May-June 2008

by Lee S. Shulman

The Carnegie Foundation is honored to provide editorial leadership for Change, but the magazine thrives because it has many stewards. As editors and publishers, as subscribers and contributors, and across the colleges, universities, associations, and governmental agencies at which we work, we are all about change.

As I write this editorial, change is constantly in the news. The two leading Democratic presidential candidates each claims to be the leader this nation needs to take us into the future and the sworn enemy of whatever noun cowers in the rhetorical corner as the opposite of change. And although the leading Republican candidate opposes “mere change” or “change for the sake of change,” his rhetoric implies approval of the “right” kind of change. So this publication’s founding parents wisely opted to name it as they did. “Change” has the right emotional tone, the right sense of progress and prospect.

But what, indeed, is change all about?  And what counts as its proper opposite? 

I first encountered the scholarly study of change in 1960, as a graduate research assistant at the University of Chicago. Benjamin Bloom was doing research for what was to become one of his classic books, Stability and Change in Human Characteristics.  Both “stability” and “change” were understood as virtues in his formulation. Without the continuity provided by stability—without connections between past, present, and future—there would be no reason to educate, to invest, or to raise children well. Indeed, these connections provide the basis for trust, durable social relationships, the rule of law, and robust communities. Stability is the keystone of human identity. 

Nevertheless, stability also raises a set of serious problems. In a perfectly stable universe, the richest and poorest families in a society never change their rank order. “A” students are forever on the honor roll and “C” students remain mired in the middle. A perfectly stable world is a caste system frozen in time.
Stability is not the same as stasis or paralysis. Stable systems must be highly adaptive and flexible. They must have the capacity to change. Tiger Woods has been the world’s finest golfer for a decade, but not because he developed a particular style and set of skills and perfected them. Woods adapted his game to changing golf-course designs (often modified to offer greater challenges to Woods himself!), stiffer competition, and flaws that developed in his own swing as he matured.
Thus the secret of his stability is his capacity for change.

Which brings us back to Bloom, whose interest in all of this was to identify the most fruitful ways to disrupt the stability of physical, intellectual, or academic givens, to invalidate the prophecies of constancy. His argument was that the earlier the interventions, the greater the benefits. If we introduced nutritional supplements, early intellectual stimulation, or intensive tutoring to disadvantaged youngsters, the impact on their status at maturity could be dramatic.    
His work became one of the cornerstones of Great Society programs like Head Start and Follow Through and initiatives like Children’s Television Workshop and High/Scope. In statistical terms, the correlation between a prior state of affairs and a future state is called a “stability coefficient.” These programs’ founders strongly believed that the purpose of educational reform was to lower the stability coefficients of the rank orders of privilege and power.

At the institutional level, higher education is characterized by continuity.  Recall Clark Kerr’s observation that of the 75 institutions in the world that have continued to play the same roles since the 15th century, 60 are universities. But greatness at the faculty level is defined by innovation, discovery, and change. Thus universities are settings where continuity and its disruption are in constant, dynamic competition. 

Another of my teachers at Chicago, Herb Thelen, once posited (with tongue only partially in cheek) “the school-burning theory of education”: Every ten years, burn down the schools and begin again. Behind this strange proposal was the recognition that after around a decade’s experience with just about any set of practices, revolution becomes habit, the adventure pales, and dreams dissolve. Only by heeding the admonition to begin again can the energy of invention be restored.

Our conceptions of knowledge, and therefore of schooling, do not change by dint of new discoveries or innovation alone, as Thelen and others have observed. Scholars develop powerful skeptical and critical capacities to re-examine old truths using the lenses of new conceptual frameworks. The works of Herodotus, William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, or Hannah Arendt take on new meaning when reinterpreted by Freudians or Marxists, by feminists or postmodernists, by behaviorists or fundamentalists. 

In several of our Carnegie Foundation projects during the past decade, we saw firsthand how change can occur through critical reinterpretation. In the Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate, faculty and students from more than eighty programs across six fields engaged in discussions of the “first principles” guiding their doctoral programs. They regularly discovered that their programs were blanketed with barnacles of tradition that had become disconnected from their original rationales. By asking innocent questions about core courses and qualifying exams, proposal defenses and dissertations, assistantships and committee composition, both faculty and students came to recognize that they no longer understood the reasons for many of their program requirements and traditions. This insight led to revision and redesign. By making requirements more flexible, they reclaimed for their programs a stability of mission and purpose.

Perhaps I have become particularly sensitive to issues of change and stability as I prepare to complete more than a decade as president of the Carnegie Foundation and to transfer that responsibility to my successor, Professor Tony Bryk. When I began my stewardship of the foundation, I recognized the responsibility for both stability and change, for preserving and extending the foundation’s extraordinary legacy while adapting its programs to educational challenges that may not have existed for Pritchett or Flexner and not even for Kerr or Boyer. I also saw the need to reinterpret the work of my predecessors.  Thus, the Flexner Report has been critically questioned and radically extended in our upcoming reports on medical and nursing education, while Boyer’s conception of the scholarship of teaching has been deepened and elaborated through the work of the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. 

For the past three years, the foundation has also been the steward of Change—a responsibility we assumed after the demise of the American Association for Higher Education. Both the foundation and this special publication will continue to flourish for many years to come. But fundamental distinctions, such as that between K-12 and higher education, currently are and should be in a state of flux and reconsideration. When subjects that were once the sole province of colleges and universities are regularly taught in middle and high schools, and when many colleges are teaching skills that were traditionally the responsibility of K-12, what are we to make of the old distinctions? When some are proposing that the upper secondary and lower college divisions be combined into new institutions, where do we find stability, and what kinds of changes will preserve schooling’s fundamental purposes? 

The tension between stability and change can be uncomfortable, to be sure. But the promise of the future lies in striking that balance. Now more than ever, Change has its work cut out for it.