David Tyack (1930–2016)

"We want to probe the meaning of continuity in schooling as well as to understand change. Change, we believe, is not synonymous with progress. Sometimes preserving good practices in the face of challenges is a major achievement, and sometimes teachers have been wise to resist reforms that violated their professional judgment.

Although policy talk about reform has had a Utopian ring, actual reforms have typically been gradual and incremental. It may be fashionable to decry such change as piecemeal and inadequate, but over long periods of time such revisions of practice, adapted to local contexts, can substantially improve schools. Rather than seeing the hybridizing of reform ideas as a fault, we suggest it can be a virtue. Tinkering is one way of preserving what is valuable and reworking what is not." - p. 5

"Better schooling will result in the future - as it has in the past and does now - chiefly from the steady, reflective efforts of the practitioners who work in schools and from the contributions of the parents and citizens who support (while they criticize) public education. This might seem to be just common sense. But in planning reforms in recent years, policy elites have often bypassed teachers and discounted their knowledge of what schools are like today. ...

To the degree that teachers are out of the policy loop in designing and adopting school reforms, it is not surprising if they drag their feet in implementing them. Teachers so not have a monopoly on educational wisdom, but their first-hand perspectives on school and their responsibility for carrying out official policies argues for their centrality in school reform efforts." - p. 135