Hixson (1994) notes the importance of integrating prevention and school restructuring initiatives:
"These discussion notes outline some key points related to the need to rethink the purposes and goals of school restructuring; particularly, the need for new strategies for consolidating social and academic agendas of schools into a more coherent and integrated continuum of experiences for students--experiences that will prepare them to be successful in life, as well as on tests. Most prominent among these issues is the need to address young peoples' increasing involvement in a variety of high-risk behaviors, particularly the use of alcohol, tobacco, and other drugs, and involvement in violence.
- The typical response has been to pursue these agendas in a fragmented, isolated and parallel manner that has led to a proliferation of add-on 'programs,' curricula, projects, and activities that has both overwhelmed schools, and made the school experience more complex, fragmented and confusing for staff and students alike.
- More recently, a new view is emerging--one that proposes a new vision of the roles, purposes, and goals for schooling that integrates both the traditional academic and broader strategies for youth development as the foundation for school restructuring.
- Throughout the country, schools are increasingly recognizing that to be effective, education must go beyond simply 'delivering' instruction or 'disseminating' information. Addressing those issues that affect students' motivation and ability to successfully engage in the learning process and participate in the broader life of the school is as central to effective schooling as is reading, math, science, or social studies. . . .
- The bottom line is this: Schools are not simply being asked to take on more of society's problems that are not 'properly' within their purview; but instead that they are being asked to recognize that they cannot accomplish their traditional academic mission if they do not attend to the whole of the individual child.
- Systematic investigations of research in six primary arenas offer some insight into a unified approach to school reform that allows for a natural, or seamless, integration of both the personal development and more traditional academic missions of the school. These arenas include:
(a) the role of the schools as societal institutions, and schooling as a societal responsibility
(b) learning theory
(c) youth development, including such issues as resiliency, the status of children, the role of 'culture,' youth policy, etc.
(d) preventing high risk behaviors, particularly alcohol and other drug use, and violence
(e) organizational change, development, and leadership, with special emphasis on holistic rather than reductionist concepts; the importance of metaphors, frameworks, paradigms, and context; and the concept of learning organizations and strategic systems
(f) integrated service delivery across agency, institutional, governmental and other traditional boundaries
- From this review, five fundamental principles have been derived.
(1) The challenge is not so much to 'restructure' our current schools as it is to reinvent or design new approaches to schooling, as well as the systems for delivering it.
(2) To meet the challenge of the increasing involvement of young people in various high risk behaviors requires a new definition of 'prevention' that focuses more on what we want young people to become, rather than simply what we don't want them to do.
(3) Schools, communities, and families will not be able to achieve their traditional 'academic' mission if they do not attend to the other issues that affect children's lives.
(4) The needs of our increasingly complex society will not be met by adults who are 'academically' astute, but personally and socially incompetent (e.g., a drug addict with high test scores, or a drug-free adult who is ignorant are both unproductive and tragic).
(5) The care and education of all our children are all of our responsibility--it really does take a whole village to raise a child. Parents cannot do it alone, and in fact, they never did.
- Based on a review of the restructuring literature, the following table reflects some of the fundamental changes in both the basic concepts and metaphors for schooling that are necessary to pursue any substantive change in schools. These four paradigm shifts are not reflective of the entirety of the changes necessary to move schools from where they are to where they need to be, but instead, they represent the core foundations that are prerequisites for that effort.
FROM--Education as academic development
TOWARD--Education as youth development
The implication is that effective education for today's world requires more than simply acquisition of fixed body of knowledge or set of discrete skills. Education requires that schools address both students' personal needs, as well as a far broader set of 'competencies' than is typical in most schools.
FROM--A fragmented, reductionist view of students and schools
TOWARD--An integrated, holistic view of people and schools
Our tendency in education is to identify issues, or problems, as autonomous and separate from each other, and as a result we do not often consider the impact of each on the others. It is this habit that allowed the proliferation of pull-out programs to address one need with little consideration for the impact on the standard classroom. This thinking also allowed our failure to understand that preventing involvement in high risk behavior requires more than point-in-time interventions, separate from the rest of the school experience.
FROM--Parallel, isolated, and competing priorities
TO--Consolidated and coherent goals and norms
The tendency to view students and schools as a collection of isolated pieces has also led to a variety of priorities that are not only isolated from each other, but are in competition for time, resources and prominence. Even further, this condition has led to development of multiple goals that are often in contradiction of each other. Effective schooling will require the establishment of a common set of coherent overall goals and operational norms that provide a focus for all people and activities in the school. This is even more true of the social components of schooling that it is for the academic.
FROM--Schools as information disseminators
TO--Schools as strategic learning communities
As mentioned earlier, effective education requires far more than the dissemination of information. More importantly, schools must model in their day-to-day operation the central importance of continual learning and reflection, both in what they do, and how they go about it. The two central questions are: Is what we're doing still what ought to, or needs to, be done? And are we doing what we do in the best way possible?" (p. 41-44)
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