the use of coercion in changing the schools

EDUCATIONAL THEORY

The Use of Coercion In Changing the Schools” By Donald Arnstine

I . INTRODUCTION

Public and professional concern for the education of America’s children has led to a wealth of proposals for making schools more effective. But few of the proposed changes are put into practice, apart from occasional classroom innovations and a scattering of short-lived “free” schools. I want to discuss this apparently odd situation, in order to show what can justifiably be done to get changes under way more readily.

When they work on their own initiative, teachers find it difficult to institute changes in schools. The reason for this is that teachers do not act wholly on their own. Consciously or not, they make their decisions in accord with the rules, customs, and pervasive climate of the school. These rules and customs depend, in turn, on a school principal who himself abides by constraints set by higher level administrators who are bound by the rules, values. and opinions that are influential within the community. Within the school system, then, decision-making is hierarchically organized. With occasional exceptions, and without the precision that characterizes the military, decisions flow downward: from the superintendent, through his staff, to the building principals, and from them through department heads to teachers, who finally convey to schoolchildren the original decisions in a transformed and often unrecognizable form.

When decisions in a formal organization are made in this way, the organization is to that extent a bureaucracy. Bureaucracies are often maligned for being impersonal and inhumane, and deprecated as being the source of unnecessary red tape. But these are only features of malfunctioning bureaucracies. On the contrary, bureaucracies are intended to promote the efficient operation of complex organizations of people. As such, a bureaucracy may be defined as “an institutionalized method of organizing social conduct in the interest of administrative efficiency.”’

Not all human groups are bureaucratically organized, nor do they need to be. Families, clubs, small businesses and shops, some performing groups, and neighborhood volleyball teams can all operate without bureaucratic organization. Educational institutions, too, can operate informally and on a face-to-face basis, although this is seldom found today except in an occasional rural school or independently financed “free” school. In contrast, most school systems today fit the stan’dard identifying criteria for bureaucracies that were elaborated by Max Weber and later expanded on by other writers.’ Thus not only are school personnel organized in a hierarchy, but most of them are also highly specialized. and nearly all of them were appointed to their posts after

Donald Arnsfine is Professor of Education at the University of California, Davis. He served as President of the Philosophy of Education Society for 1972-73.

* Presidential Address at the Twenty-ninth Annual Meeting of the Philosophy of Education Society, April 16, 1973, Monteleone Hotel, New Orleans, Louisiana.

I . Peter M. Blau, Bureaucracy in Modern Society (New York: Random House, 1956), p. 60. 2. See M a x Weber, “The Essentials of Bureaucratic Organization: An Ideal-Type Construction,”

in Robert K. Merton, et al. (eds.), Reader in Bureaucracy (New York: The Free Press, 1952), pp. 21-22; and Blau, op. cit. , pp. 18-19.

277

278 EDUCATIONAL THEORY

having been certificated on the basis of technical qualifications. Salaries are usually fixed for each position, and they increase by standard increments which an employee receives through a regularized system of promotion that depends more on seniority than it does on measured ability. Finally, most decisions made within school systems are bounded by codified rules and regulations. I t is these impersonal rules, rather than informal agreements, emotional ties, or trust, which govern relations among people within the formal organization.

While bureaucracies are intended to maximize administrative efficiency, 1 do not wish to evaluate them as such: instead. I want to assess their value for explicitly educational undertakings. In the discussion that f-ollows, I hope to make clear three major points. The first is that bureaucracy is an inappropriate decision-making structure for schools in a democratic society. The second point is that the only reasonable way to effect significant changes in educational bureaucracies is through some form of coercion, and the third point is that the only people capable of initiating and sustaining this coercion are schoolteachers.

