Romanczuk on How Schools Should Be Organized
“These are just words on the
page. It isn’t going to change anything.” - Cathy Romanczuk
Summary
The three organizational metaphors
that work for how I am experiencing Educational Administration are the
organization as organism, as political system, and as a culture. As a school-system-wide special education administrator,
it is always interesting to me how much or how little special education gets
supported at the building level. I like
the ways special education students and classes are more integrated into the
whole school environment, but am leery of the two pushes afoot to alter this
balance. We likely won't go back to the
days of full isolation of special education students, but full inclusion of
them is an equally bad idea. My
suspicion is that inclusion is more politically motivated by funding shortfalls
than educationally driven by what is best for the students. In trying to keep the balance as it is and
based on my own commitment to special education and servant leadership, I have
little problem with driving all around the county trying to give the teachers
the support they need when and where they need it.
What theories of organizational management influence school
organization?
Educational Administration’s (Ed
Admin’s) “theory movement” of the 1950s and 1960s “attempted to put educational
administration on a footing as sound as that of psychology or economics by
developing theoretical constructs that could be tested in the world of
organizations” (Foster, 1986, p. 53). That Ed Admin theorists went the
“business route” without assuming schools are not the same as other
organizations is a mistake the field is still recovering from. The world of
K-12 isn’t even the same as higher education; when the business model is
applied, the connections slip even more. A concurrent change made this business
model link even less useful. Herrnstein and Murray (1994) point out that the
democratization of higher education did not remove barriers to follow-on
schooling; it raised different ones instead. No longer was college the domain
of the children of the social elite; however, in the 1950s and 1960s, the
college admissions shifted their focus to the “cognitive elite” (Herrnstein
& Murray, p. 25).
Complicating the organizational
management theories’ impact on school organization is how wrapped up the
schools always are in the political and social problems of the times (even when
public schooling is not the problem). The mid-1960s to mid-1970s dip in the
Scholastic Aptitude Tests scores, the rise in crime from the 1960s on, and the
mid-1980s to mid-1990s reform/transition time for Ed Admin are problems not
isolated from each other. Neither is the renaissance of social justice in
America—Johnson’s Great Society—or what Gould (1996) called the civil rights
movement’s “great excitement and success” (p. 36). With publication of
Herrnstein and Murray’s Bell Curve coinciding with Gingrich’s Contract
with America, it is obvious to Gould (1996) that the good old days are gone,
replaced by a “new age of social meanness” (p. 31).
Special Education (SpEd) itself is
something of a throwback to the “life adjustment movement” of the 1940s (Owens,
2001, p. 7), prior to scientific/technical
“backlash” of the 1950s that the space race prompted in schools.
Especially for the lowest ability students, getting them life skills and some
kind of independent living is very much like Taylor’s time and motion studies.
In fact, the teachers who are the best at documenting it have task analyses of
the simplest processes—tooth brushing, making a peanut butter and jelly
sandwich, etc.—that are very like Taylor’s science of shoveling (Taylor as
cited in Shafritz & Ott, 2001).
That said, among Morgan’s (1997)
metaphors that work as other ways of explaining the K-12 SpEd Admin world I
work in are:
The
organization as organism/human relations theory
The
organization as a political system/the power metaphor
The
organization as a culture
Human
Relations Theory
The organization as organism
metaphor’s guiding assumption is that the organization is a “living system”
(Morgan, 1997, p. 37). The agency operates most effectively when its needs are
satisfied, and just as Maslow suggested for people, the more basic needs have
to be satisfied before the group can go after higher order needs (Morgan).
According to Morgan, the metaphor employs von Bertalanffy’s “open systems approach”
(p. 39), meaning the organization is open to environmental changes and must
achieve a state of balance with the environment, or homeostatis. Emphasis is on
interactions organization wide, not division of labor and management (Morgan).
This metaphor employs Follett’s “participatory management” theory (Shafritz
& Ott, 2001, p. 152-154). There can be an integration of giving and
receiving orders because all components of the organization know what needs to
be done and do it.
Shafritz and Ott’s (2001)
explanation of human relations theory parallels Morgan’s organizations as
organisms metaphor. The pervasive themes of human relations theory stress the
impact of motivation, group behavior, leadership, teaming, power, and change.
Human relations theory started with the Hawthorne studies then gained momentum
from Maslow’s theories on motivation (Shafritz & Ott). In 1943, Maslow (as
cited in Shafritz & Ott, 2001) developed a theory that our “needs arrange
themselves in hierarchies of prepotency” (p. 167). While we seek homeostatis
(balance) at the basic needs level (Shafritz & Ott), and usually need to
have basic needs satisfied before higher needs emerge, the hierarchy not rigid.
It also depends on what is most needed or personally preferred at a given time (Shafritz
& Ott).
In an organism, interdependence,
cooperation, and coexistence are required (Morgan, 1997). In organizations,
both internal and definitely external competition are stressed. There may be
external competition for resources among organisms, but all parts internal to
an organism instinctively know and work toward common objectives. If this is
so, what distinguishes management from labor?
The organism metaphor appears to mitigate how much it matters what
managers do (Morgan). Of course, it does matter because the model does not make
clear how much the environment influences how well an organization thrives and
how much a company’s survival depends on planning and tracking the plan’s
execution.
There
are many benefits to the organization as organism metaphor. The top three I see
are that it:
(1) assumes all parts have a vital role in keeping the
organism moving forward,
(2) promotes cooperation over competition, and
(3) encourages creativity and innovation.
For
Sevier County SpEd, the organism metaphor is evident in the opportunities
available to employees to develop and use their skills and interest areas to
further the goals and requirements of the department. Despite the reams of
legislation covering what needs doing, how to do it is largely left to the
individual employees and this works for special education in Sevier County.
