The Impact of Education Reform on Teachers and Students: A Theoretical Analysis Essay

Introduction

Organizational change is a tedious and complex process that requires near-total buy-in from the various stakeholders. Heath and Heath (2010) note that change involves more than a shift in strategy and approach. It is an entire mental reorientation with the accompanying stress related to uncertainty. Leaders during education reform have a significant role in mobilizing their subordinates to implement the change effectively. The failure of a change process can be costly in terms of time and resources and should be avoided at all costs. This paper will discuss education reform in relation to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, classical management theory, and the human relations movement.

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and Educational Reform Acts since 1965

Education reform over the years has taken different directions and morphologies. One of the prevalent forms of education reform over the past three-fifths of a century has been the reduction of the achievement gap (Ansorger, 2021). In particular, education strategists have dedicated time and attention to the issue of one group of learners having far better academic outcomes than another group. Crucially, the achievement gap is inherently linked with the social order, as evidenced by the demographic makeup of the two groups. The former group is primarily White, middle- or upper-class, and socially stable, coming from conventional families.

On the other hand, the latter group is economically marginalized, of Black or Hispanic ethnic heritage, and from dysfunctional family and community setups. To reduce the achievement gap, educational reformists have identified several gaps that need to be plugged. Notably, the low-achieving group is starved of top-level teachers and educational resources, and this must be addressed as a prerequisite to narrowing the achievement gap. Reform agendas and Acts passed to narrow the achievement gap have invariably proposed specific methods to distribute more resources to the underprivileged group.

In today’s socio-political regime, education plays a central role as a means towards the eradication of poverty. Ansorger (2021) argues that governments have focused on the use of education as a means to guarantee upward economic mobility for the marginalized classes. As a result, education has become akin to a commodity peddled to the masses with the promise of a better future. The evidence for market-driven education exists in the USA’s dominant form of instruction and assessment methods.

For instance, the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965 aimed at two things: Firstly, fighting poverty through education reform and second, equality for ethnic minority students. It proposed increased funding to lowly achieving schools dominated by minorities to achieve its goals. On the other hand, the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2000 had similar goals but attempted to meet them through standardized national tests and equitable distribution of highly qualified teachers to measure year and year progress in learner content uptake. However, applying Maslow’s hierarchy of needs requires an altogether different approach.

Human needs can be hierarchized according to their prepotency, as was observed by Abraham Maslow. This phenomenon can be represented by predominant basic needs at the bottom of a five-rung pyramid. Second from the bottom is security and safety, followed by social affiliation and esteem (Owens, 2004). At the tip of the pyramid is self-actualization, which every person strives for but rarely achieves in a lifetime.

A paramount aspect of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is the fact that lower-order needs must be met before higher-order needs. In particular, lower-order needs or deficiency needs are of utmost importance and must be satisfied before the two higher-order needs. In the case of learners from marginalized communities, deficiency needs are hardly met. In particular, most of their families cannot provide them with basic physiological needs in the form of healthy and regular food, clean water, and financial security. This ties in with the fact that 66% of student academic achievement can be explained by non-school factors (Ansorger, 2021). For such students, the notion of self-actualization in academics is abstract in light of immediate and pressing concerns.

From the perspective of teachers, contemporary education reform takes away from their sense of autonomy and esteem needs of Maslow’s hierarchy. Markedly, teachers have already satisfied their lower-order needs to a large extent and, therefore, only gain marginally from increased salaries and other related perks (Owens, 2004). Thus, teachers are primarily motivated by satisfying higher-order needs, especially autonomy. Specifically, teachers need to be given leeway in formulating teaching and assessment regimes.

Owens and Valesky (2021) note that the current educational reform regime increasingly pits teachers against school management. A case in point is the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) of 2015, which focuses on the achievement gap that has seen “historically underserved” learners continue to lag behind (Ansorger, 2021, p. 376). ESSA proposes that funding for schools be placed under the control of the states. Additionally, it seeks to have states set their assessment criteria with less federal intervention in the form of standardized national sets, as seen in NCLB. Thus, the management of education is firmly at the state level, which is still far removed from teachers who would like more autonomy and the resultant esteem in the running of academic affairs.

