Understanding contemporary schools requires examining their purposes,
evolution, structure, and political dynamics. Ordinary ideas of how
schools operate are clouded by a number of misconceptions and
assumptions. People often think that schools only teach skills and
content, such as reading, writing, and math; or history, English, and
social studies. They also think about extracurricular activities, such
as football, proms, and childhood peer groups. When visualizing schools,
people think of buildings like the elementary, secondary, or tertiary
ones they attended. Further, given how politicians talk about their
"education agendas," people assume that most control and funding of
schools comes from the state or national government. However, schools do
much more than just teach content, and encompass more than individual
buildings. Regardless of their size or complexity, schools fulfill a
wide range of overt and less obvious functions.
Schools are embedded within districts established by communities to
provide both educational and extracurricular activities for young people
and a center for social, political, and cultural community events.
Moreover, in the United States, schools are preeminently local, not
national. They are controlled by locally elected officials and their
appointed superintendents, and are largely funded by local property
taxes. Thus, what is described here is only typical of schools and
districts in the United States, where pressures for democratic localism conduce to an almost radical decentralization–at least compared to schools in other countries.
American Public Schools in Context
In most other countries, a national ministry or office controls
curricula, instructional methods, teacher qualifications and salaries,
and individual school budgets. In the United States, however, the
Constitution specifies that education must be provided by the individual
states, which in turn have delegated responsibility for schooling to
local communities. While funding for and control over schools in other
countries is often shared by the national government and the established
church, the U.S. Constitution mandates a marked separation between
secular and religious affairs–a mandate with which public schools comply. While strong systems of parochial schools exist in some communities–particularly ones with large Catholic populations–and
while private schools, semi-private charter schools, and home-schooling
have become increasingly popular, these enroll only a small minority of
U.S. children.
Local control–a response to both constitutional silence and to deep-seated cultural aversion in the United States to centralization–is
one of the most unique characteristics of American public schools.
Nowhere else are public schools so explicitly run by locally elected
school boards. This means that those most active in educational affairs
are often business and professional persons, since they are more likely
than working and middle-class individuals to have the time and money to
run for elected office. The United States also differs from other
countries in that more than half of all revenue for schools comes from
the local community. The federal government, in fact, contributes only
about 7 percent of all educational revenues, and only for specific
programs such as school lunches; vocational training; impact aid to
districts located on military bases or Indian reservations, which
generate no property taxes; entitlement programs to educate disabled and
language minority students; and compensatory educational programs for
children in economically disadvantaged communities. These patterns of
governance and funding make U.S. schools extremely vulnerable to
influences from interest groups, taxpayers (particularly property
owners), upper and middle-class residents, and business interests.
Schools and school districts must be understood and analyzed on many
academic and organizational levels and in terms of often conflicting
demands for their services. Contradictions of goals, purposes, control,
and functioning complicate a clear understanding of how schools, broadly
defined, really work–in
general, and in different communities. Differences in demographic
characteristics; economic resource bases; proximity to urban centers;
specific constituencies such as labor unions, religious groups, and
industries; and historical factors make each school district, and each
school within districts, unique.
The Purposes of Schooling
Schools have multiple purposes, and each of these purposes has its
own constituency or advocacy group, and each affects the goals and
organization of schools. Since the goals of advocacy groups may
contradict one another, schools face important dilemmas that can
complicate their organizational structure and goals. As will become
clear, schools are called upon to provide solutions to a variety of
social problems, including poverty, disability, and illness of students,
and the fraying of civic culture.
Academic competencies: basic skills or college preparatory?
American society asks schools simultaneously to provide job training
for children who will not go to college and college preparatory training
for those who will. Historically, these two types of training were
provided in separate institutions. Public schools initially were
established in the mid-nineteenth century to provide primary school
training in reading, writing, computation, and, sometimes, citizenship
to the children of poor and working-class families who could not, or
would not, educate their children themselves. Public elementary schools
supplanted earlier programs of apprenticeship, in which poor and
working-class children were apprenticed out to learn a trade, and the
masters they worked for were required to teach them basic literacy
skills.