11. WHY BUREAUCRATIC ORGANIZATION IS INAPPROPRIATE FOR EDUCATION

There are two principle reasons why a bureaucratic structure is an inappropriate form of organization for schools. First, bureaucracy can facilitate administrative efficiency only when the goals of the organization are clear, relatively unchanging, and accepted by all. I will try to show that educational goals in a free society lack these characteristics, and that therefore a bureaucracy cannot well serve educational goals. Second, studies of the impact of bureaucracies upon those who work within them consistently show considerable psychological damage. This damage is a calculated risk in industries that produce socially needed goods and services. But the damage cannot be justified in this way in a school system, which is intended to benefit those who work within them. I will try to elaborate in a little more detail each of these reasons for rejecting a bureaucratic form of school organization.

First, educational goals are not of the right sort to be implemented by a bureaucratic organizational structure. Bureaucracy is intended to promote efficiency, and an organization can be efficient only when its goals are relatively fixed and very clear. The manufacture of cars and the opei-ation of the postal service are obvious examples of enterprises with clear-cut goals. As such, they appropriately lend themselves to organiLational forms that will make their operation more e f f i ~ i e n t . ~ But i t is just the nature of educational goals that they are often vague (and legitimately so), often shifting, and seldom agreed upon by all who are expected to carry them out and benefit frmb them!

There has been much political concern lately to reduce expenditures for schooling by eliminating ineffective programs and personnel. In order to reach this goal, the precise measurement of educational achievement is called for, and this measurement in turn presupposes the postulation of very explicit and fixed educational objectives. Educators have met this demand by trying to make educational goals explicit and fixed by stating them in behavioral terms. While such statements are often helpful in planning and

3. Blau, op. cit., pp. 22-23. 4. Dewey summarized this feature of aims in education in the following way: ‘I. . . it is well to re-

mind ourselves that education as such has no aims. Only persons, parents, and teachers, etc., have aims, not an abstract idea like education. And consequently their purposes are indefinitely varied, differing with different children, changing as children grow and with the growth of experience on the part of the one who teaches.” In John Dewey, Democracy and Education (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1916), p. 125.

P.E.S. PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS 279

evaluating classroom activities, they do not obviate the necessity for more general and less precise goal-statements. For without general and flexible conceptions of educational goals, we should have no basis for drawing up our lists of specific, behavior objectives. It makes sense, for example, to maintain that citizenship is an educational goal, but it is foolish and politically dangerous to suppose that such a goal can be translated into a single list of explicit behavior^.^ Citizenship, social sensitivity, and aesthetic taste are only a few of many goals that are open-ended-i.e., subject to continuous reinterpretation. As such, these kinds of goals simply do not lend themselves to efficient bureaucratic administration.

It may be argued that at least some educational goals, like competence in reading. are relatively fixed and clear-cut. As such, they might lend themselves to behavioral statement, precise measurement, and efficient bureaucratic organization. While I cannot explore this suggestion in any detail here, I believe it is mistaken. For example, if reading were simply a mechanical skill, it couZd be precisely measured, and reading instruction could be organized to produce this skill efficiently. Indeed: when this is attempted we produce children whose reading skill, limited to the vocal utterance of printed words. is quite mechanical. That is, we produce poor readers who do not read critically, interpretively. selectively, or with pleasure. If these latter characteristics of reading are expected to be included among the outcomes of reading instruction, then goals in this area are as complex, open-ended, and thus interpretable as goals in the area of citizenship. Since reasonable people can disagree about what constitutes both good citizenship and good reading, then instruction in these areas does not appropriately lend itself to the efficient organization that bureaucracies are intended to promote.

The other main reason why bureaucratic structures are unsuited to educational organizations lies in the fact that most people suffer psychological damage when their lives are regulated by a bureaucracy. Extensive studies in industry indicate that apathy and immaturity in workers is directly proportional to their distance from the top of the decision-making hierarchy.6 Teachers working within bureaucratically organized school systems have been observed to display similar symptoms, e.g., in their infrequent and sparsely attended teachers meeti~igs,~ in their reluctance to assert or defend their opinions in school: and in their willingness to submit to inflexible routines.’

