alk into a classroom in any public school in the U.S. today. Is it similar to the classrooms you remember as a child? Certainly, the building may be newer, a computer probably sits somewhere in the corner of the room, the pictures on the walls may be a bit different, the students look and act a little weird, but overall, the classroom resembles those you remember from your youth. In fact, if you stayed around to observe instruction, you would no doubt be struck with how familiar everything feels. Further, if you were able to compare the former and current structure and organization in the school building and district, a similar sense of dรฉjร vu would emerge. Careful historical analyses of America's public schools, much like the literature on implementation of innovations in schools, reveals a theme of constancy [1,2]. Despite all the advances in knowledge, in technological capacity, in society in general, schooling has remained remarkably stable in terms of structure, organization, and delivery of instruction. While changes and innovations certainly have permeated schools, Tyack's [3] notion of a "one best system" emerging from the latter nineteenth century captures the essence of the schools' reality.
This consistency in school design, organization, and operation was challenged by a very cynical atmosphere which emerged in the early 1980s. A barrage of criticism was directed at America's schools. Whereas our public schools had been a major success story for generations, beginning most visibly in 1983 with the federal government's release of A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform, schools were lambasted for their poor performance. A veritable cornucopia of similar reform reports followed this initial salvo, and today, despite claims by educational scholars that these reports' assertions were terribly exaggerated and went beyond available evidence [4], it is widely agreed among policy makers and the general public that our schools are below par.
Herein lies what is perhaps the greatest dilemma facing educators today. Americans in the 1990s are obsessed with the notion of change. Popular books implore us to reinvent government [5], to reinvent our lives [6], to restructure and reengineer corporations [7,8], to reconceptualize our ideas about leadership [9], even to reconsider our understanding of faith and religion as espoused in the New Testament [10]. But concerning schools, while the public is very critical and demands improvements, the evidence suggests that schools aren't terribly amenable to significant change. Though organizations do change routinely [11], schools and teaching, as Lortie [12] suggested in his landmark analysis of the teaching profession, are characterized by conservative inclinations which he described as a pattern of continuity.