Children of the wealthy learned their "three R's" at home from
parents, governesses, or tutors, while secondary academic schooling was
provided by private academies with a classical liberal arts and college
preparatory curriculum program–and
was usually limited to males. Maintaining public elementary training
for the lower classes and private secondary academic training for the
wealthy reinforced the social class structure, even though private
academies offered scholarships to some deserving and needy children.
This system gave working-class children sufficient literacy for
citizenship and the labor market, and provided advantaged children the
academic training, cultural knowledge, and contacts needed to assume
positions of leadership in society. The comprehensive public high school
that evolved to eliminate this dichotomy has not resolved the tension
between these two types of schooling.
David P. Resnick and Lauren B. Resnick (1985) argue that by the
beginning of the twentieth century the labor market demanded higher
levels of literacy and numeracy for greater numbers of people. However,
private academies were too expensive for the masses and insufficient in
number to fulfill an increased demand for more schooling. It was for
this reason that the American comprehensive high school developed–to
provide free secondary education to all children. This "poor man's
academy" was lauded by labor unions and business people because it
provided a terminal vocational education for working people, but it was
not enthusiastically received by families and communities desirous of
distinguishing their children academically, occupationally, and socially
from those in vocational training. The result has been an uneasy–and often invidious–system of streaming, or tracking,
in which the same school offers vocational, and often remedial,
training; a terminal general education; and an elite college prep
program. Since each stream often serves quite different groups of
children, the effect is to house separate institutions within the same
building.
Citizenship: for diversity or uniformity? American
schools are asked to inculcate in children the attitudes, values, and
habits needed for good citizenship because, since the family is suited
best for developing individual personality, institutions such as schools
must provide the overall civic training needed to create allegiance to a
uniform set of cultural values and to the society's political system.
This purpose is unambiguous in a homogenous society, but difficult in
the polyglot, multicultural United States. Initially, public elementary
schools were given the task of Americanizing or assimilating
immigrant children to the English language, a northwestern European
cultural heritage, and the desirable habits of industry, hygiene,
thrift, and obedience to the laws.
As moral or civic education evolved into social studies
in high schools, its focus changed somewhat to emphasize studies of the
American government and economic system and appropriate ways for
citizens to vote and participate in legitimate political activity. The
overall purpose, however, remains: To create a culturally uniform,
English-speaking, and law-abiding citizenry–an
increasingly problematic task as the United States has become more
culturally, linguistically, religiously, and ethnically diverse. Schools
in the early twenty-first century must serve children with mental,
physical, and emotional disabilities; children who do not speak or write
English; children whose parents are nontraditional, absent, poor,
working so many jobs that they cannot participate in their children's
education, or who are themselves disabled, not working, non–English
speaking, and poorly educated. Ensuring academic success for such
children has required the establishment of a variety of support
services, including bus transportation, meals at school, health
screenings, counseling, medical care, language training, sex and
drivers' education, and free clothing. This support service sector has added many more levels of organization to schools.
Some ethnic groups resist being assimilated to what they perceive to
be a white, western European, Christian, middle-class culture, arguing
that schools should equally celebrate their own origins, experiences,
and heritage. These goals pose a dilemma: Do schools continue to promote
assimilation to a uniform version of American life, or do they promote
diversity and multiculturalism? If diversity is to be promoted, how is
it to be done? What impact would it have on school structures,
curricula, and instruction? Parents of ethnic and language minority
children and parents of disabled children form one of the strongest and
most vocal advocacy groups in the educational system. Their claims are
backed up by constitutional guarantees for "equal protection" and "equal
access" under the law. These federal guarantees, however, are left to
the individual states and local communities to enforce. These claims,
and the services they require, complicate the goals of schools and add
yet more departments and staff members to them.
Schools as centers for social life. Academic
instruction aside, friendship groups and the social activities they
participate in are a significant aspect of school life for children. In
part, schools must teach children to maintain healthy social
relationships. They also have created a wide range of extracurricular
activities to motivate students who otherwise underachieve academically.
School activities such as drama, music, and competitive athletics also
entertain the entire community, while adding departments and sometimes
diverting resources from instruction. Athletics in particular is a
significant consumer of school space, time, money, and staff energy.
Defining Organizations and Bureaucracies
Schools are usually described as organizations or bureaucracies.
