In the Classroom

Internal Coherence

By Lory Hough

Nearly 100 high school principals, teachers, superintendents, curriculum coordinators, counselors, and department chairs are packed in a lecture hall at the Episcopal Divinity School waiting for Professor Richard Elmore to start his lecture. Additional chairs have been pulled from other rooms and lined up along the sidewalls to accommodate the overflow.

It is the third day of a weeklong summer Programs in Professional Education session called Redesigning High Schools for Improved Instruction, and the students are quiet, especially when Elmore opens with a joke.

“How many psychologists does it take to change a light bulb?” he asks. No guesses. “Only one, but the light bulb has to really want to change.”

Then the students understand: the same is true of high schools trying to change. This is why they are here this summer: to explore the many challenges that American high schools face, including unprecedented demographic transformation, increased scrutiny from parents, and powerful pressures from external accountability systems; and to explore why some schools have been reluctant to making lasting change. “If you have an internal, noncoherent organization, an outside force pushing won’t make it coherent. Like with testing,” Elmore says, followed by a long pause. “Now you know why I don’t get invited to speak in Washington anymore.”

For the next hour and a half, using PowerPoint slides, Elmore talks about the Internal Coherence Model and how schools of different types and in different policy contexts develop senses of accountability and are ultimately able to deliver high-quality instruction.

For starters, he says, schools need to examine their responsibility. “To whom do you think teachers feel most accountable?” he asks. Many in the class shout out the same answer: students. Elmore nods yes. This is true of some schools, but not all, he says, and then discusses three hypothetical schools.

At school A — “the default culture, which is about 80 percent of schools out there” — responsibility trumps accountability, he says. This type of school is based on where they think students should be. The one thing that all of the adults in the school can agree on is order. School B, on the other hand, runs with little formal organizational pressure and is comfortable and congenial, with leaders exerting a light hand. This type of school is based on where the principal thinks teachers actually are. The problem with school B, he says, is that if there is any disruption, the school tends to collapse because it doesn’t have internal structures to push back. And school C, he says, already works on an accountability model, except instead of being accountable to students, “teachers, over time, tend to believe they are accountable to the larger teaching community.”

Throughout the lecture, Elmore shows leadership charts and tradeoff curves and talks about efficacy — the degree that people believe they can change their practice and that change will improve learning.

“I was working with a public school in Boston where they made lots of changes and improvement, but efficacy didn’t go up,” he says. “The mistake we made was we didn’t actually tell people they were improving. You have to let teachers know they are getting better. I learned that a little bit of behavioral theory doesn’t hurt sometimes.”

Illustration by Tim Walker

About the Article

A version of this article originally appeared in the Fall 2008 issue of Ed., the magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

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