Most of my work is of the “lone wolf” variety, helping teachers one-to-one as
issues come up (or come due). This is true for many of the SpEd central
employees, even our secretary who works the budget issues and a second clerical
person who works bus assignments and student records maintenance. This
negatively impacts shared decision making, which is more like the figure Owens
(2001, p. 297) describes, in which the administrator identifies an information
need in isolation, then goes solo through each of Drucker’s step from defining
the problem through identifying alternative to making a decision, maybe
consulting individual staff members along the way. The Vroom-Yetton “normative
leadership model” of decision making (as cited in Owens, p. 274) is similarly
lonely for the leader, only it formalizes the decision gates that necessitate
when to call in a subordinate or a group. By contrast, the principal’s decision
table (Tannenbaum & Schmidt, as cited in Owens, p. 286) takes into account
the organizational and societal environment the school operates in, and areas
of freedom of action, to describe only certain times when it is necessary for a
principal to “sell” a decision and therefore solicit inputs.
Organizations
as Political Systems
“Power is the ability to get things
done. . .the latent ability to influence people” (Allen & Porter, as cited
in Shafritz & Ott, 2001, p. 299). Some of the organizations as political
systems metaphor’s guiding assumptions are that:
Leadership is
a group function; leaders intentionally seek to influence the behavior of
others through social interaction (Owens, 2001)
Leadership
involves social influence (influence on a person) and social power (potential
ability to influence people) (French & Raven, as cited in Shafritz &
Ott, 2001)
A personal
agenda is always a consideration (and almost always a factor) in group
decisions on a course of action (Morgan, 1997)
Power holders
vary (powerful with respect to different areas), but all exert power over the
powerless (March, as cited in Shafritz & Ott, 2001), or more accurately,
those less powerful
Unexercised
power disappears (March, as cited in Shafritz & Ott, 2001)
An organization’s being political does not necessarily
rule out it being bureaucratic or even “rational” (Pfeffer, as cited in
Shafritz & Ott, 2001, p. 309). “Rational” means only that a behavior
reflects purpose or intention; behaviors are not accidental or random. In the
bureaucratic model “goals are viewed as a system of constraints. . .which
decisions must satisfy [and]. . .decisions are made with short time horizons”
(Pfeffer, as cited in Shafritz & Ott, 2001, p. 311). It becomes a power
model if the goals are not as clear or overarching (Pfeffer, as cited in
Shafritz & Ott, 2001).
French and Raven (as cited in Shafritz & Ott,
2001) cite five kinds of power I want to summarize briefly in relation to my
SpEd Admin work before continuing on. Reward power is positive only, based on
the ability to administer rewards; its opposite is coercive power. Other kinds
evident in organizations are referent power (by identification with an
organization) or expert power, stemming from knowledge held. Referent power,
meaning special education employees identifying with SpEd, is weak in Sevier
County (and elsewhere, I suspect). Expert power (based on knowledge of SpEd
teaching techniques and laws) is more prevalent. That part of this practice not attributable to expert power stems
from having a “legitimate right to command” (Owens, 2001, p. 234), that is,
vested authority, legal power, or official position. In my own
quasi-supervisory SpEd role, I have some control of decision processes, but
only in how clear it is to those SpEd personnel around the county that my
directives are an extension of the SpEd Director’s (and only as much as his
directives are followed by his peers, the school principals around the county).
Being the administrative executive for SpEd, I read with interest Morgan’s
(1997) discussion of controlling information flow, technology, boundaries, and
uncertainty (pp. 179-185). Although I am well-linked to the formal information
technology networks (interoffice mail distribution, the Internet, and
electronic mail) the informal, verbal networks tend to exclude and limit my
impact on SpEd information flow. The SpEd Director is only half joking when he
says the quickest way to get information around the county is to tell a school
bus driver. E-mail has surprisingly little impact, with most checking their
e-mail accounts less than once a week and many not even having e-mail
addresses. Faxing in used heavily for quick school to school communication, but
word of mouth remains paramount.
Since I tend to think of the administrative side as
the real work and the contact time as just talk, I am probably a good
second-in-charge to have around. While the SpEd Director has formal authority,
legitimatized power, and charismatic authority (Morgan, 1997, p. 172) that I
probably will not ever match, being Exec can be good practice for eventual
lead. I suspect one person cannot do or be both well since the strengths of
being a people-person compete for time and energy with the strengths involved
in being a process person. Oral communication was never my strong suit. I have
not been around long enough to have the “power to influence” (Owens, 2001, p.
235) exemplified by Martin Luther King, Jr., or the links to the informal,
countervailing “old-boy” network (Morgan, 1997, pp. 186-188). Even so, what
keeps me at it is that leadership, like parenthood, is the job that never ends
(Owens, 2001, p. 258 and 276). The race to power and leadership is a marathon,
not a sprint.
For my part, I was moved to the Trula Lawson Center (TLC,
also known as the Special Learning and the Early Childhood Center, Sevier
County’s Special Education Department Headquarters) in the middle of the
2000-2001 school year, which is an odd time to start new at a school. I have
not settled in even now, two years later. Most of it has to do with my natural
tendency to be a “lone wolf” and the SpEd Department’s willingness to indulge
me in this. But not all of it. The example of Bill Moyers’ involvement with weekly bomb targeting meetings during the Johnson
administration is one thorough example of groupthink that Janis offers
(Shafritz & Ott, 2001, pp. 187-189). In Sevier County SpEd, early on in the
Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program Alternative (TCAP Alt) process, I
found myself in a position similar to Moyers’, the lone backer of an idea
derided by my companions. (President Johnson called him “Mr. Stop-the-Bombing,”
Shafritz & Ott, p. 187). I just treated the negativity as the normal backlash that greets “new thing” ideas that
come along. I trusted that the teachers’ individual commitments to do what was
required would gradually win them over. “Gradual” is the operative word. After
three school years of it now, the TCAP Alt portfolio development process
remains heavily teacher driven. Only my regular help—and that it is a legal
requirement—serve to keep the teachers doing it, though most are not yet
convinced it is a useful exercise.
The power of favors owed (Morgan,
pp. 198-199) cannot be stressed enough. Bargaining is the life blood of politics.