These terms have technical meanings that often conflict with popular
understandings. Social scientists define organizations as
social structures that (a) possess a distinct set of goals agreed upon
by their members, (b) operate under uniform rules and stable patterns of
interaction, (c) are governed by a system of authority, (d) recruit
members and resources to implement their purposes, and (e) maintain
autonomy in decision-making.
Bureaucracies, or complex organizations, have goals and operations
large and complex enough to require a staff division of labor or
specialization, and to create rational and standardized sets of
procedures for employees to do their work. These procedures include
standards–such as job descriptions–for
carrying out specific tasks or occupying specific positions. Authority
and decision making in bureaucracies is hierarchical, governed with each
staff member held accountable to those in higher positions. Superiors
hold their positions because they have demonstrated that they are
competent to do so. Bureaucracies resemble a typical hierarchical
organizational chart, and most businesses, government agencies, social
services agencies and schools are bureaucratized.
Unrealistic assumptions: schools as bureaucratic hierarchies.
The bureaucratic model assumes clear-cut and unambiguous goals and
authority structures, consistent systems of accountability, operations
based on exercise of professional judgment and rational logic, clear and
fair operating rules, and the capacity to generate sufficient resources
to carry out necessary tasks. If a superior gives orders, it is assumed
the subordinate will follow them or risk sanctions. If funds are needed
to operate, they can be generated and controlled. While these
assumptions may well characterize most businesses, they do not typify
schools. This is problematic, since the business people who often are
key players on schools boards may have difficulty discerning differences
between how schools and the businesses with which they are more
familiar operate. This causes strain between expectations for, and
assumptions about, what schools should do and what they can actually
deliver.
In addition, American culture values business-like models more over diffuse structures such as those in schools–so
much so that many systems in schools, including supervisory patterns,
age-grading, fifty-minute periods, systems of accountability, and
ergonomic desks, all derive from the Scientific Management movement of
the 1920s. This movement, which revolutionized industrial practice, was
enthusiastically applied to educational institutions as well.
Organization and Funding of Schools and Districts
School districts generally encompass the elementary grades, which
include kindergarten through grades 5 or 6; middle (grades 6 through 8)
or junior high schools (grades 7 through 9), and high schools (grades 9
or 10 through 12). Some districts also include preschools and a two-year
community college. Elementary schools are relatively small (300 to
1,000 students) and located in relatively homogenous neighborhoods.
Middle schools and junior high schools are larger, and usually include
the enrollments of several elementary schools. High schools are larger
still; many communities have only one.
Schools also group within grade levels by ability for ease of
instruction. Most elementary classrooms divide children into high-,
middle-, and low-ability groups for basic subjects such as reading and
math. Tracking begins in middle school or high school as students are
grouped by ability and occupational destinations into college
preparatory, general, and vocational curricula. These tracks tend to
divide the academically able students from those who are not. Because
vocational training does not prepare students for college (and vice
versa), it becomes more and more difficult to change tracks as a student
progresses further in school. Thus, early tracking has serious
consequences for children, as small initial differences in skills
learned are magnified with each successive year.
Instructional functions are carried out in the individual school
buildings, each of which is administered by a principal. Middle schools
and high schools also have several assistant principals and secretarial
staff. The central office, under the leadership of the appointed
superintendent, provides overall supervision of the individual schools,
coordination of all instructional and support services, and staff
development for teachers and administrators. The central office also
houses offices for school board members; legal, personnel, and financial
departments–and
departments for research, evaluation, testing, and accountability;
grants development; and enumeration and monitoring of student
attendance. Central office staff are geographically located at some
distance from individual schools, which can make close surveillance of
activities in them difficult.
The structure of schools. Schools are divided into
levels according to the age of students. Elementary teachers generally
teach all subjects to one group of students in the same classroom
year-round. They usually are assisted by resource teachers for disabled
and language minority children, and, where resources allow, by special
teachers for instruction in physical education, art, music, and
computers. Middle schools and junior high schools are departmentalized
or specialized–teachers
teach only in their areas of specialization, and students move
periodically from room to room for each content area. In the sixth and
seventh grade, students may be grouped so they attend classes together
with the same four or five teachers; however, by eighth or ninth grade,
the high school model prevails. Here, students are scheduled
according to the availability of the classes they choose to take. In
middle and high schools, teachers are departmentalized by subject area–such as English, French, Spanish, biology, business practice, social studies, mathematics, and physical education.
