Reform of and by the System: A Case Study of a State's Effort at Curricular and Systemic Reform

Abstract

The article tells the story of Michigan's effort to create a language arts curriculum. Our story is embedded in an attempt by the governor, legislature, Department of Education, and (sometimes) the State Board of Education at state systemic reform. The focus of the article is that part of the overall effort that was directed toward the language arts curriculum. Although funded by the U.S. Department of Education (USDE) and initiated by the state, the language arts work was undertaken by a loosely connected but long-associated set of language arts professionals who, although suspicious of the state's motives and authority, cared a great deal about what they called best practice in language arts and embraced the state initiative to push their views. Working from Parsons's (1949) conception of a system as “a network of collectivities, side by side, overlapping, and larger-smaller” (p. 101), we describe the overlapping of this group with the state and with other collectivities that emerged as the effort went along. Finally, we argue that although the state's educational system remains loosely linked, democratic, contentious, and noisy, this language arts effort heightened the mutual awareness and interdependence of the system's separate parts and so served the purposes of systemic reform.