A case in point that hits close to home:
My wife has a high school science certification and has been working on
certification in special education. At the beginning of this school year, Cathy
had a SpEd position a Seymour Intermediate. However, after the first week of
school, Seymour High School still had no Biology teacher. The high school
principal and my boss asked her to move and she said no at first, because she
had been at the high school the previous school year and was not dealt with
fairly by the administrators. So the superintendent (through the SpEd Director)
asked Cathy as a “personal favor to
him” to move to the high school slot, with the understanding that she could
“name her school” next year. Because her level of mistrust is so high at this
point, I do not think Cathy realizes the good position she is in for next year.
Having the Superintendent owe you one is never a bad thing.
I tend not to think of politics as negatively as I do
of competition, especially competition by those supposedly on the same side.
Watching the intra-county games among the schools—and I do not mean those on
the playing fields—makes my heart weep if I let myself think about it. It only
makes matters worse when they actually speak of it in “game” terms: defining reality for others by imagery,
theater, and gamesmanship (Morgan, 1997, p. 189). By gamesmanship Morgan means
appearances and style always count more than they should. On the bright side,
ninety percent of work really is just showing up. But the remaining ten percent
is the hard part.
Organizational Culture
The organization’s “culture” is
Derived from group’s shared history, meanings, assumptions,
perceptions, thoughts, and language (Schein, as cited in Shafritz & Ott,
2001); what Owens (2001) calls its “norms” (p. 146)
Evident in the espoused values/credo of the organization, its
formal philosophy, broad policies, ideological principles (Schein, as cited in
Shafritz & Ott, 2001)
More evident in its expressed values/philosophy: how shared are the corporate visions? How friendly are the meetings, internal
interactions? (Morgan, 1997)
Embedded in an internally shared system of knowledge, ideology,
values, laws, rituals (Morgan, 1997); For schools, embedded in the
psycho-social characteristics (assumptions, values, beliefs, thoughts, rituals,
history, artifacts) and the meaning given to these (Owens, 2001)
Evident in how gender is used (influence, advantage, disadvantage,
exploitation, control, overt or hidden) (Acker, as cited in Shafritz & Ott,
2001)
Schein (as cited in
Shafritz & Ott, 2001) defines a group’s culture as
A
pattern of shared basic assumptions that the group learned as it solved its
problems of external adaptation and internal integration, that has worked well
enough to be considered valid and, therefore, to be taught to new members as
the correct way to perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems (pp.
373-374).
The
culture is also distinct from the climate of the organization, though it is
difficult to discuss one in isolation from the other. Owens (2001)
distinguishes the two by noting that the climate entails the physical material
factors (ecology), the social system (milieu), and the working structure
(organization). Culture concerns the perceptions of the place and its people, the beliefs, values, norms, and history
they share. In schools, both culture and climate impact the intimacy, engagement, espirit, and impact of teachers
(Owens). They are also impacted by the consideration, aloofness, and production
orientation of the principal (Owens). That is, how consultative or
authoritarian the leader is impacts the climate and shapes the culture (Likert,
as cited in Owens). Keep in mind, too, that culture influences how the climate
develops (Owens, 2001), but culture is self-organizing and ever evolving
(Morgan, 1997).
How
newcomers are socialized into the “rules of the game” (Schein, as cited
in Shafritz & Ott, 2001, p. 372, 374) reveals an organization’s culture in
more than just the obvious ways. Similarly, Morgan (1997) mentions that a good
way to take in the organization’s culture is to observe it “as if one were an
outsider” (p. 129). In their discussion of ethnographic studies, Gall, Gall,
and Borg (1999) call this “making the familiar strange” (p. 329) and note that
the value of it is that it can reflect light on those phenomena that members of
the culture have come to take for granted in their language, behavior, and even
use of space. Sense making as the newcomer adjusts to change from an old
setting to the new one (Louis, as cited in Shafritz & Ott, 2001) puts a
spotlight on the organizational culture.
For countywide special education
this diffusion of culture is even more evident. The personality of special
education is one way at the Trula Lawson Center (headquarters of Sevier
County’s Special Education Department) and another in each of the special
education functions at the schools. In discussing the problems surrounding
trying to make Japanese business practices work in America, Morgan (1997)
highlights the difficulties in transferring the culture from place to place.
When I see how the various special education operations work at the various
schools, the range is stunning. Thanks to federal and state laws, the special
education population is included in the life of the school, but the degree of
mixing at each school varies widely. An important variable in these differences
is how knowledgeable and supportive the building-level administrators are of
special education, and (more frankly) how comfortable they are around these
students.
Blunting the leaders’ impact,
though, is Schein’s realization that the organizational culture results from a
complex group learning process that the leader influences only minimally (as
cited in Shafritz & Ott, 2001). What is different about special education
is that it is big and small simultaneously, big countywide as an identifiable culture,
but at each school the special education population tends to be less than ten
percent of the student body and presents such a range of disabilities (from
profoundly handicapped to gifted) that it hardly can be said to have one
identity. This brings up another point Schein makes about how being a small or
large organization influences culture. In the discussion near the end of his
article Schein asks, “Can a large organization have one culture?” (as cited in
Shafritz & Ott, p. 375). He focuses on how larger organizations’
subcultures may compete with each other, whether or not a culture is shared
across all corporate units.
This hints at why big is not better
with schools (Barker & Gump, as cited in Owens, 2001). In large schools,
both the students and the teachers are going to break into smaller subcultures
with one or more common characteristics. In thinking about how schools should
be organized, one of my early thoughts about getting them from the way they are
now to the smaller way that would benefit the learning culture was to just
increase the teaching staff at each school to improve that ratio. Based on
these culture readings, I see now that the whole school setting has to be
smaller, not just the teacher to student ratios.