Some workers react to bureaucratic organization not with apathy, but with a zealous, almost slavish adherence to rules and regulations. This formality, which multiplies the amount of red tape so often associated with bureaucracy, appears to increase as authority becomes more centralized and less well understood at the lower echelons. Thus the behavior of many schoolteachers in highly centralized, urban school systems is similar to that of the civil servants in Hitler’s Germany who apparently

5. This point is elaborated in Donald Arnstine, “The Language and Values of Programmed In - struction, Part 11,” The Educational Forum (March, 1964), pp, 340 341. A somewhat different type of argument has been forcibly offered by Leonard Wdks, who concluded that “exhaustive behavioral conditions for most mentalistic aims sannot be stated.” See Waks, “Philosophy, Education, and the Doomsday Threat,” Review of Educational Research. Vol. 39. No. 5 (December, 1969). pp. 615-618.

6. See Chris Argyris, Personaliry and Organization (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1957), pp. 60-66.

7. See Myron Lieberman, The Future of Public Education (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), p. 192.

8. See Harmon Zeigler, The Political Life qf American Teachers (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice- ~~

Hall, 1967). 9. A striking example is furnished in Gerald E. Levy, “Acutc Teachers,” in Ghetto School (New

York: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1970), reprinted in Glenn Smith and Charles R. Kniker (eds.), Myth and R r - ality (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, Inc., 1972), pp. 215-225.


preserved their sense of security by the ever more anxious and rigid observance of procedural rules.’

A very typical response of workers in bureaucratic organizations is to set standards of production lower than those set by management.” This is commonly called goldbricking, and the least popular worker in any shop is the “rate-buster”-the man who conforms to the standards of management rather than to those of his peers. Goldbricking workers have their counterparts in schools. Both teachers and children are subject to rules and standards set by the central and local school administration, and neither teachers nor children have any greater attachment to those standards than factory operatives have to the standards set for production lines.’ * Like their counterparts in industry, teachers and students find themselves in a position where it does not pay to produce any more than the minimum that is tolerable. Thus plant managers, school administrators, and teachers come to believe that their charges whether workers, teachers, or schoolchildreri-are “naturally” lazy, apathetic, careless, and materialistic.’ The logical status of this belief is similar to that of racist beliefs about blacks, for it characteristically mistakes an effect for a cause. The victims of a type of social organization are accused of inherently possessing the personality traits which were a consequence of that social organization.

Since a bureaucracy withholds the power of making significant decisions from most of its personnel, interest in the job comes to rest solely in the paycheck and in the fringe benefits. This is normally true of industrial and office workers, and it is becoming increasingly true of teachers as schools become more bureaucratized. But it is particularly characteristic of students. for whom the grade is a kind of surrogate paycheck. Peter Drucker describes a factory in terms that precisely fit many school settings:

For the great majority of automobile workers, the only meaning of the job is in the paycheck, not in anything connected with the work or the product. Work appears as something unnatural, a disagreeable, meaningless, and stultifying condition of getting the paycheck, devoid of dignity as well as of importance. No wonder that this puts a premium on slovenly work, on slowdowns, and on other tricks to get the same paycheck with less work.I4

All that is needed is to change the terms “work” to “study,” “paycheck” to “grade,” and “automobile workers” to “students,” in order to get an apt description of typical schools.

To summarize the foregoing, a bureaucratic form of organization is not appropriate for schools or school systems. There are two reasons for this claim. First, the open-ended nature of educational goals does not lend itself to administrative treatment that aims at efficiency. Second, unlike an industrial plan[, an educational system turns out no “product,” the utility or importance of which justifies the psychologically harmful

10. See Frederick S. Burin, “Bureaucracy and National Socialism: A Reconsideration of Webe- rian Theory,” in Merton, op. cit., p. 43.

11. A classic example of this may be found in F. J . Roethlisberger and W. J . Dickson, Management and the Worker (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1946), pp. 379-548.

12. The similarities between schools and ractories, and the unfortunate consequences that result, are discussed in Murray L. Wax, “How Should Schools be lield Accountable?” in P. A. Olson, et af., Educa- tion for 1984 and Affer (Washington, D. C . : U.S. Office of Education, n . d.), p. 60, and in Samuel Bowles, “Unequal Education and the Reproduction of the Social Division of Labor,” in Martin Carnoy (ed.), Schooling in u Corporate Society (New York: David McKay Company, 1972), p. 50.