Larger schools can offer more subjects, and they have more
departments. Large size, then, can be an advantage, but it creates
social costs in terms of alienation and isolation for students and
teachers, who cannot know all their classmates or students. Although
team teaching and sharing classrooms exists; these innovative practices
are rare. Most teachers teach by themselves; only elementary school
teachers and teachers with severely handicapped children generally have
aides. This isolation can impede collegiality, opportunities for
teachers to learn from each other, and their capacity to organize;
however, the autonomy of the closed door, as Dan Lortie calls it, also serves to insulate teachers from excessive supervision by their principals.
Coupling and control. Patterns of what Lortie calls variable zoning
ensure that overall control is fragmented in schools. Individual
offices or personnel in schools have jurisdiction only over specific
activities. Teachers control delivery of instruction, though the type of
instruction and assessment may be imposed upon them by principals, the
central office, or state mandates. Teachers also control management and
discipline of students and how time is organized within the class period
or day. School-level administrators handle overall coordination;
disbursing the budget; assigning and scheduling teachers and students to
classes; hiring and firing building staff; maintaining relationships
with other schools, the central office, parents, and the wider
community; and providing an overall instructional and managerial vision
for school operation.
Within buildings, principals seldom can supervise the day-to-day
activities of teachers; likewise, teachers' choices of materials and
activities are limited by priorities established by the principal,
central office, and community. Central office staff are responsible for
carrying out the dictates of the school board, mediated by professional
judgments about the best way to educate children and operate schools.
They oversee overall planning, staff development, administration, public
relations, fundraising and financial planning, hiring, accountability,
and research and evaluation, and they coordinate all service and support
activities.
Dispersion of physical units within school districts, as well as the
discreteness of individual classrooms, also fragments control because it
creates, according to Karl E. Weick, loose coupling, or
difficulty in assuring that directives from supervisors are carried out
by subordinates. Neither school boards, nor superintendents, nor
principals can assume that orders given will always be carried out as
desired. Some scholars, such as John W. Meyer and Brian Rowan describe
American schools as "decoupled," while Cora Marrett (1990) argues that
inner-city schools actually are "uncoupled"–following
no upper-level directives at all. This poses dilemmas for educators.
Fairness and the need for teachers to build on what children have
learned previously requires that all children at each grade level be
provided the same quality, type, and quantity of instruction. However,
despite the responsibility of principals and central office staff for
enforcing some degree of uniformity in instructional practice and
policy, individual neighborhoods can exercise considerable leverage to
distinguish the instruction their children receive from that in other
neighborhoods. Further, individual districts can resist policies
mandated by states or the federal government. Some mandates, such as
desegregation of schools and services to students with disabilities and
language minority students, have been ignored by states and districts
for decades.
Even when districts try to implement specific policies regarding
instruction, individual teachers can avoid compliance by simply
neglecting to follow guidelines unless they are observed by supervisors.
Further, in transferring some aspects of decisionmaking authority to
school principals, some popular organizational reforms, such as shared
decisionmaking and site-based management, can complicate district
attempts to institute overall reform, since principals in site-based
districts argue that they alone have responsibility in their buildings.
Nevertheless, current reforms, which include statemandated
accountability systems, require schools to meet uniform academic
standards for test performance or face consequences such as loss of
funds and accreditation, or wholesale firing of administrators and
staff.
Budgets and funding. Looseness in organizational
structure is paralleled by looseness in budgeting and fund-raising. The
public often fails to understand why schools cannot simply buy the
materials and teachers they need. However, school budgets are based on
school board priorities and superintendent decisions. Since individual
principals usually receive their allotment of funds, and even the
individual categories of expenditure, yearly, the degree of control
exercised over expenditures at the building level may be very small.
