Change for Change's Sake

Recently at my school, many of the teachers have expressed a desire to change systems and other things because of a sense of burn-out and futility. For the first concern, it's been a pretty rough year for our school on a lot of different levels, so of course teachers are ready for a break

The second concern was that students didn't do very well on a set of testing we recently did. In fact, scores dropped drastically from the fall. I demonstrated that a variety of factors made most of the test results invalid in a recent meeting, especially when compared with two other forms of testing that we do at the school. Even so, a couple of the teachers said that changing lots of things is good because, "Change is good."

Now, I will be the first to advocate fixing things if they need to be fixed, but haphazardly changing things for the sake of changing things doesn't always help and can often times do more harm than good. For my students, what I'm doing right now is apparently helping because according to most tests that I've done, they've generally all made drastic improvements. While making changes on a school-wide basis may help, what if they don't? I would much rather leave well-enough alone.

This experience has led me to reflect on the state our country is in, and has been in for the last 130+ years. There is, and has been, a faction in the populous calling for nearly indiscriminate change. Granted, each person in the faction has generally had their own pet change they wished to see, but any change was good and they supported it. This can be seen in the many demands of the Populist Party, the grasping at whatever change the progressives could get in the turn of the last century , and the shotgun approach of the New Deal. We witnessed the same desire for any change again during the last election, as just over half of the electorate voted for "Hope and Change."

Now most of us are asking ourselves, "Is there any hope in change?" Change is good, when there is an isolated problem, stated goals, and definite ways to measure progress while minimizing collateral damage. We've had none of this in the "stimulus," "Obamacare," or any other change this administration has put forward.

I don't know if this was coherent. It was just something I had been reflecting on recently.