To effect change, one
needs to know the lay of the land. In
terms of organizations, that landscape includes the structure, the processes,
and the functions of the organization.
Each is very important and builds, given this order, on the preceding
element. One can add context to the
landscape – how the organization relates to other entities in its environment,
but for the purposes of curricular change at the school site, an “interior”
view will do.
In the current series of postings,
this blog is providing an approach to institute organizational change at a
school or school district. This posting
will review a school and a school district’s structure. Within that description certain power flows
will be indicated as the description progresses from a class within a school all
the way up to the school board of a school district.
The
state level is mentioned, but is not described – the vast number of
opportunities to change school policies are local in nature. Perhaps educational state standards are
called for, but that’s a whole different game.
That would call for its own process involving state officials, a lot of
statewide people, and deserving of another book.
But
as for local curricular change, which takes in the vast number of educational
concerns, such efforts are an excellent avenue by which average citizens can
make or help make meaningful improvements in an area that affect many people
over many years.
This
reference to “the lay of the land” harkens to the three-dimensional change approach
introduced in the last posting. This
blog, through this and subsequent posting, begins applying what it has conveyed
as being those factors affecting efforts at organizational change. So, to begin, this posting will now look at the
first dimension, the structural foundation of a school. This was originally addressed in the posting,
“The School District Maze,” December 13, 2016.
Here
is what that posting reported:
The
nation’s educational system is organized at the state level. The authority to run school districts is not
a delegated power to the federal or central government; the states reserved
that power to themselves. Generally,
this authority is exercised through the structural creation of school
districts.
While
school districts around the country might vary a bit, they do follow a general
model. They can be summarily described
by an organizational flowchart. One can
get a view of such a flowchart on the website, http://www.rff.com/school_orgchart.htm
.[1]
And for the purposes here, this account
will describe this model by starting with a class – a classroom – and from
there progressively point out how each level of such an organization is
situated.
Say a social studies class is housed
within a department of social studies at a specific school – both middle and
high schools are organized by subject areas and elementary schools by grade
levels. That class is, of course, taught
by a teacher who belongs to that department.
The department has a department head who usually does not have authority
over the class or teacher.
The
department head serves more in a bureaucratic function to convey information
from the administration of the school in which that class is situated to the
teachers of the department and, at times, from those teachers to the
administration depending on the issue involved.
At times, he/she can act as a mediator to iron out any disagreements
within the department.
In
terms of teachers, authority flows from the principal to the teacher. In this, the principal is assisted by a small
number of assistant principals (APs).
Each AP has an area of administration that he or she supervises. These can include instruction, maintenance,
discipline, counseling, etc. Again, the
level of authority can be highly limited and one who works at a school finds
out that the person in charge is the principal.
Of
course, some principals delegate authority to trusted APs, but in this writer’s
experience, most principals are not so disposed when it comes to an issue of
any consequence. In turn, principals
answer to district administrators, but this can also be curtailed. Most district wide policies can be and are
shaped [by the principal] to adapt to the perceived needs of an individual
school.
Again,
based on this writer’s experience, a principal’s tenure at a school is
approximately five years. One reason a
principal might not delegate much power to APs is that assistant principal
assignments are not the province of principals, but the decision of district
officials. This prevents the principal,
to any meaningful degree, the ability to promote a unified philosophy or
approach in is his/her school.
Principals mostly communicate with the
office of an area superintendent within the wider school district. This official usually supervises the workings
of several schools in a sub-geographic area of the district. This, of course, depends on the size of the
district; some are quite small (one such area or maybe two).
Larger
districts, for example Miami-Dade (a countywide district), might have three,
four, or five sub-districts. There are
also assistant or associate superintendents who supervise district wide
functions such as maintenance or personnel.
Of course, on top of the chart in
terms of hired help is the superintendent.
He/she can be either appointed or elected. This official does have the necessary
authority to steer the district in certain directions, but he or she, in
districts of any size, is far removed from the realities of the classroom. In all this writer’s years of teaching, he
met only one superintendent and that meeting meant little in terms of him, as a
teacher, doing his job.
But there is still one more level of
organization: the school board. This is a committee of elected officials who
determine legal policy for the district and in many cases, hires the
superintendent. They are responsible for
setting overall policy of the district.
In large districts, these positions are highly susceptible to political
forces.
Districts
buy a lot of things and services from black (white) boards to internet
services. They probably maintain immense
control over construction decisions. As
such, they are heavily lobbied by private vendors over the course of related
decision-making. These boards are seldom
made up of professional educators; instead, they are politicians whose careers
have steered them to education. This is
not to say they are mostly self-serving elected officials. Usually they are community-minded citizens
who wish to contribute to their localities.
In
certain districts, the educational bureaucracies are part of a municipal or
countywide government. In some of these
cases such officials as mayors have enormous influence on the workings of the
district. Part of mayoral elections, in
such areas, have a lot of campaign rhetoric addressing the needs and challenges
of the schools in that area. The specific
politics of a district relies heavily on the exact nature of how the district
is organized and any change efforts need to be cognizant of district policies
and/or organizational structures and processes.
In
other words, school districts, of any size, are well-established
bureaucracies. In large, urban areas,
they match good sized corporations [in terms of] their structure, processes,
functions, [number of employees,] and the like.
A
change agent needs to have a clear vision of how this system is arranged and
how power is distributed. This
information, in its broadest sense, is known by most teachers. Parents and other community members probably
have a sense of how the school district is organized.
One,
to be an effective change agent, cannot become too knowledgeable of this
structure. The information provides
countless advantages, such as providing useful parameters as to what can be
accomplished and, therefore, what should be pursued. It also points out the central role the
principal plays in either maintaining the status quo or devising and
implementing change. It is the
fundamentals.
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