There are practicalities and truisms that all stakeholders involved in education reform must face. These include the recognition and heeding of aspirations and logics, assuming agency and taking action, and constructing, trying and adjusting.

In university labs and edtech startups across the country, researchers are working on a new kind of education reform. It's called learning engineering, and it promises to make high-quality education accessible and affordable on a grand scale.
Standards

The central goal of most large-scale reforms is to raise student achievement by establishing clear standards that all schools must meet. These standards define what students must learn and can include academic content, curriculum or examinations. The standards should be measurable and apply to all schools in the state or country, and they must be criterion-referenced rather than based on relative rankings. For these reforms to be successful, they must be developed with the help of teachers. They must also be attainable for all students, not just those who are able to take extra classes or work during the summer.

Education reforms are often fueled by a desire to address socio-economic problems. Many believe that a lack of education is responsible for the inequality and poverty seen in many parts of the world. Small improvements in education, they argue, can have big returns in the form of increased health and wealth.

A major obstacle to achieving these goals is the current system of education, which is tethered to middle-class advantages and unable to provide equal opportunities for all students. In this environment, most student performance is influenced by family economics and other outside factors. Despite the best efforts of reformers, most educational systems cannot produce results that are high enough to improve the lives of families living below the poverty line.

This is why so many large-scale reforms fail to have the impact they want. While these groups denounce perceived problems and create a sense of urgency, they rarely address the significant obstacles to implementing change. Moreover, they frequently lack the capacity to offer concrete solutions. 大規模修繕 

In contrast, the studies of Singapore and Hong Kong, among other high-performing countries, reveal that a strong communication message about the nature and direction of reform is key to their success. This includes messages that emphasize the importance of survival of the nation, greater equality and a thriving economy.

These studies have also shown that high-performing educational systems spend their money differently. They do not spend as much on buildings, sports and administrative positions or separate special education functions. They also have different arrangements for distributing funds to schools and different mechanisms for targeting resources to those most in need.
Assessments

In the current era of education reform, national and international standardized assessments have become central to the Global Education Reform Movement (GERM). The motivation for many of these efforts to standardize learning and accountability stems from concerns about how to prepare students for jobs in an increasingly global economy. It is also driven by the desire to address socio-economic problems that are correlated with educational achievement, such as health, wealth and well-being. These problems are often attributed to poor quality of education. Hence, some scholars argue that small improvements in education could yield large returns in these areas.

Many of the new policies that seek to improve student performance are based on the belief that changes in assessment can change classroom practices. This approach is based on the idea that better assessments will lead to improved teaching, and ultimately, learning outcomes. This is an important goal, but it has a number of limitations. First, there is a risk that the changes in assessment will cause unintended consequences. For example, some teachers may find the new tests more stressful or annoying, and they might respond by changing their practice in ways that undermine the effectiveness of the test. This is called the “testing shock” effect (see Boruch and Merlino, 2009).

Other problems are that there is little evidence that any of these new tests will actually lead to better teaching or learning. One major problem is that it is hard to measure the quality of teaching in any way other than by observation and student achievement data. Another issue is that there are few research methods for evaluating classroom-based reforms. This is particularly problematic because it is difficult to study these reforms in a control group.

One alternative is to use a network-based approach that relies on hub organizations that collaborate with many schools in a system of school improvement. This model has attracted billions of dollars in public and private investment. It has produced examples of success, such as Success for All and America’s Choice. However, there is still a long way to go to learn about how to implement and sustain such approaches at scale.
Evaluations

Large-scale education reforms often involve national large-scale assessments (NLSA), which are designed to assess students in a uniform manner, and to evaluate the effectiveness of educational policies, programs and interventions. These assessments are also sometimes referred to as statewide or district-wide tests, and they may be used for accountability purposes, or to inform policy formulation. They are often conducted in a short period of time, and they can be difficult to interpret and compare.

Many education reformers hope that a new system will produce quick testing gains, which they can then use to measure success and justify continued public and private investment. This approach can be dangerous, especially for a field like education reform, which is largely dependent on human behavior and has much more uncertainty than commonly acknowledged.

In addition to the fact that test scores are notoriously unreliable measures of performance, many policies do not produce the promised results for long periods of time, and they may even backfire. These pitfalls can be hard to avoid, but they can be addressed by conducting rigorous evaluations and learning from them.

This is one of the reasons why it’s so important to invest in robust and independent evaluations of educational reforms. These evaluations can help to hone the design of future large-scale reform initiatives, and they can help to mitigate the risks of expensive failures.

As for the current wave of teacher evaluation reforms, it’s worth remembering that they are based on only a few years of data in most states, and four or fewer years in three-quarters of them. That’s barely enough time to harvest any real testing gains, but it’s plenty of time to prove that they’re not working.

There’s a lot of room for improvement in these systems, and there’s still a great deal to be learned from the few places that managed to get them right. But as long as the prevailing incentive is to harvest fast test-score gains, we’re going to see a lot of failed large-scale reforms. And that’s a shame, because the potential benefits of these policies are considerable.
Teachers

The earliest of all education reform efforts in the United States and many other countries focused on teacher training. The theory was that if teachers were trained in new methods of teaching, the results would be better. This is an idea that still holds some sway, although much of the research done on the subject over the years has not borne it out. The fact is that the kind of large-scale educational improvement that is needed cannot be achieved through training alone. It must involve the whole school community, including students.

Changing the way schools are run is not always easy, and the results of these kinds of reforms vary widely depending on the context in which they are attempted. This is a problem that will not go away, and it is a reason why the research on these large-scale reforms should focus on the implementation of their ideas, not the initial design.

This is not to say that the original ideas behind these reforms should be abandoned, but they must be adapted to the specific circumstances of any given situation and its history. There are several ways to do this, but a good start would be to bring all the participants together at regular intervals to make sure that everyone understood what was expected of them and how their work fit in with the overall plan.

One example of this approach is the way that Ontario brought together teachers, parents, business and civic leaders to make sure that the entire community was involved in the process. Another is the way that the reform team in Ethiopia regularly held meetings to address problems as they arose.

Many of these large-scale reforms have been aimed at addressing socio-economic problems that are believed to have significant roots in lack of education. The results have varied, but in some cases the changes have been measurable. In some cases, the results have been correlated with other social and economic benefits such as improved health or increased agricultural efficiency.

But in the long run, what really counts is the effect of these reforms on learning. There is some evidence that the reforms can improve learning. There is also some evidence that they can make learning more equitably available to all. These are important goals that can not be ignored in a world where learning is so vital to the success of any society.