13. See Argyris, op. cit., p. 123. 14. Petcr F. Drucker, The Concept of the Corporation (New York: The John Day Company, 1946).

p. 179.

P.E.S. PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS 28 1

impact that bureaucracies have on the people who work within them.” If it is thus understood why school bureaucracies systematically undermine what teachers and students are trying to do, I will now try to show why coercion is the only sensible way of altering the organizational structure of schools.

111. CHANGING THE SCHOOLS

I wish to use the terms “coercion” and “coercive” to refer to any action undertaken with the intention to compel an overt action in response. Thus a person or group against whom coercive action has been taken does not consider himself at liberty, nor is he so considered by others, either to ignore the coercive action or merely to respond with an utterance that indicates no action on his part. “Fly me to Havana or I’ll blow your head off,” is a paradigm case of coercion, but there are many other kinds of instances, e.g., a student sit-in that threatens to be maintained until tuition is lowered; a strike to gain higher wages; a threat of dismissal unless an employee follows administrative rules; a consumer boycott of products until a manufacturer changes its employment practices; the withdrawal of federal funds from agencies that investigated illegal activities of federal officials. As a means of initiating action, coercion is to be contrasted with requests. pleas, rational argument, and moral suasion. Coercion continues to dominate men’s relations in economic and political life, although its use by one person against another is often deplored. But in our consideration of educational changes, we are not concerned with relations between persons as such, but rather with the relations between persons and formally organized bureaucracies.

I will try to show that individuals have no moral obligations whatever to bureaucracies, that people are therefore free to act toward them in their own interests as effectively as they can, and that such action will often turn out to be coercive. To sec why people may justifiably act toward formal organizations in just the manner that those organizations act upon them, we must re-examine the process of decision-making in bureaucracies.

When an official of a formal organization (or bureaucracy) makes a decision, he does so in terms of the objectives of that organization. Insofar as his decisions exclude all considerations unrelated to those objectives. they are said to conform to the “ideal of rationality”’ -that is. they maximize efficiency of means without making any judgments about the value of the goals. Thus as he acts for the organization, the official perceives his decision as ethically neutral, since “morality as such must be excluded-as irrelevant,” just as it is to a move in chess.‘ “

Someone outside the organization may take a quite different posture, and judge the official’s decision or the objective of his organization as morally right or wrong. But the official considers only whether the decision enhances or obstructs the organizational objective. If in his official capacity he considered the moral dimensions of his decisions. he could no longer operate efficiently, and his role in the organization would become jeopardized. For the bureaucrat, this may be a source of continual discomfort. While his

15. More extended discussion of both theses may be found in Donald Arnstine, “Freedom and Bu- reaucracy in the Schools,” in Vernon F. Haubrich (ed.), Freedom, Bureaucracy, and Schooling (Washing- ton, D. C.: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 1971), pp. 13-23.

16. See Yehezkel Dror, Public Policymaking Reexamined (San Francisco: Chandler Publishing Company, 1968), p. 336.

17. John Ladd, “Morality and the Ideal of Rationality in Formal Organization,” The Monist (October, 1970), p. 498. This discussion of rational decision-making in formal organizations owes much to Ladd’s argument.

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career is dependent upon unhesitating action in behalf of organizational goals, his emotional life may be disrupted by a personal sense of values in conflict with his official actions. To make matters worse, action directed against the bureaucracy of which he is an official may cause him additional personal distress. One might suppose that the only means by which a bureaucratic official could protect himself from these discoinforts would be the development of a set of attitudes and dispositions so focused on the importance of organizational goals and his own role in implementing them that moral considerations would remain wholly unperceived. Such a disposition might not only preclude feelings of guilt, but might even result in a feeling of righteous indignation when the bureaucracy was criticized or attacked.