Unsurprisingly, teachers starting in their careers have dreams of achieving self-actualization during their work. However, by the time they are in their mid-forties, they are resigned to the difficulty of their jobs and barely manage to keep going (Owens, 2004). In addition, most education reform centers around cutting costs, catering to learners with significant socioeconomic challenges at home, and reducing teacher input. It is impossible to imagine a piece of education reform that inspires confidence and satisfaction in a teacher.

In summary, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs attempts to contextualize teachers’ occupational satisfaction in the face of education reform. Whereas the classical management style discusses organizational structure and the human relations movement discusses the emotional footing of the teacher during reform, Maslow’s hierarchy views the teacher as an entity with needs that may or may not be satisfied by their profession.

As noted earlier, Ansorger (2021) admits that self-actualization is out of reach for many people. It is unlikely that it can ever be achieved for teachers unless a significant rollback of education reform since 1965 takes place and is replaced by teacher-centered reform. With this in mind, teachers are likely to remain unmotivated beyond a certain point below the threshold for implementing change in education.

Personal Application

From experience, the lower-level needs of Maslow’s hierarchy, namely basic needs, security, and interpersonal connections, are relatively easily achieved in any setup, provided one has a stable income and good social skills. However, past experience working as a volunteer in an adult literacy program revealed that the two upper levels of the hierarchy are very elusive. In limited cases, the second highest level, autonomy, can be feasibly achieved. In education, this would involve the increased independence of teachers in the conduct of academic affairs. However, people, including billionaire Bill Gates, have a vested interest in children’s education (Au, 2016). Teachers are unlikely to ever get the reins of power and are, therefore, fated to remain highly demotivated.

Classical Management Style of Leadership as a hindrance to Education Reform

Education reform is idealized as a linear process originating from the US government and trickling down to various schools nationwide. However, this is not always the case, as different jurisdictions adopt different implementation strategies. Even when reform policies appear intuitive prima facie, there are always wide variations in their application across regions, schools, and even at the classroom level. To the originators of education reform, this presents a dilemma as far as it creates disparities in the consequences of the reform across the board.

One of the reasons that could explain the differences in implementation is the inherent cultural and learner ability differences within the classroom and disparities between teacher attitudes and understanding. Notably, teachers are the primary drivers of education reform as they are the ones who must ultimately make changes in instruction, assessment, and approaches to learners. The classical management style comes in as an explanation for why education reform cannot be unidirectional, uniform, and consistent as envisioned by education reformists.

The classical management theory utilizes a hierarchical structure with specialized roles and well-defined leadership that provides the necessary control. It emphasizes planning, organization, command, coordination, and control for the best project results. In particular, the hierarchical design of the organization should also delineate the flow of authority, information, and responsibility straight from the top rungs to the bottom rungs.

Owens (2004, p. 89) notes that the classical organizational theory is inflexible in that it gives no allowance for lateral or multidirectional relationships within an organization. For instance, the organizational chart of a conventional American school district is where the elementary school principal reports to the area director of elementary education, who in turn reports to the superintendent of education. Elementary school principals cannot link up with high school principals as this would represent a non-unidirectional flow of information.

Another significant aspect of the classical management theory is its approach toward worker motivation. It advocates for money as the prime motivator of workers who are, in a sense, robotic and entrenched in their habits of work (Owens, 2004). In this way, the classical management theory only addresses the base level of Maslow’s hierarchy, further adding to its drawbacks. Nuanced aspects of an organization, such as interpersonal relationships, are put to the side in classical management theory.

Similarly, the classical management theorist ignores the concept of self-esteem as a motivator of employees, as put forth in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. In particular, the worker in classical management theory is trained in a particular field and is supposed to be a paid cog in the organization’s machine (Owens, 2004). Personal aspirations harbored by teachers are moot in the context of classical management theory. Thus, the total organization is the focal point of classical organization, and the worker is as important as the service to the organization.

