring possible.

We urge that restructuring efforts use the time and resources to create:

• Genuine shared decision making in which representative voices shape both the substance and process of renewal through the collective bargaining process, memoranda of understanding or collaborative trust agreements.

• Clear school and district goals related to a definition of the problems to be solved.

• Planning time, and plenty of it; staff development that involves staff intimately in its design and execution; the establishment of professional libraries and other resources; and the creation of working environments conducive to collegiality. Collaborative planning time has to start the process and become embedded in the school culture for the long run. New styles of teaching and new roles for paraprofessionals and other staff will take considerable preparation and ongoing support. Proper training and orientation should be made available to all staff when new processes, procedures, programs or technological advances are introduced. Opportunities to achieve career advancement should be in place in order to develop the talents of all who will be employed in the changed schools even as they continue in their current roles while the change takes place.

• Preliminary plans for testing students and evaluating school results; the development of performance tests. District efforts to restructure schools should be conjoined with policies to substitute performance or "authentic" tests for most conventional standardized tests.

• Experimentation with incentives. Most individuals who work in our public schools are individually motivated to do their best for their students. But for institutions to capitalize on the talents within them and continually improve, external incentives are necessary. If used, incentive plans, at a minimum, must be designed with the voluntary participation of school staffs, must promote collaboration using schoolwide rewards, must focus on desired student outcomes of value that are fairly measured and must ensure that staff have the decision-making authority to bring about change.