Reconsidering the Educational Restructuring Process: An Exercise in Retrospective Sense-Making

The restructuring movement in American public education has been underway for several years. No longer is it enough, reformers argue, to improve schools as we know them; the very organizations in which teaching and learning are imbedded must be restructured. Yet like so many words associated with reform, restructuring has come to mean everything and nothing. The full significance of the word is often overlooked, its richness lost, as educators and policymakers alike equate any and all change efforts with restructuring. A cursory review of the literature attests to this ambiguity and to the scarcity of conceptual work on the topic. While works on specific restructuring initiatives are prevalent, few focus on the meaning and organizational implications inherent in restructuring efforts. Motivated by this scarcity of conceptual literature, the purpose of this endeavor is to provide both researchers and practitioners a framework for thinking about the restructuring process in educational settings. While not an attempt to offer a comprehensive explanation, a conscious effort is made to move toward an incipient theory of restructuring using the language and logic of the organizational structure literature.