Earlier in this discussion I claimed that educational processes had many goals, and that these goals were necessarily open-ended and subject to change. Under these conditions, it might seem difficult for school officials to undertake the sort of bureaucratic decision-making that must necessarily be predicated on a few relatively fixed, clear-cut objectives. Yet this difficulty disappears when we make a distinction between educational goals, which are manifold and open-ended, and the current goals of schools. which are far more clear-cut and amenable to bureaucratic implementation. For as school bureaucracies grew in size and thereby demanded a clear-cut goal on which to focus, such a goal gradually emerged: that of retaining as many students in school as long as possible.’ ’ By “students” I mean anyone from a pre-schooler to a college student. and by “school” I mean anything from a nursery to a reform school.

Although their official policies seldom declare that schools intend to retain as many of their students as they can for as long as possible; our assumption that this is so helps us to understand many otherwise mystifying decisions and judgments. For example. a school system is judged to be “good” if it includes a pre-school program and it sends many of its high school graduates to college. Schools are thought to be “good” if their dropout rates are low. and “poor” if they have high dropout rates.” The dropout himself is regarded as morally unwholesome and urged to return to school. Guidance counselors who find him without academic talent or aspirations can then find some vocational track, or vocational or continuation school, for him to attend. Disadvantaged children and slow learners are treated to more school, either a t an earlier age or in summer, and children whose test performance is high are counseled to stay in school longer. On educational and moral grounds, these policies do not always make sense. But they make perfectly good sense if we understand them as implementing the single, clear-cut goal of the educational bureaucracy: to keep children in school as long as possible.

Given the existence of so straightforward an objective, and adding to it some secondary goals, such as the more recent political concern to operate schools as cheaply as possible, and the goal of raising pupils’ test scores as much as possible, the point of a school bureaucracy can be better understood. At the same time, it must be kepl in mind that the administrative efficiency promoted by the school bureaucracy, like that of any bureaucracy, is to be understood as independent of moral considerations. It might be wondered whether it is better for a child, on educational and moral grounds. to do

18. The extension of schooling downward and the extension of the compulsory attendance age up- ward has resulted in what Ivan Illich calls a virtual monopolization of education by schools. Correla- tively, other institutions which historically have performed important educational functions, such as family, church, politics, work, and leisure, are discouraged from doing so. See Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society (New York: Harrow Books, 1972). p. 11.

19. The dropout causes a reduction in school attendance figures, and this in turn reduces state and federal financial aid. Hence the method of financing schools results in strong pressures to keep enroll- ments up.


something other than attend school. But this is a question that no school official seriously raises. John Ladd reminds us how mistaken we would be to expect bureaucratic conduct to be moral:

We cannot and must not expect formal organizations, or their representatives acting in their official capacities, to be honest, courageous, considerate, sympathetic, or to have any kind of moral integrity. Such concepts are not in the vocabulary, so to speak, of the organizational language-game.’ ’

Despite this mode of bureaucratic conduct, individual persons are often advised to conduct themselves according to standards of ordinary morality toward the organizations that serve or employ them. They should be honest. fair, and 10yal.~’ Yet it is commonly understood that people are hired and fired by organizations on the basis of efficiency, quite apart from considerations of honesty, fairness, or loyalty. To soften the harshness of this supposedly ethically neutral system, jobs are protected by seniority. But seniority, too, is allegedly ethically neutral, and it therefore protects the competent and the incompetent equally, and discriminates against the young without regard to competence, needs, or virtues. The old, for their part, are retired at an arbitrary age without regard to personal needs or abilities. Given these modes of bureaucratic behavior toward individuals, it would be nonsense to speak of a person’s having a moral obligation to a bureaucratic organization.

Since they do not recognize moral obligations, formal organizations cannot be expected to exercise any initiative in acting upon the values, needs, and interests of individuals :

It is fatuous to expect an industrial organization to go out of its way to avoid polluting the atmosphere. . . or to desist from wire-tapping on purely moral grounds.’

The moral grounds to which a citizen might appeal in opposing industrial waste are analogous to the educational grounds to which a teacher appeals in trying to initiate educational change. But it would be just as fatuous to expect an educational bureaucracy to desist, on purely educational grounds, from closely regulating the academic lives of students and teachers.

