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Public school critics often suggest that imposing a corporate model on schools would speed up the pace of reform. However, there’s nothing unique about public education’s ability to resist change, says W. Patrick Dolan, president of W.P. Dolan & Associates in Kansas and author of Restructuring Our Schools: A Primer on Systemic Change. Over the years, corporate executives themselves have tried a number of "reform" efforts: suggestion programs, participative management training, quality circles, Total Quality Management. Most of these efforts, Dolan asserts, have met with only limited success.

Why? The problem with most organizations does not rest with the people in them, Dolan told a standing-room-only crowd of workshop participants at the IASB Joint Annual Conference in Chicago this past November. Instead, the problem with most organizations rests in the structure itself. In the western world, he explains, one classic model exists for organizations, whether they be factories, the military, churches, or our educational institutions. That model is the traditional organizational pyramid -- a top-down, authoritarian, "command and control" system layered in hierarchy and divided horizontally along lines of specialization.

While some people believe schools should become more like businesses, Dolan thinks they operate too much like corporations already -- and that is part of the problem. According to the former high school and college teacher, who holds a doctorate in organization behavior from Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, organizations with a pyramid style of leadership typically suffer four major dysfunctions:

Restricted information flow. Because it's a command model rather than a consultative one, the pyramid structure creates a non-listening system that cannot retrieve its own data nor learn from it. "To manage successfully, you simply must have people at the point of delivery who will tell you when something isn’t working," Dolan says. "In fact, Western organizational culture supports exactly the opposite behavior. It's enormously risky to move tough data up the hierarchy, especially in a blaming environment. . . . Heads roll when things go wrong, and no one wants to be associated with bad news. . . . Ultimately, it means that those on the strategic decision-making level can't learn about themselves and their performance. They are operating in the dark, sometimes practically blind."

Lack of teamwork. Most organizations pay lip service to the importance of teamwork, but the reality is usually quite different. "The typical industrial enterprise resembles a cluster of silos, each sheltering its own little world: finance, human resources, engineering, production, purchasing, and so on," Dolan says.

Rather than collaborate to produce the best possible product, the "teams" in a typical organization, and the individuals within them, compete for power, position and resources. This deeply competitive culture is antithetical to teamwork because of the way it pits one individual or group against another.

Short-term quantitative bias. Most U.S. organizations are driven by an obsession with numbers and a demand for quick results. "There is a deep prejudice toward short-term and quantitative endeavors over long-term and highly qualitative goals," Dolan says. This total focus on short-term measurements can lead to dangerous misinterpretations of an actual situation because it does not take into account the qualitative aspects of performance.

Poor morale. According to Dolan, the message that workers in most organizations get is: "You are stupid. You don’t care. And you can’t be trusted." The result, he says, is that most people at the bottom of the pyramid feel rage, which they suppress by quietly finding ways to undermine the system. This system is marked by poor morale because it cannot, by its very nature, sustain the energy, talent, and commitment of those who actually do the work.

Enter the Dolan Model, which seeks to transform schools from hierarchical, top-down structures to "learning communities" in which "stakeholders" -- teachers, parents, students and community members -- are empowered to make a greater number of strategic decisions. Dolan has spent more than 20 years working with such organizations as Ford, United Auto Workers and Goodyear on labor-management approaches to systemic change. In 1989, he began to use that history and experience to approach public education in a systemic fashion. Dolan & Associates has worked with more than 200 school districts around the country, as well as with statewide school reform efforts in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Washington and North Carolina.

In workshops he’s given around the country, Dolan distinguishes between leadership styles based on the pyramid model and the more collaborative model he promotes, and he urges school board members and other school leaders to view their roles in a new light. While the pyramid model features top-down directives, a collaborative style of leadership emphasizes shared decision-making. In organizations based on the pyramid model, information is closely guarded or hoarded, competitiveness tends to mitigate against teamwork, and power is defined as the ability to control others. In a collaborative model, information is freely shared, cooperation is valued at least as highly as competition, and power means having a voice in decisions. A pyramid model promotes lack of trust between people at different levels of the hierarchy, even if they are all supposed to be on the same "team." In contrast, more trust between members at different levels of the organization is a goal of collaboration.

Dolan believes most of our nation's schools fit the pyramid model. Our education system tends to stress individual competitiveness, learning environments in which students are ranked according to grades and test scores. At the same time, there is a general distrust of team learning and group problem-solving. Instead of an integrated education system, school is pitted against school, district against district, student against student, teachers against school board members against school administrators. The different disciplines within a school system are divided into "silos of specialization," often housed in separate offices, and courses are usually taught as if they have no relationship to each other. Often, schools are encouraged by the public to focus more on test scores than on what students actually learn.

So what would an actual school system based on the Dolan Model look like? Springfield District 186 is one of several Illinois school districts developing such a model. Coordinating this effort is the District 186 Communications Council, comprised of students, parents, business representatives, teachers, support staff, principals, district-level staff and members of the school board. "Dreaming the School: A Process for Shared Decision-Making," a handbook produced by the District 186 Communications Council, outlines the district’s plans to adopt what has become known as the Dolan model of site-based leadership.

