This paper reviews Larry Cuban's article "How Schools Change Reforms: Redefining Reform Success and Failure," which examines how schools adapt, transform, and sometimes undermine educational reforms. The review summarizes Cuban's three commonly used criteria for evaluating reforms — effectiveness, popularity, and fidelity — and traces his use of the Gary, Indiana reform movement as a historical case study. The paper also discusses Cuban's argument that modern reforms share similar weaknesses, often being judged by flawed criteria and implemented without sufficient forethought. It concludes by highlighting Cuban's call for policymakers and administrators to rethink how they design, implement, and evaluate school reform efforts.
Larry Cuban's article "How Schools Change Reforms: Redefining Reform Success and Failure" explores how schools influence and transform educational reforms, and what it truly means for a reform to succeed or fail. Cuban's analysis is aimed at policymakers and administrators, urging them to rethink how reforms are designed, implemented, and evaluated before they are put into practice.
Cuban identifies three criteria commonly used to evaluate educational reforms: effectiveness, popularity, and fidelity. He then examines both the merits and the problems with developing and applying such criteria. His central concern is that these standards are often flawed or easily influenced by bias, leading to inaccurate assessments of whether a reform has truly succeeded or failed.
Cuban argues that modern school reforms share a fundamental weakness: they are adopted and, as they are implemented, undergo changes that transform them in ways that few of the original designers could predict or claim ownership over. As he writes, "They are adopted and, as they are implemented, undergo changes that transform them in ways that few of the designers of the original reform could predict, or even claim ownership" (Cuban 455).
To illustrate his argument, Cuban uses the educational reform enacted in Gary, Indiana at the turn of the 20th century as a model case study. The innovations developed in Gary spread rapidly across the nation within just a few years. However, subsequent studies revealed that Gary students had not advanced as much as originally believed, and their achievement scores were generally weaker than those of students in other schools. The Gary reform movement eventually collapsed, and other reforms took its place — many of which have also since disappeared entirely.
This article makes it clear that school reforms are often not sufficiently thought through before they are implemented, and that they are then judged by faulty criteria. Cuban offers alternative ways to assess how successful reforms are, and urges school districts to develop new evaluative standards that are not so easily swayed or prejudiced. He acknowledges that not all reforms are failures, and points to examples of successful reforms and the factors that contributed to their success.
"Implications for policymakers and reform evaluation"
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