A New York Times article from March 2008 about a new charter school in New York City that proposes to pay its teachers $125,000 as a way to attract a high-caliber teaching staff and, so their theory goes, create a high-performing school. While the ideas that incentive pay and teacher quality are levers for systemic change are certainly not new, this article did raise a new question for me: Has the substantial growth of the charter movement made the business of school change more about designing new schools as opposed to improving unsatisfactory ones?

Certainly the school creation process has some significant differences from the school change process: staffing, school culture, and student-makeup take on quite different meanings depending on the case. Have those of us who study school change given enough attention to the increasingly-commmon change approach of starting a new school? In this division, we’re somewhat familiar with the idealized design processes advocated by Ackoff and Banathy, but they generally contextualized this design process within the setting of a pre-existing organization. So many of the school reformers I speak with now have simply abandoned this approach and are content to create rather than change their ideal schools. Hopefully others out there are thinking about this same issue and how it influences the study and practice of systemic change in schools.