Whole school reform: promise and limitations in American education

¶ … school reform, also known as comprehensive school reform, has been proposed as an effective and promising means to helping even the most marginalized students succeed and thrive (McChesney, 1998). The tenets of whole school reform take into account every aspect of a school including its role in the community, its budgets and spending, its resource allocation, its infrastructure, facilities, curricula, and teachers. According to the whole school reform model, piecemeal methods fail because they do not address the underlying structural and functional issues in education. While whole school reform seems promising in theory, it fails to manifest meaningful changes in practice due to the largely privatized model that it has been built on, especially with regards to the New American Schools (NAS) system. Moreover, the whole school reform model takes years to implement properly, and fails to provide effectively for interim solutions to the most pressing and immediate problems (Fullan, 2001). Another drawback with the whole school reform model is that it cannot be universally implemented without substantial shifts in public education policy at the federal level. Given the low degree of likelihood that whole school reform will be embraced universally, whole school reform could result in further education disparities and greater inconsistencies in American education. However, whole school reform remains an idealistic vision that can inspire educators and policy makers to engage communities and improve education outcomes by addressing structural problems.

One of the great hopes of whole school reform is that it will help students with disabilities become better integrated into the classroom. As the text points out in Issue 10, integrating classrooms has been challenging at best, and ineffective at worst. Whole school reform promises a system in which students with disabilities are served in their community schools, and encouraged to participate along with their families in structuring their IDEA plans. Moreover, all students in the school benefit from exposure to and interaction with different students. Leadership potential, communication, and other social gains to integration can be witnessed relatively fast, at least in theory (Issue 10). Within the whole school reform framework, classrooms can be structured differently depending on the needs of the teachers and students. One of the tenets of whole school reform is improving parental empowerment, which can especially help students who have special needs.