Leading or following educational change?

Across many educational systems the limitations of centralized reform initiatives to significantly affect the learning and achievement of young people has become increasingly apparent. The failure of large-scale educational reform to improve levels of student learning is all too familiar. The early signs of success shown by the ‘National Literacy Project’ has started to plateau and, like many other large-scale reform efforts, it focused attention on a number of limited instructional priorities while ignoring the wider social, organizational and contextual influences on schools and teachers. While this ‘top-down’ approach to educational reform may result in improvement in the short term, in the long term the prognosis is much less optimistic. Unfortunately, the history of educational reform is littered with promising ‘educational experiments that fade and fizzle after the first few years of innovation’ (Hargreaves et al., 2001, p. 159).