Organizational Behavior in Education: Leadership and School Reform

by Robert G. Owens

Although U.S. schools have tended throughout their history to reflect the values and views of industry, commerce, and the military, it is becoming increasingly clear that schools are in fact distinct, if not unique, kinds of organizations that differ in important ways from industrial, commercial, governmental, or military organizations.

The distinctive mission of the schools to educate requires organizations that, by their very nature, enhance the continuing growth and development of people to become more fully functioning individuals. Such organizations must foster the learning, personal growth, and development of all participants, including student as well as adults at work in the school.

Effective educational leaders, then, strive for a vision of the school as one that seeks to be engaged in a never-ending process of change and development, a “race without a finish line” (or kaizen, as the Japanese call constant growth achieved through small incremental steps), rather than one that seeks the big dramatic breakthrough, the mythical silver bullet, that will, supposedly, finally make everything right.

Indeed, to many people in the world, bureaucracy is the defining concept, the very essence, of what an organization is.

These are the kinds of organizations that Peter Senge (1990) called learning organizations. They are not only adaptable to new challenges emerging in the world but are also adaptable to the worldwide rise in expectations for increased democracy, personal freedom, individual respect and dignity, and opportunities for self-fulfillment.

Nonbureaucratic approaches, in contrast, emphasize developing a culture in the organization that harnesses the conscious thinking of individual persons about what they are doing as a means of involving their commitment, abilities, and energies in achieving the goals of the organization.

Thus, the culture of the organization epitomizes not only what the organization stands for and expects but also the core beliefs and aspirations of the individual participants themselves.

Personal identification with and commitment to the values of the organization’s culture can provide powerful motivation for dependable performance even under conditions of great uncertainty and stress.

Theory X

This pattern of behavior may take one of two principal forms: 1. Behavior Pattern A, hard, is characterized by no-nonsense, strongly directive leadership, tight controls, and close supervision. 2. Behavior Pattern A, soft, involves a good deal of persuading, “buying” compliance from subordinates, benevolent paternalism, or so-called “good” (that is, manipulative) human relations.

Theor...

This style is characterized by commitment to mutually shared objectives, high levels of trust, mutual respect, and helping people in the organization to get satisfaction from the work itself. Pattern B leadership may well be demanding, explicit, and thoroughly realistic, but it is essentially collaborative. It is a pattern ...

Blake and Mouton ( 1969 ) found that effective organizations involve individuals in important organizational decisions. They submitted that System 4 management is most effective and System 1 least effective.

In the parlance of neoclassical theory exemplified in NCLB, the focus is on teacher accountability, specified performance objectives, and market-based approaches to reform.

What it does suggest is that organizations may be properly described as relatively bureaucratic or relatively nonbureaucratic. It also suggests that schools are undoubtedly far more organizationally complex than is generally understood.

Critical theory holds that institutionalized oppression of groups of people in a society— cultural, ethnic, racial, and gender groups—is often supported by the oppressed peoples themselves, who believe the system to be in their own best interests.

He contended that education should not treat children as empty, passive vessels into which teachers implant knowledge, which he called banking ; education

in his view should be problem-posing in which teachers and students engage in dialogue and students are proactive learners in their own knowledge acquisition.

When CT is applied to race, and specifically in education to the achievement gap, it is also termed Critical Race Theory (CRT), which is defined by Solórzano (1997) as scholarship and discourse on race and racism in an attempt to eliminate racism and racial stereotypes from society, including laws, social policy, and organizational cultures.

The practical impact on what we do in education based on CT and CRT, however, has not been as successful as most critical theorists would have hoped.

Since mid-1990s, when LadsonBillings and Kozol presented their work to educators, some progress has been made, such as improved equity in school funding across school districts in many states, yet funding equity among schools within school districts still remains a question.

Discussion about social justice in the field of education generally, and in educational leadership more specifically, have typically framed the concept of social justice around several issues (e.g., race, diversity, marginalization, gender, spirituality). Although these areas are vitally important to any discussion of social justice, we add the formidable issues of age, ability, and sexual orientation to this discourse.

the need to be nimble, adaptable, and flexible is a central characteristic of all kinds of effective organizations in every profession today.

the web of shared assumptions, beliefs, and values that unites the group in mutual solidarity.

