Reforming the Grammar of Schooling Again and Again

Abstract

For each generation of progressive educators since the early twentieth century, the history of attempted classroom, school, and district reforms to alter the “grammar of schooling” has been a dismal tale of disappointment and failure. The structures of the age-graded school and the district bureaucracy, both of which tilt pedagogy toward teacher-centered instruction, have seemingly forged cage-like steel bars to hold the “grammar of schooling” in place. Yet historians have recorded incremental changes that have marginally bent these structures and practices over time. School boards established alternative schools. Superintendents decentralized authority. Principals allowed multiage groupings in their schools. Teachers modified lessons and relationships with students. Such changes in the grammar of schooling and instruction have underwhelmed passionate progressive reformers inspired by Deweyan ideas but have given hope to many policy makers, practitioners, and researchers that the grammar of schooling and its apparent permanence can be amended, perhaps even banished. The articles in this special issue testify to the persistent belief that progressiveminded reformers can fix, if not eradicate, district bureaucracies, age-graded schools, and traditional instructional practices embedded within the steeltempered grammar of schooling. In commenting on these articles, I look first at the unit of analysis the five authors used and then what they documented as alterations (or not) in the