District level constraints also exist. The majority of school district
revenues come from local real-estate taxes. Although a few communities
have given their school boards–within limits–the
authority to establish tax rates, rates usually are controlled by
voters, who periodically must approve requests both for school tax
levies and the bond issues used for major capital expenditures such as
construction of new buildings. Districts that experience emergencies–such
as a sudden influx of needy immigrant students, destruction of a
building by fire or its sudden obsolescence because of new earthquake
codes, or radical increases in enrollment because of explosive
population growth in the community–cannot
quickly raise funds to meet their needs. School personnel and their
supporters cannot compel, they can only argue persuasively for,
additional funds. Further, they must await the usual political cycle to
request increased funds from the voters, who can vent their displeasure
over taxes in general by disapproving the only taxes they directly
control.
Similarly, districts have little control over revenue received from state foundational funds, called ADA because they are calculated on the average dailyattendance
of all students in the district. States raise educational funds from a
variety of sources, including gasoline taxes, lotteries, and sales
taxes. They give each district a certain amount for each child enrolled
in mid-October; these funds are intended to "equalize" educational
provisions across districts. However ADA is the same for children in all
communities. Since communities vary widely in the value of their real
property, and since they are not limited in the amount–above foundational funding–they
can generate locally, wide inequities exist in educational services.
Not only can rich communities generate more money than poor ones, their
residents pay fewer taxes, proportionately, than those in poor
communities with decaying housing and little industry. Poor communities
often struggle to cover the cost of minimal educational services.
Politicians, including school board officials, often are elected on
the basis of promises to reform or redirect educational policies and
practices. In fact, their ability to do so is severely curtailed by
their inability to affect already established budgets and revenues. Over
the years, few attempts to change the local nature of school funding
have been successful. States that have tried equalization –giving a larger share of foundational funding to poor districts and correspondingly less to rich ones–have
met strong opposition from well-funded communities reluctant to lose
their privileged economic position. Federal funds cannot make up the
difference, as they are earmarked for specific programs and constitute
only a minuscule proportion of overall educational cost.
Reform Issues: Recurring Problems and Proposed Solutions
While parents usually say that they are satisfied with the schools
their own children attend, their support has been dropping since 1983. A
significant segment of the public in the United States has always been
dissatisfied with the education system. This is understandable, given
that many segments of the population hold expectations for schools that
either cannot be met or are contradictory. David Berliner and Bruce
Biddle also suggest that the declining confidence in American schooling
is a crisis "manufactured" by political conservatives to usher in the
privatization of public schools.
Typical solutions proposed for real or imagined school failure often
involve instituting changes in the organizational structure and patterns
of control in schools and districts. Reforms proposed since the 1970s
are discussed below. These reforms have attempted to improve student
performance by changing power balances in schools and districts; raising
standards; increasing assessment; creating smaller organizational
units; changing on-the-job training for teachers; increasing local
control of schools; giving public-education funds to parents,
semi-private, and private schools; and devolving more autonomy to
teachers and principals.
Decentralizing pathological bureaucracies.
Believing that "bigger is better," Americans consolidated their school
districts, reducing the total number of school districts by more than 80
percent from 1930 to the 1970s. Consolidation created larger funding
bases and greater variety in course and curriculum offerings, but it
also required districts to provide transportation for students who could
no longer walk to nearby schools, weakened immediate neighborhood and
community control of schools, and increased bureaucratization of
educational administration.
However, by the 1970s, public disaffection with district size;
excessive diversion of revenue to administration at the expense of
instruction; lack of responsiveness to the needs of local neighborhoods,
particularly minority communities; and, at times, administrative
mismanagement and corruption led to the decentralization movement.
Decentralization created subdistricts within larger ones. The
superintendent's office retained overall coordination and fund-raising
responsibility, but many other functions were delegated to subdistrict
offices. Decentralization reformed "pathological" school bureaucracies
unable to reduce corruption and operate effectively and made schools
more responsive to immediate communities.
Localism: giving control to schools and communities.
While decentralization dismantled and reduced the authority of
central school-district administrations, localism went further. Three
approaches dominated: site-based management, shared decisionmaking, and
creating school-based school boards. All of these approaches weakened
the central administration's ability to direct and coordinate overall
district policy. Site-based management devolves decision-making powers
in specific areas such as curriculum, hiring and firing of teachers,
instructional methods, and even disbursement of budgets to school
principals. They, in turn, can make all such decisions themselves, or
engage teachers, staff, and sometimes parents in shared decision-making.
