If one is not a political leader or administrator, would it take, then, a single teacher with a belief in this idea of systems change? Would they begin their ideas in their own classroom, creating a tiny example of the new ecosystem that they would like to see happen district-wide? To somehow demonstrate the idea’s effectiveness and also try to demonstrate that the school-wide systems change would make an even bigger difference? Starting out small with something such as the above is the only way that I can see things beginning to change. Even though this takes on the “piecemeal” change idea, this could be the pipeline to the systems change that we are looking for. I would say the people presenting the systems change would need to have some sort of rapport with the stakeholders, a respected individual that has had even a minute amount of experience with a version of this change including research of other schools, such as the Decator school, that have attempted this type of change. Even though we would not want to follow the framework that they have in place, because the whole concept is to design your own framework around the details of what would be make sense for the area of the school, it would still be nice to know that this is possible.
Changing to a different system would be great, but it would still need to satisfy the needs of the antiquated government standardized testing, etc. Would these required items need to be taken into account when the organization is planning? The MEAP test, for example, is given by grade level and I’m assuming that instead of “sorting” the kids into grade levels there would be some other way of grouping them, or maybe no way of grouping them what-so-ever-, so how, then, would be differentiate between a third grader and a fourth grader, and how would we make sure that they correct standards have been taught to those children? Otherwise, our school would end up “failing” or not meeting AYP and all of a sudden, this wonderful new systemic change looks like, to the community and to the government at least, that it is not working! There would certainly have to be a plan in place that covers this possible issue, but that seems like it would keep us closer to the post-industrial world of schooling that we are