Leading Educational Change and Improvement at Scale: Some Inconvenient Truths about System Performance

The challenges of securing educational change and transformation, at scale, remain considerable. While sustained progress has been made in some education systems (Fullan, 2009; Hargreaves & Shirley, 2009) generally, it remains the case that the pathway to large-scale, system improvement is far from easy or straightforward. While large-scale comparative assessments, such as PISA, increasingly define the contours of contemporary policy-making, the international pursuit of better educational outcomes and higher student achievement persist. Despite various critiques of PISA (Alexander, 2012; Lingard, Martino, & Rezai-Rashti, 2013) and questions about the legitimacy of cross-border generalizations from its data (Luke, 2011) for the foreseeable future, at least, this pervasive international assessment and the global education reform movement that has erupted from it, is likely to remain a potent policy force. It has been suggested that the main reason why meaningful, educational change at scale, remains, for many systems, an ongoing aspiration is because the "wrong policy drivers" have been chosen (Fullan, 2011). In other words, the wrong strategies and solutions have been selected and applied. This may indeed be the case, as around the world there continues to be evidence of considerable intervention in education systems but relatively little to show for it (Payne, 2008). An alternative explanation for the failure of much large scale reform points towards a preoccupation with human capital solutions, partly fuelled by evidence from large-scale assessments and the rhetoric of "what works" (Whitty, 2016), that obscure certain inconvenient truths. This article considers four of these inconvenient truths that directly affect, and in many cases prevent, attempts to secure education reform and change at scale.