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This review has been accessed times since February 21, 2005

Sims, S. J., & Sims, R. R. (2004). Managing school system change: Charting a course for renewal. Greenwich, CT: Information Age Publishing.

Pp. ix + 225
$31.95   ISBN 159311-079-0

Reviewed by Linda Mabry
Washington State University, Vancouver

February 21, 2005

In Managing School System Change: Charting a Course for Renewal, Serbrenia and Ronald Sims combine their experience as former teachers and as a district practitioner-educational consultant and business professor-consultant, respectively, to offer guidance to educational administrators responsible for school and school system improvement. The authors' basic tenets are (1) that effective educational reform requires a systemic approach (2) persistently led by a focused, methodical, well-connected administrator (3) with the collaboration and investment of a variety of stakeholders, and (4) that lessons regarding organizational or cultural change from the for-profit sector "are easily generalizable to school system changes" (p. 17).

New administrators are likely to find useful outlines in this book, and experienced administrators helpful reminders. For example, readers attempting educational change are encouraged to:

• Create a change vision . . .
• Take stock of the current situation.
• Identify strengths and areas of opportunity . . .
• Identify or target several priority items . . .
• Establish a change plan . . .
• Monitor and assess progress regularly and revise . . . as needed.
• Take stock again and use . . . feedback to revisit the change vision (p. 11)

to consider that:

• inclusion of the full range of stakeholders is not only an essential pre-condition for successful school system change but also vital for promoting a desire and commitment to participate (p. 109)

and that:

• [t]op administrators must communicate the new culture through their own actions. Their behaviors need to symbolize the kinds of values and behaviors being sought. (p. 156)

Despite such good advice, the text suffers from a number of problems which, in the end, limit its contributions either to the educational reform literature or as a how-to guide for practitioners. Four of the problems are substantive and serious. The most critical of these is over-simplification. The authors acknowledge the dynamic and complex nature of educational influences and contexts, for example, the "ambiguity and disagreement concerning educational content of the required curriculum" (p. 7). But most of their discussion offers common knowledge(Note 1) or familiar phrases,(Note 2) enumerates obvious factors, (Note 3) assumes these factors are finite and knowable, (Note 4) and addresses them with series of recommended steps, (Note 5) typically treated lightly. Despite the authors' cautions to the contrary, (Note 6) the implication is that successful educational change may be achieved by following certain directives or standard formulae.

For example, in chapter 4, "Managing School System Change," Sims and Sims recommend mapping stakeholders and their interests and identifying direct/formal and indirect/informal power wielders. However, even if an administrator could be cognizant of the interests and influence of all stakeholders, a dubious presumption, managing systemic change is much more demanding than anticipating power sources and conflicts, which are only two aspects. Moreover, expectations of trouble are not reducible to the authors' two-by-two "stakeholder power/dynamism matrix" (p. 81). It is neither helpful nor realistic for the authors to suggest, despite documentation and common experience to the contrary, that powerful resistance can be confidently predicted.

It is in the nature of tables and charts to simplify information to facilitate initial or overall grasp, and the authors sometimes offer helpful visual displays, for example, Table 6.1, "Contributing factors for successful cooperation during change" (p. 127) and Figure 7.2, "Evolution of a positive school culture" (p. 134). But other graphics suffer from the general tendency to oversimplify. Particularly egregious are nine identical seven-point scales repeated over four pages, each preceded by a change-related question, e.g., "What's our track record for handling change?" (p. 206). The reader is offered no guidance as to how to choose one number-point on a scale as opposed to another and, for "interpreting the overall results," is left with such ambiguous (and possibly erroneous) advice as this single-sentence explanation:

High scores (Range = 6-7): Indicate that an administrator is in good shape for this change and suggest that his or her school system knows how to work well with its people. (p. 210)

Presenting topics in educational reform through series of steps and tables gradually builds an impression of the text's disconnection from complex realities. The authors acknowledge that change is "chaotic, messy, and painful" (p. 24) but nevertheless offer simplistic lists of challenges and decontextualized strategies and solutions. The authors' detachment from authentic reform concerns is underscored by their puzzling inattention to perhaps the most sweeping educational change in a century, the federal No Child Left Behind (2001) legislation. NCLB is mentioned parenthetically on p. 49 in these words: "(remember our discussion of the forces for and history of change drivers in school systems like the No Child Left Behind mandate)." But there is not only no previous "discussion" of NCLB, there is no previous mention of it although, on p. 6, there are two sentences regarding "mandated federal statewide testing and accountability." Near the end of the book, there is an additional one-phrase reference to "the new demands of programs like 'No Child Left Behind'" (p. 193). It is not at all clear how local administrators living in this historical moment can Manag[e] School System Change or Renewal without consideration of policy requirements that threaten their organizational autonomy and their standing within their communities.