One problem with this kind of
culture change (beyond the obvious one that teacher shortages make it unlikely
any time soon) is deciding what to keep and what to change (Trice & Beyer,
as cited in Shafritz & Ott, 2001). More challenging than these outward
changes are changing the mind sets (Morgan, 1997) of school as we have long
done it. Further complicating the challenge is that schools do not exist in a
vacuum. The community the school is in impacts student achievement positively
or negatively, too (Baird, as cited in Owens, 2001).
The hardest aspect of this
organization/culture discussion is separating the two ways the metaphor works.
With how an organization worked like a machine, a brain, even an organism there
was a clear bilateral argument to make. With this one, though, I keep getting
knotted up in the difference between organizations as cultures and the cultures
of organizations. Even so and either way, I like the way it aligns with public
education.
Bureaucracy
Public schools—as part the municipal
and state government, and as subject to the federal government—are inescapably
bureaucratic. Bureaucracy permeates all levels of action and decision making.
Granted all organizations are political and bureaucratic to some degree, but in
government organizations, politics and bureaucracy are canon. Rapid pace of administrative work impacts
how decisions are made (Owens, 2001). This may be what Merton (as cited in
Shafritz & Ott, 2001, p. 104) is alluding to in calling bureaucracy speedy
and discrete. The also claims there is “little competition” in a bureaucracy
(Merton, as cited in Shafritz & Ott, p. 106). I’m
sure I’m not in the minority in never thinking of bureaucracy this way. In the
same article, however, he calls bureaucracy “trained incapacity” (Merton, as
cited in Shafritz & Ott, 2001, p. 105 and 107). This is what people tend to
think of: red tape, Catch 22s, instances when conforming to rules interferes
with intended purpose of those rules, or anyone’s common sense. This results
from a system that can’t or won’t adapt to individual problems, and all
customers tend to see their problems as individual (Merton, as cited in
Shafritz & Ott, 2001, p. 107). Bureaucracy is also characterized by
bloat: when the response to need
doesn’t go away, even after need does. This hints at another trait of
bureaucracies: they are reactive rather
than proactive. Not as obvious traits of bureaucracy are that “well defined”
problems are few, verbal communication is preferred, and three groups stay
distinct (superiors, subordinates, outsiders) (Owens, 2001, p. 276).
The SpEd Department is a living,
changing entity with no small amount of flexibility for a political,
bureaucratic component of a county-wide school system. All of the changes in my
two years have been necessary, but only rarely proactive. Most have been driven
by federal SpEd rule changes; some were a reaction to personnel or budgetary
shortages; a few may have been proactive serendipity. The “No Child Left
Behind” legislation passed last year has already meant some personnel shifting
for us, especially among the teaching assistants (for whom the formal education
requirements have increased drastically at schools receiving federal funds).
Another trait of bureaucracies is that they can seem unreasonable, and even be
unreasonable. Requiring two years of college for a job that starts at $11,000
annually (even for a 7-hour day, 10-month year) is one such seem/be example.
As Morgan (1997) notes, the world’s
labor force has undergone a transition from craft to factory and from rural to
urban. Still, office work remains its own animal. Weber (as cited in Shafritz
& Ott, 2001) calls office management “distinctly modern,” requiring “expert
training” and written documentation (p. 74). This evolution has played out in
public schooling as well, with the rural heterogeneous school house giving way
to the graded, large urban school model for both urban and rural areas (Tyack,
1974).
What theories of organizational management are ethically organized
schools based upon?
Are the theories we base school organization on morally correct,
just, or fair?
How are these theories helpful or harmful to the purpose of
schools?
The “Procrustean Bed” of age-graded
progression isn’t the most useful idea (Hargis, 1995), but getting rid of rote
(Darling-Hammond, 1997, p. 17, 19) is throwing out the baby with the bath
water. (Procrustes, of Greek mythology, was one of many undesirables Theseus
dealt with on his journey. Procrustes adjusted victims to fit his iron torture
bed, either stretching them if they were too short, or truncating the tall,
until Theseus put Procrustus himself on the bed.) Having children flunk their way into unskilled labor or ace their
way to college makes for an easy sorting system, but not a very
customer-friendly one. There was a good side to the country schoolhouse with multiage
students sharing one space and one teacher:
it was knowledge-based, not age or grade based (Tyack, 1974).
In the nineteenth century, the
country schoolhouse was also practice and repetition based. Drills are still
important in spelling, writing, and early addition, multiplication (Hirsch,
1999), but have fallen from favor in attempts to make learning more holistic,
activity based, and fun. Where I think Darling-Hammond (1997) is most wrong is
in the assertion that children have the right to learn, which guides her
similarly named book. They have an obligation to learn, but in America this is
true only if they think it is. Learning isn’t the right, because this requires
their engagement. Children do have the right to be in learning situations, but
this is almost useless to say since almost any waking moment can be a learning
situation.
School organization is curricular
framework/content based. It doesn’t exclude teaching morals (Noddings, 2002) or
character education, but it has just assumed up to recent times that home, or
church, or other nonpublic schooling venues would teach the non-subject area
based content.
The “paradigm wars of the past 25
years have done little to make schools better or more effective places” (Murphy
& Forsyth, 1999, p. 268). Part of the reason is that it is still easier to
learn from our own experience rather than someone else’s. The bigger part is
that school reform gets only tinkered with, nothing close to the full overhaul
it needs. Most of the reason is how entrenched as all sides are in keeping
public schooling the way it has become.
That is, everyone involved in public schooling is willing to do whatever
it takes to make schooling better for kids ... as long as they don’t have to
change anything. Those with more power in the current system have more blame
for maintaining this status quo. Parents, teachers, administrators, school
boards, and the government’s education departments are all hanging onto their
“teddy bears” for fractious times (Morgan 1997, p. 236). It is more than the
usual resistance to change; it is defense of the status quo as self-defense
(Morgan, p. 245).
How else could having teachers unions and having (or needing) a tenure system
too be explained?