Implementing education reform involves two primary actors whose actions depend on the success of the process. On the one hand, the designers of the reform, typically professors of education and curriculum administration, conduct empirical and theoretical studies and draw meaningful inferences that detail the reform agenda. On the other hand, there are the implementers who interpret and execute the reform agenda at the lowest level.

The implementers have the most prominent role to play in ensuring the goals of the time-bound reform agenda are met. Thus, education reform in the US follows a distinct classical management format of unidirectional flow of information (Datnow et al., 2002). Those in the higher ranks expect the workers in the lower rungs to know precisely what they need to do, and they should be reasonably motivated by the monetary rewards they receive.

In case a piece of education reform fails, blame is placed on the implementers. There may be claims that educators did not execute the tenets of the well-meaning reform to the best of their ability, possibly because they are specious or saboteurs (Datnow et al., 2002). Fullan (2004, p. 113) notes that for teachers, “If the change works, the individual teacher gets little of the credit; if it doesn’t, the teacher gets most of the blame.” This is especially the case when reform implementation is treated as a technical-rational process, as in classical management theory. In reality, reform is not merely technical and subject to a rigid and rigorous chain of command. There are important undertones to reform, such as the socioeconomic and personal factors that affect educators, learners, and all other individual stakeholders daily.

Additionally, the designers of education reform often envision the uniform implementation of their ideas due to their distance from peculiarities that characterize different environments. Fullan (1982) points out that the oddities and unpredictability of a typical classroom render any logicalities and rational expectations moot. Thus, classical organizational theory is perhaps why education reform is, at best, stop-start and ununiform. There is a need for those setting the reform agenda to realize what goes on at the lower rungs where educators are. This way, there may be a better design of the reform agenda and a degree of flexibility for implementers who must adapt to a variety of factors during the course of their roles.

Education reform agendas routinely fail in the US due to an organizational structure that adopts the classical management theory. A case in point is the attempt to introduce a set of national standards termed the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) in the USA in the late 2000s. The CCSS was part of a paradigm shift that would see education firmly placed in the domain of neoliberal policies (Au, 2016). In particular, CCSS idealized education as any other commodity subject to market forces following large-scale privatization and the withdrawal of government interventions – a reform agenda decried by Ansorger (2021).

Controversial tenets of this reform agenda included the deregulation of the teaching profession and the utilization of high-stakes standardized testing that richly rewards successful learners while shunning failures (Au, 2016). This wide-ranging reform agenda required that educators consent and become willing participants in a free-enterprise education model. Its chief sponsors included philanthropic organizations founded by persons such as Bill Gates who wanted increased influence in the education regime of the US.

The neoliberal policies have not found a home in the US education system primarily because their proposed implementers have become its primary saboteurs. Its tenets, as defined by its designers, ultimately failed to convince educators of its relevance or goodwill. Teachers, for instance, criticized the proposed de-unionization, which would see them subject to market labor forces and possibly lower rewards. Moreover, the decreased autonomy of teachers, which would result from the subjection of academic content and educational resources to market forces, made teachers uneasy.

Au (2016, p. 318) notes that teachers increasingly built, and continue to build, alliances that “offer opportunities for educators to share liberating practices that encourage acting autonomously of state-mandated reforms.” Thus, implementers at the lower rungs of the classical management model crave autonomy and input in the agenda-setting process – higher order needs of Maslow’s hierarchy (Owens, 2004). To deny them this will result in a haphazard, poor implementation of education reform.

Personal Application

From experience, the classical management style often breeds contempt for authority. In particular, subordinates feel lorded over and unable to express themselves within their roles. This remark is informed by a stint volunteering at a local school that received periodic instructions from a regional management center. From personal observation, they may be so physically and mentally removed from the persons to whom they send instructions that they are entirely unaware of how work is done at the basic level. As a result, their pronouncements are often out of touch with reality, brewing discontent, mistrust, and even defiance in their subordinates. In such cases, the organization experiences a high turnover and a disgruntled workforce.