A second serious limitation is the authors' neglect of racially, ethnically, culturally, and economically diverse stakeholders and of the role of diversity as an impetus for educational change initiatives. Perhaps more than any other sector of the U.S., public schools are the vortex of diverse populations. Equalization strategies have characterized most federal educational reform efforts for half a century (see Conley, 2003). Yet, in chapter 4 which, as noted above, treats stakeholders as sources of power to be identified and managed, there is no more than a single acknowledgement that "stakeholders are becoming more diverse" (p. 69), a reference to "achievement gaps" so vague that it fails to specify the nature of the gaps (p. 68), and an even less explicit recommendation to consider "the social setting or history of the relations among the stakeholders" (p. 83). Despite a few brief nods to diversity issues (e.g., mention that high-stakes testing has yielded higher retention and dropout rates for minority students than for others, p. 6; a reference to Kozol, 1992, Savage Inequalities, p. 4), the authors' near-silence about diversity, given their highlighting of stakeholders' interests and given the importance of diversity in well-publicized reform efforts in their home state of Virginia (Frontline, 2002), adds to the sense that the text is insufficiently grounded in educational realities.

A third serious limitation is the unproblematized presumption that business models fit education. Some early references to the education-business connection assume that education should serve business, reducing education to vocational training, e.g.,

K-12 schools like other educational institutions must recognize that the world has changed. Employers and students have needs that our current delivery system is not meeting (p. 2)

or that differences between the two sectors are negligible, e.g.,

[S]ome advocates of school change view schools as no different, [sic] than [sic] the typical bureaucratic systems one might find in the for-profit and government sectors. (p. 10)

Such assumptions invite challenge. But it is chapter 8's presentation of the balanced scorecard (Kaplan & Norton, 1996) and SMART targets ("specific, measurable, agreed upon, realistic, and time-bound," p. 182) that really rub. Although Sims and Sims concede "the literature reveals no systematic study" of use of the balanced scorecard in education (p. 177), they nevertheless extol its benefits for education, "translating strategy into an integrated set of financial and nonfinancial measures" (p. 164). As it happens, I have small-scale (n=1) empirical evidence.

In 2001, every unit at my campus, Washington State University Vancouver, was directed by our associate dean to prepare academic scorecards on the basis of which unit evaluations and comparisons, program funding allocations, and permission to conduct faculty searches would be based. I was asked to evaluate the suitability of the scorecard for representing the Education unit and to propose our targets and measures. I tried, not always successfully, I thought, to translate our efforts and outcomes into "an integrated set of financial and nonfinancial measures" which were presented by our retiring director to the campus for approval and use the following year. That Fall, the associate dean was asked to serve a one-year term as interim Education unit director, in which capacity he had the task of preparing the Education unit's academic scorecard. Although he himself had imposed the requirement, he could not fulfill it. He presented a largely narrative account beginning with a quotation I had offered, one often attributed to Einstein: "Not everything that counts can be counted, and not that can be counted counts." The effort to implement the academic scorecard was abandoned after that one year.

By contrast, the authors' confidence in the balanced scorecard includes a presumption of sufficient validity in educational measurement to encourage attaching high stakes: "tying rewards to these measures motivates greater efforts toward their attainment" (p. 164). This includes "tying teachers [sic] pay to measurements (e.g., student performance on government-mandated standardized tests)" (p. 183) – the same tests Sims and Sims decried earlier:

[M]any of the accountability systems established in the last five years to improve schools are having the opposite effect. The standards movement, once touted as the cure-all for failing schools, "has degenerated into the 'standardized testing movement,' [sic] in which teachers teach to the test, students become scores, and everyone feels less motivation to learn and achieve. (p. 6)

"Assuming that one is convinced that the balanced scorecard can be useful to a school or school system" (p. 167), as the authors clearly are, they recommend surveying school leaders (p. 167); defining mission, objectives, and strategies at a retreat (p. 178); and selecting "the performance measure(s) for each specific goal," perhaps by task forces (p. 179). They recommend that "successful implementation of the balanced scorecard" be viewed as an equation (p. 183):

Success = Measurement x Technique x Control x Focused Persistence x Consensus.

But what does this mean? How could such a calculation be performed? What number could possibly represent "technique" or "focused persistence, otherwise known as project management" (p. 184) – and is that really the meaning of focused persistence? Sims and Sims offer 11 exuberant pages of tables, without answering these questions or considering the investment of time and energy required by the activities they recommend. Nor do they revisit their earlier concerns regarding "the repetitive nature of annual standardized testing" and failures "to achieve public consensus regarding the test instrument" (p. 8) that would provide measurements required by the scorecard.

A fourth serious limitation is quality of scholarship. Because many references are unaccompanied by significant discussion of their contents, as with Kozol (p. 4) and high-profile business authors such as Peter Senge (1990) (pp. 45, 47), (Note 7) the citations seem little more than name-dropping. Sims and Sims generally decline to synthesize across the literature or to reveal the ways that source information informs or fits (or not) with their thinking.