"Every school is a learning community," says school board vice president Nina Giavaras, who has served on the Communications Council as a board representative. "The district is a big learning community, and it belongs to all the stakeholders."

Members of the Council argue that "in contrast to traditional ‘top-down,’ authoritarian and centralized operations, the process of shared decision-making allows those directly affected to take charge, creating ‘ownership’ of schools." To this end, the district is creating site leadership teams, "the principal decision-making group in each school," which also will be composed of teaching staff, school administrators, support staff, middle and high school students, parents and community members. The Council plans to start training the site leadership teams in the fall, and will begin with three of the schools.

Because of the newness of some of the ideas, "the Communications Council has purposely said we will go slowly," Giavaras says. "Nobody is bigger or more important than anyone else. No one’s ideas are any more valuable than anyone else’s. And that’s such a major cultural change in thinking for our country. We've been trained to think top-down on everything, and now we’re giving everybody an equal voice. One of the interesting things with the Communications Council was when we were learning how to do consensus. We don’t want a vote. We want to build consensus, and we’ve gone through training on how to do that. Everyone has to be able to live with what we’re proposing. And that would be part of the training we offer to the schools that become interested."

Indeed, the Council believes proper training is essential for the new model to work. Council members have attended numerous workshops themselves and plan to provide extensive training to the site leadership teams as well. District 186 also is a charter member of the Prairieland Education Network, a consortia of Central Illinois school districts committed to implementing shared decision-making strategies and promoting high quality professional development opportunities for all stakeholders. "The Communications Council has been through intensive training, and continues to seek more training," Giavaras says.

The Communications Council points out that it is not a regulatory body, nor does it replace the roles of the superintendent, school board or collective bargaining groups. However, members promise that site leadership teams will be allowed to seek waivers from collective bargaining agreements and school board policy, if this is what's needed to put a good idea into practice, and will even be assisted in seeking waivers from state laws and regulations (the Illinois School Code) if necessary. The Council also promises that ideas or policies created by the site leadership teams will not be carved in stone if future "stakeholders" want something different. "The shared decision-making process, by its nature, will remain a work in progress," the Council’s handbook states.

So far, the Dolan Model has been enthusiastically embraced by the Springfield Education Association, Superintendent Robert Hill and other administrators, as well as the school board, and Giavaras praises the willingness of each of these parties to take new risks. "Maybe I'm an idealist, but I feel we’re really making some major strides to strengthen public education, which has been good, but suffers from an image problem," Giavaras says. "If we can have the infighting gone, and get everyone working together, it works well. When you get ideas coming from the bottom up, people are committed, and they work much harder. That’s what we want to see in all our schools."

Still, Giavaras believes change will take time. "The whole thinking is changing. It’s not easy to change a culture, and we don’t expect it to happen overnight. The concept has been well received in many areas, but there are the doubters who are saying, ‘I think this is just another fad.’ So we’re proceeding slowly."

Dolan agrees that change isn’t easy. He stresses that if we want true reform within organizations, including schools, we need to take some essential steps.

We must resist a "mechanistic" view. With a machine (a car, for instance), if we can identify the faulty part that needs replacement or upgrading, we can fix it. For many would-be school reformers, "organizational change becomes a visit to a parts store for the proper upgrade, and school improvement is a series of well intentioned tweaking and new bits," Dolan says. "The mechanistic model promises what everyone wants -- a quick, clean, measurable solution to an identified problem -- and all of it with a minimum of disruption." However, schools are not cars, and quick fixes rarely fix anything for long.

Instead, we must look at the system as a whole. Within each system, subsystems exist, and each of these must be pushed to change. "If the state is the educational system in the United States, then we must take into account those elements . . . that hold it in place from within (unions, schools boards, administrators), and to some extent from without (parents, business community, legislators)," Dolan says. "The entire system is one, and to change a school is to change a district, its union, board, and management. And eventually to change the state educational structures as well. Anything else will be short-lived and false."

We must be prepared for resistance. When we try to create change, the system already in place will actively resist the change. Dolan describes a phenomenon he calls The-System-In-Place-Over-Against-Which-You-Start. "There is always something over which you are going to restructure," he says. "If you pretend that it is not there, or naively believe you can paint over it, some months or years later you will find the old picture staring back at you, scarcely altered. . . . There is a fundamental, relational, and intellectual consistency in every system that translates into a powerful drive to retain its equilibrium. It is in a steady state and needs to stay put." What’s needed is a strategy for "unsticking" the steady state already in place.

We must create a safe environment for new ideas. Trying out new ideas means being willing to take some risks. When we take risks, we risk making mistakes and proposing ideas that might sound radical at first. In most of our current organizations, making mistakes can be a dangerous proposition, and can even cause people to lose jobs. In a healthy organization, honest mistakes are not penalized and new ideas are encouraged.

We must involve all the players. "It’s easy to invent wonderful models in isolation, apart from the real communities, parents, teachers, and children, and existing school systems. But we are not starting from scratch," Dolan says. "Too often, legislatures simply demand required improvements in test scores, add some carrot/stick language, involve none of the major actors, and wait for something to happen. It will be a long wait."

Debi S. Edmund is contributing editor of the IASB School Public Relations Service.