J Educ Change (2016) 17:539–544

DOI 10.1007/s10833-016-9289-1

The elusive nature of whole system improvement

in education

Michael Fullan1

Published online: 8 November 2016

Ó Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2016

Abstract Whole system improvement—where the vast majority of schools

improve—is difficult to achieve. Some jurisdictions use what turns out to be
‘wrong’ policy drivers like testing and evaluation. Rather, success turns out to
depend on changing the culture of schools and their relationship to the infrastructure
of policies and regulation. I examined the six cases studies in the light of whole
system change criteria. Two of the case studies, South Africa and India, represent
limited but useful examples in that they focus on basic skills like literacy. A second
set of two studies, Escuela Nueva and LCP in Mexico, represent strong examples of
how bottom up strategies can spread to significant levels. The final two, Long Beach
in the US and Ontario, are strong examples of how deep change can be accom-
plished by focusing on a few core priorities and then building a culture over a
number of years to support and sustain the changes. The paper then draws con-
clusions about the conditions that will be required for large scale change to occur.

Keywords Whole system improvement
School culture
Centrality of pedagogy

Introduction

Improving whole education systems—provinces, states, countries—has proven to be

a frustrating quest. In 2011, I published a paper called ‘Choosing the wrong drivers
for whole system reform’. Drivers are policies and wrong drivers are policies that
don’t work. There were four: accountability (punitive), individualism, technology,
and fragmented policies. The right drivers—at least directionally were: capacity
building, collaboration, pedagogy, and systemic policies. The paper had some

& Michael Fullan

mfullan@me.com
1
Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada

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impact and some jurisdictions began to alter their approach. They toned down
wrong-headed accountability, emphasized collaboration in policy documents
(implementation is another matter), highlighted pedagogy or instruction, and
attempted to coordinate polices. These are turning out to be weak versions of what
could be a set of right drivers. They tend for example to highlight standards for
teachers and others, and even when they play down the accountability dimension
they fail to have much of an impact. Put another way, standards represent a weak
mechanism for causing system change.
I also want to dismiss going to scale as an approach. I don’t know of any
evidence that demonstrates that going to scale is viable as a model for system
change in education. When things go to scale, such as good drinking water, use of
seat belts, reduced smoking, and so on, they tend to involve behaviors that do not
require capacity or skill. Getting back to going to scale, one cannot go to scale when
something involves new and deep capacity. The pilots are not typically replicable
for one or more of the following reasons: the first users are more motivated; there
are not enough resources; solutions in each new situation are not exactly the same;
the program loses momentum as key sponsors move on, or new ideas come along. In
the rest of this commentary I connect to the papers in this collection and then
conclude with what I think is the essence of getting whole system change. As an
advance organizer, let me say that the essence of whole system change involves two
elements: deep pedagogical change based on the relationships among learners (I
include teachers and students as learners) and solutions that successfully address
equity—that is, solutions that serve all, but especially serve the historically
disaffected.

The six case studies

In terms of the six papers, four are based in developing counties and two in North
America. I start with the four developing country papers comparing South Africa
and India, with Colombia and Mexico. As we see in Fleisch’s paper, changes in
‘instructional practice’ is at the heart of change. We can agree with Fleisch that
vague instructional practice will never work or spread. We then get into
controversial terrain when he suggests that ‘specificity’ and a degree of ‘prescrip-
tiveness’ is necessary. I am willing to entertain that this may do some good when
teacher competence is low but I would also argue that its effectiveness is confined to
lower level skills and may in fact not represent the kind of change that can be
leveraged for the future, or for helpful dissemination. My point is that we need
specificity but the kind that spreads does not require prescriptiveness. In other
words, specificity furnishes clarity but does not assume prescription. This is crucial
in our deep change work (Fullan 2016). Best ideas flourish when people learn from
each other. And Fleisch does show that coaching is an effective part of the strategy,
but in this case effectiveness involves the spread of scripted lessons that have impact
on limited learning goals. Progress for me is not ‘weak to scripted’ but rather ‘weak
to deep’. We do need specificity in order to learn about more complex solutions that
would influence our practice, not through imitation, but though innovative

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adaptation which itself should be subjected to specificity and to measurable impact