Owens (2004) observes that before the education reform in 1965, more than half of existing teachers were optimistic about their career choices. However, after 1970, only slightly over 25% of teachers felt that they were in the right job. Most individuals do not want to be imposed on, particularly not teachers with a demanding job.

How the Human Relations Movement Affects the Change Process in Education

Human beings are the chief agents of change for any organization. In defining change, Fullan (1982 p. 25) observes that it involves “loss anxiety and struggle.” In the education sector, change, as noted earlier, is primarily driven by the teacher. Notably, teachers have a set of problems that they face every day in school, such as problematic learners, uncertainty in the execution of their roles, and time constraints that cause them great anxiety on a daily basis.

In many cases, reform agendas for the teacher are not geared toward eliminating the tangible problems that teachers face. Oftentimes, they appear abstract and unnecessary to the teacher, who is likely to continue grappling with their everyday problems long after the proposed change is implemented. The teacher, therefore, develops a deep-seated personal resistance to any piece of education reform and views it as a frivolous imposition on an already stressful occupation. Therefore, the human relations movement is important to education because it recognizes the humanistic demands and characteristics of any change.

The human relations movement focuses on the personal behavioral elements of motivation. Elton Mayo noted that group dynamics, leadership styles, and decision-making approaches of an organization are important predictors of the level of morale and commitment shown by employees (Owens, 2004). Fullan (1993) highlights that all instances of educational reform require teachers to adopt new skills, behaviors, and discretion. It is, therefore, unsurprising that education reform that feels imposed rarely takes off since teachers simply become uncooperative and resistive to the new agenda.

Moreover, change is shepherded by a change process or a gradual reorientation and adoption of new approaches. There is a need for continual buy-in by the human stakeholders for reform agendas to be successful. In particular, the change process must continually allay the anxieties of the teacher, the parent, and the learner at the most basic human level.

The teacher is often thrust into the whirlpool of change without prior preparation or involvement. Consider a teacher in a rural school in the USA receiving a new piece of education reform from the state government a few miles away. At that given time, the teacher is already overwhelmed by several factors, such as having a low-ability class, being behind schedule, and struggling with several ill-disciplined students. In addition to the change not addressing the teacher’s immediate concerns, it involves acquiring new skills and competencies. The teacher will likely feel frustrated and anxious and may even dread getting up to work every morning. The macro-environment within which the teacher operates is not predisposed to change and is likely to frustrate its elements.

Notably, Ellsworth (2000) highlights the importance of the environment being adequately geared for change to facilitate the actions of the human elements of the change process. Stand Tall Steve (2022) notes the importance of having a positive school culture, especially during times of change. However, in many cases, teachers find themselves merely striving to survive change instead of being active protagonists in the change process.

The inability to relate to the agents of change on a human level is one of the reasons for the failure of the education reform process. Teachers, learners, and parents are treated as robots capable of changing their long-entrenched methods and approaches to education once a mandate for reform is issued (Fullan, 1999). Instead of being viewed as important parts and victims of the change process, important stakeholders are viewed as vessels of the change who should, without question, implement the change as desired by its designers. The human relations movement requires the originators of the change to consider the needs of the individuals who make up the organization. The organization is not viewed as a vehicle for a certain desire but as a summation of individual elements with personal opinions on the change they are implementing.

This shifts the focus to the leadership of the change process and their conduct with regard to their subordinates. In the education sector, the leader can be the principal of a local area superintendent tasked with overseeing the implementation of a particular change model. Owens (2004) opines that a good leader is able to shape and initiate structure around the change as far as assigning roles and setting timelines. On the other hand, they should be capable of showing consideration for subordinates at a human level.

However, the latter behavior is more valuable to subordinates when a school is undertaking a major transition, such as a curriculum change. In collaboration with teachers, leaders of education reform should ideally develop processes that facilitate sound decision-making instead of making final decisions themselves (Owens, 2004). Due to the challenges teachers face when conducting their roles, they are particularly prone to switching off when a leader is seen as increasing the level of uncertainty in their roles.

