Educational Assessment, Evaluation, and Research Commons^™

Turbulence, Perturbance, And Educational Change, Brian Beabout

Brian R. Beabout

While scholarship on educational change has long accepted that disruptions to the status quo are an essential part of the change process, disruption has never been more central to planned change than it is in the current political context in the USA, where legislation has mandated school closure, reconstitution, and turnaround as required remedies for schools failing to produce annual student achievement gains required by government. We are also unfortunately hampered by the imprecise language that surrounds complexity- based theories of educational change. Words such as perturbance, turbulence, and disruption all have gained currency lately, but meanings are unclear and …