Moreover, the age of many citations gives the book a faint (and perhaps not wholly deserved) aura of obsolescence in which the more recent references sometimes seem to function as updates for the authors' justifications of preexisting views. To be sure, some early references are classics. One which threads through chapters 2, 3, and 5 is Kurt Lewin's (1947) view of the change process. Sims and Sims take Lewin's force-field analysis (1951) as foundational, iterating its steps but offering little penetrating discussion or new perspective beyond their emphasis on stakeholder collaboration. Other sources enjoy less deliberation.

Organization of content is less serious but still problematic. Jarringly abrupt changes of topic emphasize the simplistic treatment of each. The following four headings, for example, all appear on the same page, the first three each followed by discussion no longer than four sentences: Minimizing Stakeholder Conflict, Engage in Serious Preplanning, Involve the Right Stakeholder, Facilitating Stakeholder Cooperation (p. 125). It does not seem reasonable that a reader might be able to "engage in serious preplanning" or any of the other activities suggested by these headings with such a slight send-off. While the authors also treat these topics elsewhere, their revisiting of topics saddles much of the text with redundancy and increasingly invites readers to skim or ignore sections. For example, Lewin's (1947) steps in force-field analysis are repeated virtually word-for-word on pp. 26 and 90.

Occasionally, doubling back on topics also yields inconsistency of message. For example, administrators are often described as leaders of collaborative activities in their role as

change agent[s]. Instead of being responsible for identifying the change challenge, problem and the solution, they are now expected to be jointly responsible for identifying the issues, purposes, and boundary constraints. (p. 119) But sometimes the authors describe administrators performing such tasks as lonelier "Future Shapers [who] are obsessed with achieving results" (p. 63), e.g., “Future shapers are responsible for identifying the need for change, creating a vision of the desired outcome, deciding what is feasible, and choosing who should sponsor and defend it. . . . School board members, superintendents, and principals typically, but not exclusively, are future shapers.” (p. 30)

Less serious problems with the text include lack of a topical index, provision of an incomplete bibliography rather than a reference list, frequent grammar errors and, occasionally, nearly indecipherable wording, e.g., “We dispel the difficulty of change efforts to discount well-intentioned attempts to portray ‘change’ as a discrete process, which when followed "correctly" leads more or less inevitably to the new desired state.” (p. 21) At least one table, a typology of stakeholder commitment (Figure 6.2, p. 114), also teeters toward incomprehensibility. Another type of occasional textual nuisance involves acronyms, some of which are needless (e.g., "D" for direct impact of change and "I" for indirect, p. 94, when neither is used afterward; "TAT" for "top administrative team," p. 100, used only for a table on the same page). One acronym, SMART, is defined on p. 182, two pages after the authors begin incorporating it into the text.

But these are minor irritants in comparison to the far more important question of whether the authors are damned by their own words: “School administrators are sometimes misled by authors or consultants who make change seem like a bounded, defined, discrete process with guidelines for success. They feel deceived; instead of a controllable process, they discover confusion.” (p. 23) Have not the authors (who are also consultants) provided a series of "guidelines for success" in the management of change, management implying that the process is "controllable"?

As have all veteran educators, the authors have undoubtedly experienced educational and organizational changes and drawn many important personal understandings about factors which influenced effectiveness (or not) in each case. Reflections across instances can lead to important insights useful for future adaptations. How best may the gleanings be collected and shared? Full documentation of a single case is complex and often obstructively lengthy, and deriving cross-case lessons from many individual write-ups would challenge the dedication of the writer and reader. Against such inefficiency, Sims and Sims have attempted instead to "ponder on and contribute to the dialogue" (p. 1) by presenting their understandings of educational change in a general manner with little reference to individual cases. Generalization carries danger of decontextualization, of abstraction, of lost connection with real-life grounding – and it is to this danger, fundamentally, that their text succumbs.

Notes

1. e.g., "As we advance toward the future, our entire society is changing in a global context" (p. 2).

2. e.g., "Mark Twain once said, 'In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then He made school boards' (p. 2).

3. e.g., "People confronting change seem primarily interested in three things . . . How will this change affect me, . . . Why do you have reason to believe this can be implemented . . . [W]hy do you think it will work?" (p. 36).

4. e.g., who all the stakeholders are and their roles, interests, and capacities (p. 113).

5. e.g., four steps for minimizing stakeholder resistance: consider "the extent of stakeholder involvement" as a measure of success, "link stakeholders to each other, create change communities and embrace open dialogue" (p. 116).

6. e.g., "often divergent methods [are] called for in different scenarios" (p. 22).

7. Stephen Covey is also named on p. 47 but not listed in the bibliography.

About the reviewer

Linda Mabry is an evaluator of educational programs and a member of the faculty of Education at Washington State University Vancouver, of the Public Affairs Committee of the American Evaluation Association, and of the Board of Trustees of the National Center for the Improvement of Educational Assessments. She may be contacted at 360.546.9428 or mabryl@vancouver.wsu.edu.

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