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4 Thinking About School Restructuring: A Case and Some Observations From Research in Progress! Richard Elmore We hear a great deal these days about the necessity for fundamental restructuring of schools, by which reformers mean changing the basic structures, work patterns, and relationships in schools in order to achieve a higher level of performance. I would like to address the relevance of school restructuring to the preparation of educational administrators, and I would like to do so in the context of a specific case drawn from research that I am doing with two colleagues, Penelope Peterson and Sarah McCarthey. The school I'm going to tell you about is one of three elementary schools that we have been studying. They all are schools that were chosen because they are in the process of making major changes, of the type described by Michael Fullan in his recent work. I want to analyse this case initially because I think it puts the broader themes that I sketched out above in a special kind of perspective. The school, let's .call it Lakeview, is located in a Pacific coast city in the United States, a major city, which has all of the problems of any major American city - race, drugs, poverty, social inequality, and the like. It is a small school by American standards. It has about 300 students. It is an elementary school, kindergarten through sixth grade. It has a history of community involvement or parent involvement. It is a socially heterogeneous school. It happens to be located in a fairly affluent neighborhood but it draws its students from across the city. And roughly I This paper is the revised text of a lecture presented at the annual meeting of the Commonwealth Council for Educational Administration, 18 August 1992, in Hong Kong. I would like to thank the sponsors of the meeting for the opportunity to develop these ideas in the context of a stimulating international discussion. 60 Richard Elmore 40% of the students in this school could be classified as at-risk in one way or another, either because of family background or because of learning problems. Because the neighbourhood in which the school operates doesn't have a sufficient number of children in it to support a school, Lakeview is a school of choice. Parents from other attendance areas in the city can choose to send their children to the school. A fairly large proportion of the students in this school come from other neighbourhoods. And, interestingly, the students who choose to go to this school are disproportionately students at-risk, not students from more affluent families with fewer educational problems. The school also has a traditional commitment to an active interest in children with learning problems of one kind or another - programmes in special education, remedial education, basic problems of learning for students. About six or seven years ago a principal came to the school. Let's call her Laurel Daniels. Laurel came out of a rather unconventional background for an American principal. She got her start as a teacher in a rural area in Idaho. She was able, because of a teacher shortage in that state, to actually begin teaching before she graduated from college or before she had a teaching certificate, and she managed to finish college while she was teaching. It is a very unusual kind of career path for an American teacher. During this time she became acquainted with the Montessori philosophy. She formed and taught in a small private Montessori school in the city where Lakeview is located. She became a community organizer in the city and eventually she organized an alternative school within the public school system. After a year or so, she suddenly found herself in a principalship in a school other than Lakeview, a very troubled school in the inner-city. And then, after a couple of years in that school, she found herself the principal of Lakeview. Her teaching experience was mostly in very unconventional schools, not in traditional schools. And so she carried into Lakeview a very strong personal philosophy of what a school should look like, a vision if you will. That vision had to do with all the things that reformers believe the current education reform movement should be about: All children can learn. Students should control the means of learning. Teaching and learning should be student-centred rather than teacher-centred. No student should be labelled, permanently or temporarily, as incapacitated or unable to learn. And...

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