Archived: Coordinating Top-Down and Bottom-Up Strategies for Educational Reform - Coordinating Top-Down and Bottom-Up Strategies

A r c h i v e d I n f o r m a t i o n

Systemic Reform: Perspecitives on Personalizing Education--September 1994

Coordinating Top-Down and Bottom-Up Strategies

Recognizing that both top-down and bottom-up strategies co-exist in effective systems means that the choice of reform strategies will never be entirely clear. Ambiguities and tensions always accompany complex change processes. In this final section my intent is to contribute some clarity to this vexing problem area by making two generic distinctions, and then by providing two case illustrations - one at the level of school (local)/district(center); the other at the district (local)/state (center) levels.

The two generic distinctions pertain to division of labor (between the center and local), and the sequence of strategies. Division of labor concerns the relative roles of the center and local entities. In overall terms, the center's role in bilateral systems is to stimulate and respond to local action, help formulate "general direction", gather and feedback performance data, focus on selection, promotion and replacement, provide resources and opportunities for continuous staff development, and the like. The role of the local unit is to take action, work on shared vision, develop collaborative cultures, monitor and problem solve vis-a-vis desired directions, respond and be proactive with external agencies and events, and basically to develop the habits and skills of learning organizations. These relative roles will become clearer through the two case illustrations to be described below.

Even more problematic is the sequence of events and emphasis. In dynamic systems there can be no step-by-step set of procedures. Recent research, however, shows that non-linear change does work in approximate patterns, which point clearly to the types of strategies that are more or less likely to be effective (Fullan, in press). As heretical as it sounds, reliance on visions and strong shared culture contains severe limitations for addressing complex change.

In studying 'the critical path to corporate renewal' in twenty-six companies, Beer et al (1990) concluded the following:

Change efforts that begin by creating corporate programs to alter the culture of the management of people in the firm are inherently flawed even when supported by top management.
Formal organizational structure and systems are the last things an organization should change when seeking renewal - not the first, as many managers assume.
Effective changes in the way an organization manages people do not occur by changing the organization's human resource policies and systems.
Starting corporate renewal at the very top is a high-risk revitalization strategy not employed by the most successful companies.
Organizations should start corporate revitalization by targeting small, isolated, peripheral operations, not large, central, core operations.
It is not essential that top management consistently practice what it preaches in the early stages of renewal, although such action is undoubtedly helpful (p.6).

Beer et al found that isolated pockets of change reflecting new behaviors, led to new thinking which eventually pushed structures and procedures to change. People learn new behaviors primarily through their interactions with others, not through front-end training designs. Training builds on and extends new momentum. We found this process very clearly in our work in Brock High School in the Learning Consortium (Durham Board of Education, Video; Fullan, 1993). Change started in the behavior and culture of teaching and teacher relationships through small-scale inservice, which in turn spread and led to changes in structure.

This leads to the interesting hypothesis that reculturing leads to restructuring more effectively than the reverse. In most restructuring reforms, structure is expected to push for cultural change, and mostly fails. There is no doubt a reciprocal relationship required between the two. But, it is much more powerful when teachers and administers begin working in new ways only to discover that school structures must be altered than the reverse situation in which rapidly implemented new, structures create confusion, ambiguity, and conflict ultimately leading to retrenchment.

In any case, Beer et al (1990) found that organizations that underwent successful revitalization followed a particular sequence in which individual, small group, and informal behavior began to change first (bottom-up, if you will), which in turn was reinforced and further propelled by changes in formal design and procedures (structures, personnel practices, compensation systems etc.) in the organization (top-down). Both local and central levels can be active and influential at all phases, but what is attended to, and when is critical.
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[Why Centralized and Decentralized Strategies Are Both Essential]

[Coordinating Top-Down and Bottom-Up Strategies (Continued)]