School Improvement Teams (SIT teams) consisting of parents and teachers
are popular; their responsibilities can include everything from
fund-raising and volunteer services to actual policy decisions. While
parents often participate enthusiastically, recruiting effective parent
groups that include working-class and minority parents can be difficult.
Shared decision-making not only dilutes the power of the principal, but
can cause work overload for teachers, who argue that they do not have
time to both teach and run the school.
A Nation at Risk: assessment and standards.
While decentralization and localism addressed school responsiveness
to constituencies, it did not affect student achievement. In the early
1980s conservative political forces commissioned A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform
(1983), a report calling for improving school quality by raising
standards. The authors of this report argued that higher expectations
for students would produce greater achievement. In response, states and
districts increased the number of courses needed for graduation from
high school, instituted state-wide and district-level basic skills and
content area standardized tests to measure pupil achievement, and raised
the test scores students needed to pass from one grade to the next.
While these changes did little to change overall school organization,
they did dilute district, school, and teacher control over what was
taught, since teachers were forced to teach to the tests for their
students to do well.
Improving instructional quality: testing teachers.
The second attack on educational quality addressed the competence of
teachers. The argument was that simply raising standards for students
would not improve performance if teachers could not provide instruction
commensurate with the level of the tests. In response, national and
state-level minimum competency tests were created for beginning and
experienced teachers. While the reforms initially required firing
teachers who could not pass these tests, in practice, the passing levels
for the tests were rather low. Many opportunities for remediation were
offered, and few teachers were either found to be so poorly prepared
that they could not pass. The testing programs did remove some district
control over who could be hired and retained. Testing programs also took
a heavy toll on teacher and student morale.
Privatization. In the 1990s disaffection with
schools led to innovations in school funding and control, including
privatization, charter schools, and vouchers. Privatization
involves turning over to for-profit or nonprofit corporations and groups
the operation of individual schools or districts deemed to be failures
because of the low achievement of their students. These corporations
receive funds from districts or the state that are normally allocated to
those students enrolled in the privatized school or district; and the
corporation then promises to do a better job than the public schools of
educating children.
Charter schools, while still public, are run by parent or
secular nonprofit special interest groups. Often using facilities owned
by the public school district, they too are allocated ADA and local
funds for the pupils they can enroll. Both privatization and chartering
exempt the schools from a number of regulations–including
the requirement that the schools serve all students (including language
minority, poorly performing, and handicapped students) and specific
guidelines regarding teacher qualifications, student teacher ratios,
curricula and assessment. This effectively dilutes district and state
capacity both to control what occurs in schools and to create consistent
and coordinated educational policies and practices.
Vouchers, perhaps the most popular fiscal reform, involve
giving to parents a sum equivalent to the local funds that would be
expended for their child's education, and allowing them to use those
funds to enroll the child wherever they wish, including private or
parochial schools. Vouchers are popular with conservatives, who seek to
dilute the influence of public schools by diverting public funds to
private schools, which more often are attended by wealthier persons. By
contrast, politicians of the left support strengthening the public
schools to promote equality of educational opportunity for all children.
Open enrollment. Larger school districts historically have been divided into zones for attendance–students attended the school to which they were zoned,
usually the one closest to their home. However, as parents have grown
dissatisfied with the education offered at neighborhood schools, they
have looked to enroll them in other schools–often those with special programs–within
their district. Open enrollment policies dismantle attendance zones,
allowing children to attend anywhere they choose, given available space
or specific qualifications established by the receiving schools. They
also disrupt patterns of school-level budgetary control, because funds
earmarked for open-enrolling students go with them to the receiving
schools, impoverishing the sending schools
Conclusions
Schools are asked to assume a myriad of responsibilities quite
separate from simply teaching social and academic skills. Each of these
has transformed organizational structures and patterns of control and
funding in schools. The question remains whether public schools, with
their original mission of educating children of all backgrounds, will
survive; or whether the public schools, like those in many countries,
will become the last resort for disadvantaged and poor children while
more affluent segments of the population send their children to private
institutions.