In their introduction to the power
and politics organizational theory chapter (VI), Shafritz and Ott (2001) say of
power, “we all understand it” (p. 298). Their point is that only the
“intellectualizing about it is new” (p. 298), not the idea itself. I do not
agree, however. I am willing to concede only that we all think we
understand power when what we are really understanding is some component of
it: a Western or Japanese version,
parental power, or maybe an abuse of power (like Pfeffer’s description of
Nixon’s “need for power” [Shafritz & Ott, 2001, p. 304]). What makes this
rush to claim understanding of power even worse for K-12 education is that
everyone thinks he or she understands compulsory education as well. We have all
been through twelve or thirteen years of it, after all. This notion surfaced
during the cohort’s discussion of Darling-Hammond’s Right to Learn: “education as a civic religion.”
Another area in which assuming you
know interferes with the need, desire, or willingness to find out more is
intelligence in general and Spearman’s g in particular. What Herrnstein
and Murray (1994) don’t do is spend a lot to time explaining why they are so
sure that IQ tests are fair, accurate, and unbiased. This is the main point
that critics of the work jumped on. If you think you know something already,
how hard are you going to try to figure out more? Even in the introduction to The Bell Curve, Herrnstein and
Murray (1994) observe that they are “blithely proceeding on the assumption that
intelligence is a reasonably well understood construct” (p. 1). The authors
believe that the history of intelligence measurement bares this out such that
everyone understands what we mean by intelligence quotient (IQ), mental level,
and mental age. Herrnstein and Murray also assume the same about Spearman’s g,
noting that it has been around since 1904. They take a little extra care to
explain that the g is the idea that for groups of people over groups of
tests the differences in their test scores will reflect a difference in general
mental ability (the g). Further the g will remain consistent and
how strong the g remains will depend on how laden with g the test
is (that is, how much a measure of general mental ability it reflects). The
reason I buy into Spearman’s g is not that it has been around for 99
years, but that I’ve seen it in supposedly heterogeneously constructed classes
myself. Many teacher notice, for example, that their second period tends to
average about ten points lower every test than their fourth period. And this is
merely for single subject tests with a limited number of students. With larger
groups to compare and tests more tailored to get at IQ, Spearman’s g
gets even easier to point to. Herrnstein and Murray compare blacks to whites
and suggest some interesting conclusions. People make a big deal of the fact
that The Bell Curve covers the IQ differentials of different races
(Asian about 106, white about 100, black about 85). What played a much bigger
part in the book, and what academia was really afraid of, was how badly Murray
and Herrnstein torpedoed higher education in the U.S. (which has a near
monopoly) and the public schools (which have even more than a monopoly). At
least not everyone has to pay for college. We all pay for public schools even if we don’t use them, or have a use
for them. At least there is less hypocrisy at the public school level, where
they don’t feel obliged to support misguided ideas like affirmative action
while creating the next cognitive elite.
What’s more insidious about the K-12
arena though, is the monopoly it has become. As long as the public schools have
the year to year tax flow no matter how poorly they perform, they will never be
any good, let alone excellent. Suppose you perform a service, but it doesn’t
really matter how well you do, you will just continue to get more and more
money. Suppose, for example you write a newspaper column. But it doesn’t matter
how good or poorly constructed what you write is. You will keep your job and
continue to get raises no matter what. How long would you knock yourself out
trying to write the best column you can? Would you be worried if someone making
half as much—who could actually lose their job for bad or even mediocre
performance—wrote a much better column than you? No, you would laugh at the fool.
What if you were that fool? That is, a
first or second year teacher teaching all day and preparing lesson all night.
Then you begin to see how little those teachers who have been around years and
years are doing. How long is it before you break into Anthony Newley’s “What
Kind of Fool Am I?” and wizen up?
What do we know about the purpose of schools that should guide how
schools are organized?
Darling-Hammond (1997) prefaces The Right to Learn with the
assertion: “Educating all children effectively is the mission of schools today,
yet great numbers of children still have no reasonable opportunity to acquire
the knowledge and abilities that will help them” (p. xi). I do not agree with
the second part of the statement and I am not sure I agree with the first half
either. In schools that do not have overriding discipline problems, the
opportunity is there, but what exactly does she mean by “educating.” All the public expect is that people are
able to read after 12 years of school, and maybe write a little for certain
jobs. Since many students, maybe even the majority, are reading and writing
adequately by middle school, perhaps the real purpose of public schools is to
be a public works baby sitting service. Many parents would probably find this
adequate.
I say “many” parents only because it
makes me too sad to think it is probably true for most parents. Less than ten
percent, probably less than five percent, have or want any contact with their
children’s’ schools or teachers. By the same token, most would be okay with the
teacher running his or her classroom anyway the teacher chose. Too many
teachers do not choose to have and enforce their own rules and use the excuse
that they don’t want to deal with irate parents. Similar to our foolish new teacher
who learns to lay off and get along, otherwise good students see their peers
behaving selfishly, having fun and getting rewarded with attention for doing
so. It would take a student more mature than most in K-12 education are to
resist the impulse to be just as selfish, have fun, and get rewarded.
The emphasis on discipline and
classroom management (when it even is part of teacher preparation programs),
tends not to survive the first assignment, especially if the new teacher gets
no administrator back up in enforcing her own or even the school-wide rules.
Levels from verbal warning, to parent contact, through in-school suspension, to
alternative learning center can work (and reduce out-of-school suspensions) if
these are consistently applied. During ISS and ALC placement, students should
have to do school work the entire day according to what the teachers have laid
out. They shouldn’t get to help around the school or work in the office, start
later, or be dismissed earlier. Out-of-school suspension as it is done in many
districts and for many who receive it, is a reward rather than a punishment.
Their punishment for demonstrating how much they hate waking up in the morning
and going to school is being forced to sleep in and not go to school. Hmmn.
