Does Systemic Change Work? Curricular and Instructional Practice in the Context of Systemic Change

Abstract

Given the rhetoric and practice of systemic change in the last decade, we studied (a) the level to which the systemic change is able to penetrate, (b) the areas which the systemic change is able to impact, and (c) the coherence among various curricular and instructional components in the context of systemic change. Using hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) and other additional analyses, we analyzed data on public school teachers' perceived influence on curricular and instructional matters collected during Schools and Staffing Surveys 1987–88 and 1999–2000. We found that (a) the systemic change appears to standardize key curricular practices at the state and school levels and is able to penetrate to the school level in terms of prescribing curriculum, (b) the prescribed curriculum, which is at the state and school levels, and instructional practice, which is at the level of individual teachers, appear to be two different entities, and (c) in the 1999–2000 school year various components of curricular and instructional practices are not as coherent as advocated by systemic change theory. Implications of the findings for curricular and instructional changes in general and in the context of systemic change in particular are discussed.