We define a vision for an organization as the ideal toward which the organization is focused, whereas the mission is how the organization will achieve the vision, that is, a clear statement of the methods and strategies to be used, which contain the beliefs and values of the organizational culture.

By

participating in the never-ending process of creating, maintaining, and evolving a vision of the future of the school, teachers are themselves involved i...

The process has a name—reflective practice—and many believe that it is essential if one is to continue to develop and improve one’s professional practice over the years rather than stagnate and become increasingly irrelevant.

Because the new form of organization facilitates and encourages the active participation of people who are on the lower rungs of the organizational hierarchy, it is sometimes popularly referred to as bottom-up organization.

Therefore, vision building is not always a placid process but also often requires engagement with different worldviews of people in the group, different temperaments, different personal agendas, different levels of understanding, different hopes and aspirations, and different pedagogical approaches to the future.

The school leader, then, must demonstrate convincingly an interest in promoting collegiality and shared leadership, an interest in shifting the norms of the school’s culture from the traditional to more collaborative ways of working together.

It is generally agreed today that a school administrator who does not have a clear and well-developed vision will find it difficult, if not impossible, to be an effective educational leader in the days ahead.

signified a clear shift from the department’s early role as data keeper and dispenser of student-aid funds to its emergent role as leading education policy maker and reformer”

Conversely, it has also been described as a historic, even breathtaking, intrusion by the federal government into the rights of states to control the education enterprise within their borders.

Research in elementary and secondary education has, for over a century, been generally scorned in the academic community as being trivial, shallow, and largely lacking what is usually called scientific or academic rigor.

Research in education is hampered by the fact that education is not recognized as a bona fide scholarly discipline.

Education, on the other hand, must draw its knowledge as well as its theory and research methods from a number of related disciplines, including psychology, sociology, anthropology, political science, and economics.

Findings from standardized test measures of math and reading indicated that students in small classes benefited significantly among all types of schools when compared to regular classes or regular classes with aides. Regular classes with aides showed some increased achievement results when compared to regular classes, but these results were not significant. The most striking findings were that gains made in small classes in kindergarten and first grade were maintained over the four years of the study, that low socioeconomic status (SES) student gains outpaced high SES student gains, and that small class sizes reduced grade retention.

The NCLB Act ushered in a new era for educational leaders, one in which school leadership was expected to be driven by data concerning educational

outcomes to an unprecedented degree, an era in which one increasingly needed statistical evidence to support claims and beliefs about instructional practices, much as the Framingham Heart Study guides us today in dealing with choices about diet and exercise.

What it does mean is politicians and policy makers must allow a public education system that empowers local school boards, administrators, and educators to make educational decisions for their respective communities and then hold them accountable for their decisions.

Actions—that is, behaviors—flow from the values and beliefs that we embrace.

Much is said about the need for children to get an early start in schooling with a rich and diverse program to lay a strong foundation for success in later years, yet we persist in spending minimal amounts for preschool and early childhood education.

If we want to make a difference in the organization we call school, it is first necessary to carefully make our basic assumptions manifest and consider how logical the connections are between those assumptions, our publicly espoused values and beliefs, and the organizational behavior that we use in professional practice.

There is often an obvious disjunction between publicly espoused values and what we do in schools.

It is essential for principals and others who want to be leaders in schools to explore ways of understanding the extraordinarily powerful relationship between the school as an organization and the behavior of people who work in it, and what implications for professional practice these understandings suggest about the behavior of leaders.

It requires those who would be educational leaders to think more carefully about those assumptions and about the nature of science and scientific progress.

Thus, during periods of normal science, the work of scientists consists largely of using currently accepted theory to frame explorations of questions that the theory has not yet explained. Usually, this work results in strengthening and extending the currently accepted theories, ideas, and practices.

Kuhn used the term paradigm to describe this worldview shared by scientists, this intertwined set of theoretical and methodological beliefs and values that is accepted as being fundamental to a field of science.

The emergence of a revolutionary paradigm is strongly resisted and denied by the established “normal” science community. Thus, a scientific revolution is inevitably turbulent, volatile, and even intellectually violent. This is not a peaceful process, though, at its best, it may well be a civil process.