Even when I was a student, I didn’t
follow that logic. Of course, I was one of the rare breed that actually enjoyed
the classroom part. It was all entertainment, mostly passive entertainment. The
homework assignments were the only torture, and while you were at school you
not only didn’t have to do homework, but you weren’t allowed to. But enough
about me. If a student does not show up for an in-house suspension, they should
be called out on it and get only one more chance to show. During the conference
telling the student that they will get this chance, they are told that the
consequence will be transfer to a disciplinary “magnet” school or some similar
alternative education setting in the district. When it gets out through the
kids that it is run like a military academy where you don’t get to do anything unless
and until you earn the privilege, they will realize regular school really is
passive entertainment. The alternative setting would have no sports, proms, or
any type of social activity. These taken for granteds become rewards to earn,
the main one being a return to regular school.
How could schools be organized ethically?
Schools are being asked to feed the
students and make them moral, ethical American adults, while still clinging to
the time lines and classroom structure developed in the nineteenth century.
What’s magic about the 180-day year and the 3 o’clock day ending? Especially if breakfast is going to be
included now, which we know it has to be because parents are either too
neglectful or too busy to send off their little ones with food in their
bellies, we need to think about a longer day. For twenty years, I’ve been
thinking schools needed to end later. The selling point could be that the
child’s work day would match their parents’, but the real reason I’d be for a
longer afternoon is that homework is a thing of the past in both rural and
urban settings, so we need to build in the “home” work during the school day.
I’ve taught in both urban and rural
settings. In the urban setting, administrators cautioned me against giving too
much homework because many students worked outside jobs. In the rural setting,
I was told to lay off the homework assignments because many of my students had
chores around the home. Never mind that most city kids worked not to add
to the family income, but to buy clothes and music and never mind that most of
the country kids didn’t live on farms. Homework is now schoolwork and the block
schedule—with it’s 90-minute period for those with 2-minute attention spans—is
working to end homework.
This is not to say I am any big fan
of period by period, isolated subject-based, grade level based learning. Of
course an interwoven project based curriculum with math and science and
literature all included in a block of instruction with easy to see real-world
tie ins sounds lovely. This fits Darling-Hammond’s (1997) idea that we are
teaching students, not subjects (pp. 7-12). To put it in marketing terms,
knowledge is the product we’re selling; students (and ideally, their parents)
are the customers. Mixed subject, unit based instruction may
also offer the good side of tracking without the bad. Pardon my idealism
creeping in, but if the annoying students have a strength area to contribute
maybe they won’t feel compelled to ruin the block of instruction for everybody.
Big Maybe.
Noddings makes the point that
teachers have to teach the group, but care about the individual student
(Nodding, 2002, p. 16). The opposite feels more true in my teaching experience,
especially in SpEd in which individualized instruction is codified in law. We
have to care about the class, but teach the individual. To be frank, I’m even
uneasy with Noddings idea of caring. Is being responsible to equal to caring
about? Teachers who talk about how much
they “love the children” make me extremely uneasy. They aren’t ours to love,
but to teach. Of course, you have to care about them collectively. Adults who
hate kids aren’t going to be very effective teachers, but teachers don’t have
and never will have the luxury of fully knowing each student. All the teacher
needs to know is who is trying and who isn’t. Nobody who tries should fail and
nobody who doesn’t try should succeed.
Fortunately, full knowledge of
individual students isn’t necessary for good teaching to occur. Even more
surprising, individual instruction isn’t necessary for individual learning to
occur. Hirsch (1999) points out the paradox apparently borne out in several
studies that “individual students get more effect tutorial attention. . .and
seem to make more progress when there is greater emphasis on the whole class
and less on individual tutorials” (p. 11).
I am no huge fan of mission and
vision statements and codes of ethics, but sometimes it is worthwhile to commit
the obvious to writing. Schools may benefit from a code of ethics that describes
what they mean by considering the students first (and the professional staff
last, if they even dare to put in writing this second bit). Between these two
should be the community the school works in and for. Formal education that does
not put the student first would cause anyone to question its priorities, as
would any school that thinks putting the students first means letting the
students run the school. This is especially true of kindergarten through
secondary education, but also holds for higher education. One benefit of this
mind set is that it guards against abuse of power by those in positions of
power. This could be directly addressed by commitments to engaging in
appropriate relationships with students and indirectly addressed by actions such
as keeping confidential students’ records and progress. However, the main point
of putting students first is that those in leadership roles are obliged to
improve the community by improving the school system and improve the school
system by improving the student body.
What are some examples of ethically organized schools?
Ethically organized schools would
demonstrate shared accountability (Darling-Hammond, 1997). One step in this
direction would be to have teachers evaluating teachers, not administrators
doing it. Another would be for schools to stop trying to supplant the parents’
role and settle for supplementing it. If kids aren’t learning math at home,
schools can do something about that. If they aren’t learning how to get along
with other kids in their families or neighborhoods, school are obliged to show
the way there, too. But if kids aren’t eating at home, then they ought not be
living at home.
Noddings (2002) spends a lot of ink
on her notion of teaching homemaking (pp. 53-55). Yes, units on homemaking
could include history, math, economics, science, etc. But home seem like a more
obvious place to teach homemaking.
K-12 isn’t the place for “shared social
life,” “pursuit of human possibility,” and a place for people to be themselves
(Darling-Hammond, 1997, p. 31). In school, we usually want kids to behave
better than themselves.
Two final components of ethically
organized schools are that students would be singled out for praise only rarely
and never singled-out for ridicule. There is too much competition is schooling
already and precious little cooperation. I have seen competition work to make
rote learning more interesting and fun (boys against the girls multiplication
table races come to mind), but sports already do enough to sort the “good” from
the “bad.” Pointing out who the best
students are rarely makes the worst students want to try harder. There is also
enough negativity in the world without teachers adding to it. Hargis (1995)
cautions against requiring students to read aloud to the class (Hargis, 1995).
Tyack (1974) notes that ridicule was a popular teaching method in the large
classroom of the big cities early in the twentieth century, but he does not
support it as a good practice.
How do we make the transition from the various ways schools are
organized currently to an ethical organization of schools?
Kearns (as cited in Darling-Hammond,
1997) makes the point that we need to restructure, not merely tinker. Piecemeal
changes and reforms that were more well-intentioned than thorough have gotten
K-12 education to its present state.