Thus the only way to make the rights and interests of individuals relevant to organizational decision-making is to translate them into pressures of one kind or another. In the examples just mentioned, it is worth noting that Gulf Oil will take pains to stop spilling oil in San Francisco Bay if the resulting bad publicity should result in a consumer reaction that reduces sales. The government may desist from wire-tapping if those who order it are prosecuted and subsequently disciplined. And officials in school systems may grant greater autonomy in classrooms when teachers and pupils stop showing up for class. In each of these cases, significant changes are made possible by some form of coercion.

Since the mode of decision-making in bureaucracies prevents officials from recognizing moral obligations. they cannot in their official capacities claim any moral

20. Ladd, op. ci t . , p. 499. 21. Bonnie and Clyde wouldn’t have agreed, and it is noteworthy that they have achieved the status

of modern folk heroes, even though they were not noted-as Robin Hood was-for giving their phnder to the poor, It may take some time for moral philosophy to catch up with public opinion.

22. Ladd, op. cit., p. 508.


rights. Thus however distasteful coercion may seem to those who consider only the relations of individuals to one another. it follows that

there can be nothing morally wrong in exercising coercion against a formal organization. . . . Hence . . . it would be irrational for us, as moral persons, to feel any moral scruples about what we do to organizations.’

The upshot of all this is that the tactics of initiating change in education must themselves continue to change. Responsible people have traditionally presented to school officials new ideas that were based on carefully thought-out educational and moral grounds. But if the history of education can be believed,24 this tactic has typically failed to reach its objective. It may not be necessary to mention here that the reason for anyone’s proposing an educational change must be relevant to some conceived benefit to students or the society. But such reasons cannot be expected to make any practical difference in the decisions made by the officials of educational bureaucracies.

If a change is wanted, then the bureaucracy must simply be compelled to make it or allow it. And since no individual person or small group can expect to succeed in coercing an extensive formal organization, it behooves those who desire change to identify others who might also stand to gain from the change, to convince them of their stake in the situation, and to join with them in exerting pressure on the burea~cracy . ’~ This, of course, is what working people have had to do to achieve their objectives, despite charges of unethical conduct levelled at them by their employers, by the press, by the courts. and by the public.

The point of this discussion has been to show that there is nothing unethical, and much that is practical, in the use of coercion as a means of educational change. Indeed. the only question to raise is how to organize it effectively in particular situations. Now I would like to suggest who i t is that can and cannot be expected to initiate and carry out significant changes in education.

IV. CHANGE AGENTS

If we exclude from our consideration pressure groups whose efforts are confined to particular educational issues, we are left with about a half-dozen categories of people that represent potential agencies of change in education: school boards. local communities served by schools, the pupils themselves, school administrators, federal and state political and educational agencies, and schoolteachers. I will try to show why only teachers,

23. Ladd, op. cit., p. 508. But it should also be noted that the officers of bureaucracies, as individuals, must still be treated as moral agents. Many of our most difficult ethical choices focus on when to treat a person as an individual, and when to treat him as a representative of an organization. In order to promote organizational goals, the officials themselves capitalize on our hesitation and present themselves as “‘just plain folks.”

24. I have especially in mind some more recent contributions to the history of American education, e.g., Michael B. Katz, The Irony ofEarly School Reform (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968); and Katz, Class, Bureaucracy, and Schools (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1971).

25. To the contrary, John Walton claims that “it would be impossible to maintain our educational attainments without complex organizations and the bureaucracy that is an integral part of their nature. It would, therefore, be extremely foolish to advocate the elimination of bureaucratic organization [the reference here is to Paul Goodman’s Community of Scholars], or even to assume that it will diminish.” See Walton, Introduction to Education: A Substantive Di.rcipline (Waltham, Mass.: Xerox College Pub- lishing, 1971), p. 24. Walton does allow that some human enterprises might be less amenable to bureaucratic organization than others, but he does not entertain the possibility that educational activities might be more appropriately organized in forms other than bureaucratic ones.

P.E.S. PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS 2x5

among all these groups, have any hope of effecting significant changes. The other groups are powerless.