on learning.
Banerji’s analysis of the Read India program raises additional issues. Learning
Camps in local villages across 20 states is indeed large-scale, it provides the
opportunity for local villages to be the center of reform, and the goal is ambitious:
‘‘every child in school and learning well’’. The lessons learned from the 10 or more
years of Read India are fivefold: focus, time, instructional methods, leveled reading
materials, and tracking progress. This raises two key questions for me: is this the
best way to engage students in their learning that is likely to provide the foundation
for deeper and continuous learning? Second, does the method serve the most
disadvantaged? (One could claim that all the students are disadvantaged, but it
would be helpful to see how the neediest fared; I suspect that this might call for
additional or different methods.)
The second pair of papers, Colombia and Mexico, represents similar school
populations (in the sense of widespread need and disadvantage) but present very
different pedagogical strategies than the South Africa and India examples. Colbert
and Arboleda focus on Escuela Nueva which is a bottom-up student-centered
pedagogical strategy, especially for rural schools. Teachers interact with students
giving individual and group feedback, advising and guiding the learning pace of
each student. There is strong parent and local community involvement in the
learning. It has been operating for more than 40 years and at some point in its
history expanded to 20,000 schools. Escuela Nueva has developed a series of
learning guides that are ‘‘interactive and dialogue based’’ geared to the national
curriculum. Strategies for implementation include demonstration schools, teacher
training, and micro centers that support peer-to-peer learning. The initiative also
instills democratic values with instruments like the ‘school government’ component.
Escuela Nueva has had an explicit strategy to liaise with the Government: links to
the national curriculum, interaction with Ministry of Education personnel, sharing
of information, and generally seeking financial and political support as part of its
model of change. All through, the program has conducted assessments and shared
results transparently on measurable outcomes related to literacy and math, and
linked to national assessments.
We begin to see some of the conditions for whole system reform that I will take
up in the final section if this commentary. First, we see a model that is based on
habits of learning to learn individually and collectively—what Joanne Quinn and I
call Coherence, defined as the shared depth of understanding about the nature of the
work (Fullan and Quinn 2016). Coherence is subjective and shared coherence means
that such subjectivity is across individuals and groups. As such it is more likely to
persist and spread. Second, Escuela Nueva has deliberately interacted with the
hierarchy proving in this case that autonomy and connectedness can co-exist,
another element of sustainability. Third, local development is combined with
expectations and help for arriving at specificity that in turn is shared with the group.
Such a process finesses the vague vs. prescriptiveness dilemma. The process allows
flexibility but generates and sorts out specificity resulting in the convergence on
valuable solutions. I return to these matters later.

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Similarly, Rincón-Gallardo writes about The Learning Community Project (LCP)

in Mexico—a locally based pedagogical project that trains and supports tutors
(teachers and in some cases students) to work with tutees (students and in some
cases teachers) in the development of literacy. The project operated from 2004 to
2012 spreading to 9000 low performing schools. These schools reached high levels
of ‘‘good’’ and ‘‘excellent’’ in the national standardized tests faster, and better than
comparable schools not in the program. The seven core principles of bringing
pedagogy to scale are strong. I especially like numbers 2 (establish a clear purpose
centered on student learning and effective pedagogy), 4 (create multiple opportu-
nities to observe, practice and refine the new pedagogy), and 5 (attract the support of
system leaders, or become one), although concerning the latter it was change in
system support that eventually ended the program in 2012. Be that as it was, the
conditions that LCP established make it likely that it will be resumed.
Long Beach Unified School District (LBSUD)—a large California district that
has been improving and going from strength to strength for over 15 years under two
successive superintendents—provides a number of lessons about system improve-
ment. Zavadsky’s findings reinforce what has been learned in the other cases with
respect to factors crucial for embedded success: a relentless focus on curriculum and
instruction (pedagogy), talent management geared to continuous capacity building
and the development of leaders for today and tomorrow, a long-term relationship
with the local university to cultivate the supply of new teachers, a cycle of inquiry,
feedback and improvement around problems of practice, appropriate assessment and
intervention. Put in overall terms all successful endeavors have job-embedded
professional learning (‘learning is the work’). The chances for long-term sustain-
ability of continuous improvement at LBUSD are very high. Alas, since LBUSD is
only one of 1009 school districts in California this case begs the question of how to
achieve whole system success.
The case of Ontario by Gallagher, Malloy and Ryerson comes closer to the
system improvement goal because it focuses on the entire public school system of
5000 schools and its 2 million students and 130,000 educators (Full disclosure here:
I have served as advisor to the Premier and Minister of Education since 2003.)
Ontario has the usual (for success) focus on pedagogy linked to measurable impact
but has also mobilized teachers, schools and districts to learn from each other (what
is called ‘use the group to change the group’). This represents a powerful strategy
that has embedded a continuously developing collective capacity across the
province. Guides and tools, such as the Ontario Leadership Framework and the
School and District Effectiveness Framework, support quality learning. Oddly and
crucially while these tools are voluntary they are used by virtually 100 % of schools
and districts. As the authors say, ‘‘deep and lasting change requires that the learning
and ownership of the change be internal to districts, schools and educators’’.
Recently Ontario has retained its focus on literacy, is attending to its great
weakness (math performance), and has widened the set of priorities to include
wellbeing. There has also been a fundamental shift occurring that involves moving
from a culture of teaching to a culture of learning, establishing an inclusive
participatory environment with students and with parents, and addressing the
perennial accountability dilemma—how to get shared responsibility for

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performance. These recent developments take us more deeply into the matter of
sustainability and deep performance that I take up in the final section.