Charter Schools and vouchers are
hamstrung baby-steps in the right direction, but these have little serious
chance of threatening the status quo. Case in point, this opinion column from
the Wall Street Journal of February 27, 2003:
A Salt Lake Education
We’ve come to expect Democrats to fight school choice
for minority children trapped in Washington, D.C.’s public schools. But a
Republican in Utah?
GOP Governor Mike Leavitt has threatened to veto a
proposed tax credit for private-school tuition that would save Utah taxpayers a
great deal of money while giving parents more options about where they send
their kids to school. He’s leaning instead toward an omnibus education bill
that includes the tuition tax credit—but wraps it into $90 million in new
spending (read: future tax hikes) and a mixed bag of education reforms.
Both bills are working their way through the state
legislature and the Governor has needlessly complicated the issue by saying he
won’t support the $2,132 tuition tax credit unless he’s first satisfied that
public schools are “adequately funded.” Whatever that means in theory, in
practice it means the Governor has tied himself to the omnibus bill, which is
guaranteed to be fought by almost everyone. Fiscal conservatives oppose the tax
increase, while teachers unions oppose anything that includes parental choice
and/or real education reform. . .
Herrnstein
and Murray (1994) and Murphy and Forsyth (1999) highlight different decades
important to getting us where we are now for different reasons. The dip in the
college aptitude tests from the mid 1960s to the mid 1970s and the reform of Ed
Admin from the mid 80s to the mid 90s have more commonality, though, then is
immediately obvious. The shift from “scientific” to “postscientific” Ed Admin
(Murphy & Forsyth, 1999, p. 3) posed more questions than it has so far
answered. Is Ed Admin “an applied science” with a “single best approach”
(Murphy & Forsyth, 1999, p. 20), or would only Taylor think so?
Although
politics mires public education, privatization isn’t the answer either, for the
same reasons scientific management wasn’t. Putting stuff in kids heads isn’t an
assembly-line job. If it were, we’d insist on starting with better raw
materials (just kidding). Notice, though, that I’m admitting that only
“learning” is the product. I don’t buy that we are creating citizens for the
future of society. Their parents created them. We’re just trying to get them
ready for jobs, not life.
How does moral leadership affect the way we organize schools?
Some educators think of the school
as the children’s home away from home, but it isn’t and shouldn’t be. Yes,
character does count, but is it the schools’ job to instill it? Can virtue be taught in schools at all, let
alone in schools as they operate now? (See Noddings, 2002, wrestling with this
problem, p. 3.)
I’m am not abdicating all but
academic responsibility. Teaching children to be good students is part of
teaching them to be good, or as Noddings (2002) puts it, schools should be
places where it is “possible and attractive to be good” (p. 9). Schools need to
care about kids, their parents need to care for them. (I’m disagreeing
with Noddings now, but the one little preposition makes a world of difference.
I’m not as convinced as Noddings appears to be that being cared for reduces
violence.
Turning my attention to finish now
by concentrating on the moral, ethical Ed Admin leader nascent in me, the top
three ethical considerations my actions keep working toward have been
integrity, persistence, and service.
Integrity
Integrity means that words and
actions match, that I deal with others genuinely. Acting with integrity means
choosing the hard right over the easy right. It means being counted on to work
responsibly, honestly, and truthfully. For me, it also means operating within
institutional and moral laws and evokes an element of loyalty as well. What
integrity means in practice is that I live out my system of “individual ethics”
(Bruhn, Zajac, Al-Kazemi, & Prescott,
p. 472) beyond what is institutionally required. Integrity means
weighing the options then doing what the situation requires, even if to do less
would not be viewed by others as shameful or even wrong. Even more, it means
responding the same way whether your decision and its outcomes were to be made
public or if you were certain they would be kept private. Barash (2001) invokes
Kant’s: “Act so that the maxim of your will can be valid as a principle of
universal legislation” (p. ?). Behave as you would want anyone else in an
identical situation to behave; it is the Golden Rule on steroids. Even more,
Kant’s categorical imperative is the “mom test” gone universal (i.e., would you
being doing what you are doing right now if your mother were watching?).
Persistence
Persistence means looking to the
long term fix (Kidder, 1995), not the easy temporary solution to a permanent
problem. For me it means having the patience, drive, and vision to persevere
from an idea’s inception through its execution. It does not include stubbornly
riding out a flawed plan, but allows for flexibility in execution and
incorporates consideration of human interactions factors (Noddings, 1984).
Persistence in dealings with others involves being slow to anger and quick to
forgive.
Service
Service is both being and doing for
others. It is considering the needs of others and tending to these before
taking care of personal needs. In its purest form, service means that the needs
of the servant are met by seeing to the needs of others. In incorporates
Kitchener’s notion of benefiting others (as cited in May, 1990), not in blindly
assuming one knows what is best for all, but by factoring into the decision
making the desire for a “positive effect on others” (May, p. ?). For me
“service” has a religious connotation if not denotation and implies a
prerequisite amount of maturity and discernment. During my masters work in
Information Sciences, I was exposed to the work of Robert Greenleaf (1991) on
the servant as leader. It seemed to me at the time (and sometimes still does)
that he really means the opposite, the leader as servant. But what Greenleaf
means is not the biblical notion of the leader of all being the servant of each
(Matthew 20:26-28). Greenleaf’s notion is that the greatest leaders are not
natural leaders but natural servants. Any leadership role is external to their
nature and they will take on leadership roles only unofficially or as a best
means of serving. Unlike Christ’s advice (in Matthew 20:26) that “whoever
desires to become great among you, let him be your servant,” Greenleaf’s
thought is that the desire is always to be a servant and any leadership roles
happen as best-fit situational.
Maybe I am just kidding myself that
integrity, persistence, and service are my top three values in action. I think
these are the ones I keep coming back to and cannot help doing. But would
someone else—even my wife—see it the same way?
Maybe close, but probably not. That disclaimer aside, if these are not the
top three I practice the most (task by task), but they are the three I spend
the most time on.
