Don't settle; don't compromise. Freeze your eggs, get your sociology doctorate, worry more about war and pestilence and the incredible inequality of geographical birth than finding your soulmate.
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A significant barrier to educational reform is the bureaucratic nature of school systems. Sociologists view the school as a specialized structure with a special socializing function and that it is also a good example of a bureaucratic organization. As any student knows, there is a clearly defined status hierarchy in most schools. At the top of the hierarchy in primary and secondary schools is the principal, followed by the assistant principal and/or administrative assistants, the counselors, the teachers, and the students. Although the principle holds the highest position in the system, his or her influence on students usually is indirect. The teacher, on the other hand, is in daily command of the classroom and therefore has the greatest impact on the students. In this post we discuss several aspects of the structure of educational institutions and attempts to change those institutions. Schools as Bureaucracies As the size and complexity of the American educational system have increased, so has the tendency of educational institutions to become bureaucratized (Torres & Mitchell, 1998, Sociology of Education). The one-room schoolhouse is a thing of the past; today's schools have large administrative staffs and numerous specialists such as guidance counselors and special education teachers. Teachers themselves specialize in particular subject areas or grade levels. Schools are also characterized by a hierarchy of authority. The number of levels in the hierarchy varies, depending on the nature of the school system. In large cities, for example, there may be as many as seven levels between the superintendent and school personnel, making it difficult for the superintendent to control the way policies are carried out. Similarly, in any given school it may be difficult for the principal to determine what actually happens in the classroom. School bureaucracies are often criticized for being top-heavy with administrators who do not teach and whose regulations seem to stifle creativity at the classroom level. What accounts, then, for the prominence of these complex administrations and their influence on the conduct of schooling? In attempting to answer this question, we need to consider several aspects of what makes a successful school system in a city, town, or rural area. First, in addition to everything else they are, schools are a collection of buildings, sports fields, laboratories, and real estate. They require capital funds for building and maintenance, planning for new facilities, budgeting and accounting for fiscal oversight, and much more. Teachers, students, and parents want to know that buildings are safe and designed to facilitate learning, but they do not have the time or ability to take care of these needs themselves. School administrators must work with potential leaders and parent groups to get the physical work of the district done, and they often labor under extremely difficult conditions of budgetary constraints and ideological conflict.
A second social force that tends to expand educational bureaucracies is their need to respond to so many different public needs and values. Children with learning disabilities need special programs; sports teams demand budgets and leagues; federal and state authorities demand compliance with new requirements for testing, record-keeping, school security, student health standards, and much more. Every demand on a school system that administrators are expected to fulfill adds to their workload and produces a need for more administrative personnel. Some school administrations become large because political leaders want to place their allies in jobs (this is known as patronage) or because of cronyism within the administration (appointing people to jobs as a favor), but much of the growth of school administrations is caused by demands that citizens and their representatives place on the school system. The Classroom In most modern school systems the primary school student is in the charge of one teacher, who instructs almost all academic subjects. But as the student advances through the educational structure, the primary school model (which evolved from the one-room school with a single teacher) is replaced by a "departmental" structure in which the student is taught by several different teachers, each specializing in a particular subject. The latter structure is derived largely from that of the 19th century English boarding school. But these two basic structures are frequently modified by alternative approaches such as the "open" primary school classroom, in which students are grouped according to their level of achievement in certain basic skills and work in these skill groups at their own pace. The various groups in the open classroom are given a small group or individual instruction by one or more teachers rather than being expected to progress at the same pace in every subject. Open classrooms have not been found to produce consistent improvements in student performance, but they have improved the social attendance rates of students from working-class and minority backgrounds. Students in open classrooms tend to express a greater satisfaction with school and more commitment to classwork. The less stratified authority structure of the open classroom and the greater amount of cooperation that occurs in such settings may help students enjoy school more and, in the long run, cause them to have a more positive attitude toward learning.  The Teacher's Role Because the role of the teacher is to change the learner in some way, the teacher-student relationship is an important part of education. Sociologists have pointed out that this relationship is asymmetrical or unbalanced, with the teacher being in a position of authority and the student having little choice but to passively absorb the information provided by the teacher. In other words, in conventional classrooms there is little opportunity for the student to become actively involved in the learning process. On the other hand, students often develop strategies for undercutting the teacher's authority: mentally withdrawing, interrupting, and the like (Darling-Hammond, (1997, Nov.), What Matters Most. Education Digest, pp. 4-10; Rose, 1995, Possible Lives: The Promise of Public Education). Much current research assumes that students and teachers influence each other instead of assuming that the influence is always in a single direction (Kornblum, 2003, p. 573). *MAIN SOURCE: KORNBLUM, W., 2003, SOCIOLOGY IN A CHANGING WORLD, 6TH ED., PP. 570-574* end |
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