What’s next

In many ways for me the six case studies represent a transition point in large-scale
system improvement. None of the cases get sufficiently to deep change but they all
focus on pedagogy and gravitate to collective learning and efficacy. The solution for
system improvement for me consist of three matters: deep change in the culture of
learning, local ownership of the learning agenda, and a system of continuous
improvement and innovation that is simultaneously bottom-up, top-down and
sideways. We are indeed attempting to develop such systems in our New
Pedagogies for Deep Learning initiative involving over 1000 schools in 10 different
countries (www.npdl.global). In this commentary I shall contrast briefly what the
nature of successful whole system improvement might and might not entail. Let’s
start with the latter and pursue the question through three stages that I will call
accountability, professional standards, and learning cultures. I have already men-
tioned the ‘wrong drivers’ that represent the worst of the accountability set of
solutions. The evidence is clear these drivers send the system backwards.
As policymakers try to accommodate the problems of the accountability
approach they seem to be evolving into what I will call the professional standards
solution. A good example of this is the recently released report, What matters now
(National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future, NCTAF 2016). Twenty
years ago NCTAF published its first commission report, What matters most. It is
accurate to say that the situation (system improvement in the U.S.) has only
deteriorated over these two decades. How likely is the new set off recommendations
to lead to whole system improvement? The report has six main recommendations:
1. Policymakers should establish and broadly communicate a new compact with
teachers.
2. Every state should establish a Commission on Teaching, Learning, and the
State’s Future.
3. States and districts should codify and track whether all schools are ‘‘organized
for success’’.
4. Teacher preparation should be more relevant and clinically-based.
5. States should support all new teachers with multi-year induction and high-
quality mentoring.
6. Education leaders should evaluate ALL professional learning for responsive-
ness and effectiveness.

While this is a marked improvement over blatant accountability it is obvious, to

me at least, that given what we have learned from the six cases that such macro-
level standards will not make a marked difference on day-to-day practice.
Implementing the six recommendations will be too slow and ineffective even in

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the long run due not in the least to weak implementation. Even the causal
mechanisms for daily success in the culture of learning seem vague.
So, what is the solution? I will not be able to spell it out in detail here but I can
identify the nature of the solution and its direction. We need to understand the
messages of the emerging science of networks, combined with what we know about
cultures of purposeful learning. On networks it is clear that they are increasingly
evident, to a certain extent uncontrollable, and yet contain the seeds of a dynamic
solution. The network side of the solution is to realize that on the one hand networks
weaken hierarchies (this is why there are limits to central control), while on the
other hand they both disperse and concentrate learning (Ramos 2016). In our deep
learning work, we are finding that learning disperses among students, teachers and
others (learners outrun leaders), but when it is combined with a culture of
collaborative learning it also coalesces around good solutions. It is this dynamic of
co-learning that, when it reaches a critical mass, creates a system of continuous
improvement and innovation. In play also are some ‘strange attractors’, as
complexity science calls them. I use it here as an analogy (but it also may be
theoretically a true attractor). I mention here two attractors (forces that cause things
to coalesce). One is the fact that humans are ‘wired to connect’. Even though the
forces of dispersal are at work they are inevitably mediated by the human tendency
to connect with one another. Thus the strategy is to establish cultures that enable
connection—such as use the group to change the group, or Hargreaves and my more
complete solution of ‘professional capital’ (Hargreaves and Fullan 2012). The other
attractor that we are finding, especially among young people, is the intrinsic
disposition to helping humanity—indeed to helping humanity evolve.
We are elaborating on this solution in our current work. The evidence of its
power is both empirical (it is happening), and theoretical (wired to connect and
helping humanity) and are natural forces. The system improvement strategy is to
realize that while they are natural they can be promoted or blunted. Whole system
improvement in short involves shaping and cultivating a culture of purposeful
learning that is neither tightly controlled nor too loose. Challenging but exciting—
and doable!

References
Fullan, M. (2011). Choosing the wrong drivers for whole system reform. In Seminar Series 204.
Melbourne, Australia: Center for Strategic Education.
Fullan, M. (2016). Indelible leadership: Always leave them learning. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.
Fullan, M., & Quinn, J. (2016). Coherence: Putting the right drivers in action. Thousand Oaks, CA:
Corwin Press.
Gallagher, M. J., Malloy, J., & Ryerson, R. (2016). Achieving excellence: Bringing effective literacy
pedagogy to scale in Ontario’s publicly-funded education system. Journal of Educational Change.
doi:10.1007/s10833-016-9284-6.
National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future. (2016). What matters now: The evidence base.
Washington, DC: Author.
New Pedagogies for Deep Learning. (2016). www.npdl.global.
Ramos, J. C. (2016). The seventh sense: Power, fortune, and survival. New York: Little Brown & Co.
Rincon-Gallardo, S. (2016). Large scale pedagogical transformation as widespread cultural change in
Mexican public schools. Journal of Educational Change. doi:10.1007/s10833-016-9286-4.

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