Restructuring: Achievement and Engagement Outcomes

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The call to restructure U.S. schools "implies that something fundamental needs fixing. But what does restructuring really mean? What changes are called for? What are the changes meant to accomplish?" Valerie Lee of the University of Michigan and Julia Smith of the University of Rochester explore these questions in the July 1993 issue of the Sociology of Education.

I would disagree that "something fundamental needs fixing" systemwide, as noted in "The Third Bracey Report on the Condition of Public Education," which appears elsewhere in this issue. I would argue that we need restructuring because we now know a lot about how people learn that is not in accord with a 25-kids-in-a-box instructional model. But I would certainly concur that "restructuring" is a fuzzy term and that we don't know what, if anything, happens in restructured schools.

To see if anything had actually changed in middle schools that claimed that they had restructured, Lee and Smith pulled a nationally representative sample from the eighth-grade database of the National Education Longitudinal Study (NELS) begun in 1988. Because restructuring is such a muddy term, the researchers established several ways of measuring it. Citing evidence that collaboration leads to improved outcomes, they examined schools that reported engaging in team teaching. Given the largely negative findings on ability grouping, they looked for schools that reported heterogeneous grouping practices. To uncover …