Boulding's typology elaborated: A framework for understanding school and classroom systems

The scope of current educational reform themes is wide. Power is shifted from central governments to local, from administrative office to school site, from principal to teachers, from teacher to students. This is hopeful because traditional reform efforts have been counterproductive. These new themes parallel a worldwide paradigm shift from viewing relationships as monocausal and top-down regulating to interactive and self-regulating. The new themes are also problematic because resulting reform efforts are conflicting, proposing either control or flexibility, which increases harmful out-comes. This paper elaborates Boulding's typology of system complexity drawing from education and related disciplines. The elaboration unifies conflicting perspectives and explains why school reforms fail. Agency in change is clarified. The change model that results highlights system adjustment capacities and specifies both control and flexibility: control of morphostatic subsystems for maintaining access to resources of time, materials, equipment, and energy; and flexibility in morphogenic subsystems for learning, growth, and differentiation.