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Exploding the Myths
of School Reform
David Hopkins
ACER (Australia and New Zealand) and Maidenhead (UK): Open University Press,
2013 Paperback. xxiv + 320 pages. ISBN 978-0335263141. £23.99
Reviewed by David Galloway Durham
University
The continuing interest of governments around the world in international
comparisons of student attainment has contributed to the politicisation of
education policy. Nowhere has that been more evident than in the UK. While
governments, accountable to tax payers, clearly have a legitimate interest in
education policy, there is an obvious risk of policy being based on ideology,
not evidence. This book is therefore a timely contribution to the debate on
school reform. David Hopkins claims that his aim “is about myth busting and
introducing a heavy dose of truth and realism” [xviii]. It is a bold claim. Does
he succeed? Hopkins sets out to demolish ten myths in successive chapters: The myths
that achievement cannot be realised at scale for all students; that school
autonomy leads to the reality of change; that poverty is a determinant of
student and school performance; that the curriculum rather than the learning is
what counts; that teaching is either an art or a science; that external
accountability results in sustained school reform; that innovation and
networking always add value to school reform; that charismatic leadership is
central to school reform; that “one size fits all” in implementing school
reform; and that market forces drive educational excellence. At times, he
overstates his case. In reviewing school effectiveness research, for example, there
is no longer any serious debate that schools make a difference, but nor is
there serious debate about social-economic background having an influence on
students’ attainments. A careful reading of the seminal studies he cites, such
as Fifteen Thousand Hours by Michael
Rutter and colleagues, shows that schools had a much stronger influence on
behaviour than on attainment. Hopkins could legitimately have claimed that
school effectiveness research has demolished the once prevalent deterministic
view linking social class inexorably with educational achievement. But poverty
remains, and will continue to remain, relevant as long as children from
privileged homes continue to benefit as much from outstanding schools as
children from disadvantaged backgrounds – thus maintaining their advantage when
they start school. Other reviewers could object that many of Hopkins’ myths
have long since been demolished. Nevertheless their superficial attraction has
created a conventional wisdom that continues to mesmerise policy makers. He has
identified pervasive myths and has made a robust case for exposing them as such. The book’s scope is wider, though, than exposing myths. The author wants
“a ‘grand theory’ of system change in education that results in relatively
predictable increases in student learning and achievement over time” [16]. This
is much more ambitious than merely exposing myths. The problem, which Hopkins
has not fully resolved, is that knowing the details of effective practices –
whether at system level or school level – does not necessarily help others to
copy them. This is the problem that school effectiveness research ran into over
35 years ago: to take a rather obvious example, knowing that the most
successful schools have strong leaders did nothing to help the head teachers of
less successful school become strong leaders. To take an example in Hopkins’
chapter on charismatic leadership, the eight key dimensions to successful
leadership [219] are intrinsically interesting and supported by evidence, but applying
them in an improvement strategy, whether at system or school level, remains a
big step. Similarly, it is hard to disagree with what teachers, schools and
local authorities need to do in developing professional learning [196], but telling
them what to do is unlikely to help. The focus on teachers, head teachers and school systems is both a
strength and a weakness: a strength because the author draws on his own extensive
experience as Chief Adviser on school standards to the English government, but
a weakness because it too often leads him to overlook research on children’s –
as opposed to teachers’ – learning that could have directly addressed the
problem identified in the previous paragraph. Two examples will suffice: First,
he discusses the benefits of teachers coaching each other, but not the quite
extensive evidence on the benefits for students of all age groups of peer
tutoring. Second, there is an interesting discussion of teachers using
metacognitive strategies in their own professional learning (though
metacognition is not in the index,) but not of the research on teaching
students metacognitive strategies as a way of raising standards. In each case, the
implicit, and perhaps unintended, assumption seems to be that attitude change
comes before behaviour change. More frequently, it is behaviour change that
comes first. If a group of teachers discover by working with each other and
with students that peer tutoring works, they may be more likely to share ideas
and experience with each other in other contexts. And if they learn that
teaching their students metacognitive strategies works, there may be a better
chance of these strategies generalising to teachers’ work with each other. The sections on leadership are particularly interesting in this respect.
Hopkins recognises that turning round a school or education system in crisis
requires different strategies to maintaining and developing a successful school
(in itself a neglected field in the literature on leadership). But in each
case, how are the skills to apply the necessary strategies to be acquired, and
why do many outstanding classroom teachers fail to become outstanding leaders? He
misses the opportunity here to develop a new theoretical understanding of
educational leadership, with its roots solidly grounded in classroom practice. Outstanding
teachers discover that turning round a chaotic classroom requires different
strategies to maintaining and developing a highly successful one. Generalising
from this professional knowledge to the challenge of departmental and
ultimately school leadership is not a huge step, and requires no extensive
reading on leadership or institutional change. As trainee teachers are told in
the first week of the course, start from what the children – or, in this case,
teachers – already know! The book is well written with a clear structure. It is provocative, at
times polemical, and thought provoking. I hope it will find a place in school
libraries and on reading lists for Masters programmes. However, it should be
seen as a stimulus to discussion, not as a definitive statement of the field.
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