The current structure of the educational system is not very receptive to new and innovative ways to learn.   New and potentially effective ideas are met with much resistance in the rigid educational system.   These new ideas are changed often by the system rather than the system changing to accommodate them. The long history of education has been a process of rewriting the student goals, with little effective efforts to bring the system in alignment with the goals.   Student failure has been met with attempts to fix students rather than carefully examine what might be wrong with the system.   For effective program implementation, the major elements of the school/community must be brought into alignment with long-range goals and standards for students.   It is past time to use the symptoms of problems, such as low-test scores, as a way to examine and improve the system in order to insure success in meeting learning outcomes for all students.  

The first step is to really take time to bring sound understanding about the appropriate inquiry outcomes for students in modern society. Inquiry learning must be well understood though a process of operationally defining it, so as to be clear to all stakeholders.   Inquiry learning should be further enhanced by the delineation of success indicators, or ways to demonstrate the successful achievement of these outcomes.    This operational definition serves as the basis for the alignment of the systemic elements. This second and most difficult task is accomplished through the development of a series of systemic rubrics designed around the operational definition of inquiry. That is the essence of systemic thinking.  

Six systemic areas have been identified as import and it is suggested that the operational definition of ìScience as Inquiryî be used to illustrate how to objectively align these system areas by developing rubrics for each of them over time. 

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