On the bright side, working toward
these as my top three values in practice will help me avoid the danger of becoming what Hodgkinson (1991) calls the
technician, factotum, manager (p. 93). The temptation for me to disengage or
become only a conduit is ever present because working with people taxes me a
lot more than working with stuff does. But education needs leaders more than
managers. I know I have to stay morally engaged and personally involved
(Hodgkinson).
Supervisors need to give their
employees what the workers need when they need it. Teaching does not have to be
as autonomous as it usually becomes. When teachers do not feel supported by
their administrators or have no idea what administrators do all day, they begin
to believe that their supervisors are out of touch with what it is really like
in the classroom these days. Supervisors have to be skilled and tireless
two-way communicators. To do this well, leaders need to be open and visible to
those served. When communication breaks down or is filtered through layers of
personality and pride, cooperation ends and productivity suffers.
The implication of valuing service
especially, but also integrity and persistence is that it makes it harder for
me to ignore others (which I tend toward), even as it make it easier to
research, organize, and synthesize. These activities benefit from a
concentration that filters out distractions, so persistence of service can lead
to research content integrity. On the bad side, this also leads to a reliance
on the written word even as those around me tend toward and prefer face-to-face
interactions. I do believe we should act on our convictions, I just honestly
cannot say that I do because—despite the previous thirteen pages—I am not sure
what my own convictions are yet.
References
Barash, D. P. (2001). Kant isn’t just
for kindergarteners. The Chronical of Higher Education, June 8, 2001,
?-?.
Bolman, L. G. & Deal, T. D. (1997). Reframing
organizations: Artistry, choice, and
leadership (2nd ed.). San Francisco, CA:
Jossey-Bass.
Books, S. (1994). Social foundations in
an age of triage. Educational Foundations, Fall, 27-41.
Bruhn, J. G., Zajac, G., Al-Kazemi, A.
A., & Prescott Jr., L. D. (2002). Moral positions and academic
conduct: Parameters of tolerance for
ethics failure. Journal of Higher Education, 73(4), 461-493.
Callahan, J. C. (Ed.). (1998). Ethical
issues in professional life. New York:
Oxford University Press.
Darling-Hammond, L. (1997). The right to
learn: A blueprint for creating schools
that work. San Francisco, CA:
Jossey-Bass.
Foster, W. (1986). Paradigms and
promises: New approaches to educational
administration. Amherst, NY:
Prometheus Books.
Frankel, M. S. (1989). Professional
codes: Why, how, and with what
impact? Journal of Business Ethics,
8, 109-115.
Fraser, S. (Ed.) (1995). The bell
curve wars: Race, intelligence, and the
future of america. New York: Basic
Books.
Gall, J. P., Gall, M. D., & Borg, W.
R. (1999). Applying educational research:
A practice guide (4th ed). New York, NY: Longman.
Giroux, H. (1983). Theories of
reproduction and resistance in the new sociology of education: A critical analysis. Harvard Educational
Review, 53(3), August, 257-293.
Giroux, H. (1997). Is there a place for
cultural studies in colleges of education?
Education and Cultural Studies, 231-247. New York, NY: Routledge Press.
Gould, S. J. (1996). The mismeasure
of man. New York: W. W. Norton.
Greene, M. (1995). What counts as
philosophy of education? Critical
Conversations in Philosophy of Education, 3-23. New York, NY: Routledge Press.
Greenleaf, R. (1991). The servant as
leader. Indianapolis: Greenleaf
Center.
Hamilton, E. (1940). Mythology: Timeless tales of gods and heroes. New
York: Mentor.
Hargis, C. H. (1995). Curriculum-based
assessment: A primer (2nd ed).
Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas.
Hargis, C. H. (1999). Teaching and
testing in reading: A practical guide
for teachers and parents. Springfield, IL:
Charles C. Thomas.
Herrnstein, R. J. & Murray, C.
(1994). The bell curve: Intelligence
and class structure in american life. New York: Free Press Paperbacks.
Hirsch, Jr. E. D. (1999). The schools
we need and why we don’t have them. New York: Anchor Books.
Hodgkinson, C. (1991). Educational
leadership: The moral art. Albany,
NY: State University of New York Press.
Kidder, R. M. (1995). How good people
make tough choices. New York: William
Morrow & Co.
Kincheloe, J. & Steinberg, S.
(2000?). Addressing the crisis of whiteness. Sociology of Education,
23-34.
May, W. W. (Ed.). (1990). Ethics and
higher education. New York:
American Council on Education, Macmillan Publishing Company.
Mertz, N. T. (2003). Framing the
context: Educational administration and
policy studies at the university of tennessee. National Forum of Educational
Administration and Supervision Journal, 20(2), 9-20.
Morgan, G. (1997). Images of
organizations. Thousand Oaks, CA:
Sage.
Murphy, J., & Forsyth, P. B. (1999).
Educational administration: A decade
of reform. Thousand Oaks, CA:
Corwin.
Noddings, N. (1984). Caring: A feminine approach to ethics and moral
education. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Noddings, N. (2002). Educating moral
people: A caring alternative to
character education. New York:
Teachers College Press.
Owens, R. G. (2001). Organizational
behavior in education: Instructional
leadership and school reform (7th ed). Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon.
Phillips, D. C. (1995). Counting down to
the millennium. Critical Conversations in Philosophy of Education,
34-42. New York, NY: Routledge Press.
Prettyman, S. S. (1998). Discourses on
adolescence, gender, and schooling. Educational Studies, 29(4), Winter,
329-340.
Sadker, M. P., & Sadker, D. M.
(2003). Teachers, schools, and society (6th ed.). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.
Shafritz, J. M., & Ott, J. S.
(2001). Classics of organizational theory (5th ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
Tyack, D. B. (1974). The one best
system: A history of american urban education. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Wallerstedt, A. (Ed.) (1993). The
orthodox study bible: New testament and
psalms, new king james version. Nashville:
Thomas Nelson Publishers.