Personal Application

One personal proposal for change that education reformists can take on board is implementing psychosocial support for teachers during considerable education changes. For instance, changing the entire curriculum can cause significant discomfort for teachers. Teachers above forty-five years have no lofty expectations or aspirations regarding their jobs (Owens, 2004). They have already settled into a dysfunctional rhythm where they carry out their roles in the way they know best, with varying results. Convincing them to undertake a particular reform agenda that will presumably solve the problems they have encountered in a long career is not easy.

This age group of teachers is the most likely to forestall any education reform agenda. Psychosocial support in the form of talks and forums where such teachers can voice their inhibitions and fears may ease the change process for them. A qualified occupational therapist can come in and talk such teachers into a sense of cautious optimism that can, at the very minimum, eliminate their tendency to sabotage the reform agenda.

Comparison and Contrast of the Selected Theories

Similarity exists between Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and the classical management theory. In particular, both of them deal with the humanistic, specifically emotional, aspects of change. Heath and Heath (2010) describe change as having a rational and an emotional element. Maslow’s hierarchy in light of education reform reveals that teachers cannot be adequately motivated beyond a certain point if the contents of the proposed changes are implemented. In the same vein, the human relations theory brings to the fore the emotional and mental anguish that change can inflict on a teacher.

On the other hand, the classical management theory starts out rationally but crumbles in the face of emotionality. From its description as envisioned by Fredrick Winslow Taylor, it aims at creating a robust organizational framework that is robust to change. However, it fails to account for the humanistic elements of the organization. As a result, changes induced in educational setups using the classical management model are rarely successful.

Compared to the theories discussed above, the human relations movement best explains the prevalence of deviant behaviors within a workforce. In particular, teachers can sometimes outright refuse to cooperate with the change process as opposed to merely being unmotivated elements within the organization. Au (2016) reports on teachers in Seattle who refused to administer a district-mandated test.

In an even more extreme case, several teachers in Mexico were shot when protesting the same neoliberal education reform. However, in other cases, dissatisfied teachers may sabotage the change process by taking action against their fellow employees, such as excessively gossiping about colleagues or playing rude pranks on them (Brady et al., 2017). On the other hand, employees disenfranchised by the change process may resort to sabotage by being lazy or pilfering materials (Di Stefano et al., 2019). The change process will not be successful as long as teachers display a personal willingness to derail it with no regard for the organization’s aspirations.

The Switch Framework Applied to Education Reform

Organizational change needs to be clearly mapped as either a situational or a people problem. Education reform is primarily a people problem as it induces fear in the teacher and other stakeholders charged with seeing it through (Fullan, 1982). Heath and Heath (2010) propose a switch framework that can be illustrated as a rider, an elephant, and a path. In this case, the rider is the rational aspect of things.

On the other hand, the elephant is the emotional aspect, and the path is the desired change. For change to occur, the rider must plan and organize, and the elephant must be motivated to drive the plans. From earlier discussions, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and the human relations theory portray problems with the metaphorical elephant. Teachers, learners, and parents must be passionate about the change.

On the other hand, the organizational structure must chart the change process from start to finish. Heath and Heath (2010, p. 31) note that people inherently dislike “imported solutions.” Thus, a possible starting point for organizational change in education would be finding a way to make stakeholders feel they own the change.

Conclusion

Organizational behavior is a complex, multi-layered process involving many players and uncertainties. Education reform, in particular, presents many challenges to the school, the teacher, the learner, and the parent. When undertaking education reform, it is important to consider whether the organization is structured in a form that will facilitate the proposal. It is also important to consider the individual needs of the stakeholders according to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and whether the change presents more satisfaction or deprivation. Lastly, change cannot be separated from the humanistic aspect of its protagonists. If individuals reject the change at a mental and emotional level, it will simply not go through as desired by its originators.

References

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