Traditionally, boards of education have been perceived as the most likely and the most legitimate change agents in American education. Originally established when professional teachers were either scarce or non-existent, school boards were given legal responsibility for overseeing education. Today, influential educators like James B. Conant continue to address their proposals to school board members.”

Such expectations are hopeless. While legally responsible for the education of most American school children, school boards simply lack the means of effecting significant changes in schools. The decisions of local board members are hemmed in by externally dictated spending guidelines and limitations, by state education laws, and by whatever latitude for choice is allowed by local school professionals. Ten years ago, Stephen Bailey and his associates examined the constraints on school boards and concluded that, “in a highly interdependent, technological world, the myth of local control of educational policy is increasingly unrealistic.”’

While school boards in smaller districts may exert some influence on educational policy. boards of education in large and middle-sized cities and in metropolitan suburbs have become virtually helpless; the evidence supporting this conclusion is already voluminous.28 Time forbids a detailed account of all the reasons why this is so. but it may be worth noting that one of the major tasks of school administrators is the gradual and effective indoctrination and co-optation of each new person who becomes a school board member. Eventually, the latter comes to believe that the schools are doing as well as could be hoped for under the circumstances, and that the superintendent offers wise counsel on technical matters. If the board as a whole should reject these beliefs, it will hire a superintendent who will make them believe i t . Thus school boards

perform the function of legitimating the policies o f the school system to the community, rather than representing the various segments of the community to the school administration, especially with regard to the educational program.2

Most school board members would probably deny this powerlessness. They will also probably be the last to realize it.

If school boards cannot reasonably be expected to promote educational change, the local communities they nominally serve are even less able to do so. The local citizenry is further removed from the intricacies of running schools than the school board is, and although parents are often concerned about what their children are up to in the

26. See James B. Conant, The American High School Today (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959), p. 9. 27. Stephen K. Bailey, er ul., Schoolmen and Politics (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1962),

28. For an analysis of the role of school boards in New York City, see Marilyn Gittell, Partici- pants and Participation (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1967); for an analysis of Boston’s School Com- mittee, see Peter Schrag, Villuge School Downtown (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967); for Chicago, see Joseph Pois, The School Board Crisis: A Chicago Case Siudy (Chicago: Educational Methods, Inc., 1964). Summaries and comparisons of the roles of school boards in the cities of New York, Boston, San Francisco, and Chicago, can be found in Alan Rosenthal, Pedugogues and Power (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1969). For analyses of the roles of school boards in smaller school systems, see Roscoe C . Martin, Government and the Suburban School (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1962), and Arthur J. Vidich and Joseph Bensman, SmuN Town in Muss Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958), pp. 171-197. Each of these studies clearly indicates the powerlessness of local boards of education.

29. Norman D. Kerr (pseudonym), “The School Board as an Agency of Legitimation,” in Alan Rosenthal (ed.), Governing Education (New York: Doubleday and Company, 1969), p. 139.

p. 11.


classroom, they are seldom concerned enough to bother voting, let alone campaigning, in school board election^.^ Disagreements within local communities are often enough to keep them from acting effectively, even when sensitive issues are prominent. In the relatively few cases when community members agreed with one another about what changes they wanted, the educational bureaucracy has been effective in obfuscating issues, retaining power, and impeding action.31

Romantics have from time to time expressed the hope that students themselves might serve as the impetus to educational change. But while students are the immediate victims of schools. they seldom have much of an idea of what the trouble is, and even less idea of what to do about it. Those students who finally do reach some consciousness of changes that are needed are usually too close to graduation-and too close to some of the other promised rewards-to risk pressing for any changes. Like prison inmates on the verge of being paroled, they cannot be expected to engage in serious (and coercive) efforts at ref0rm.j

School administrators are often perceived as a promising source of change in education. This is about as likely as the Pentagon’s becoming the chief architect of peace. Just as the business of generals is to plan for war, the business of administrators is to maintain an institutional status quo. While it may be an oversimplification to claim that the role of all school personnel is to maintain the educational status historical research strongly suggests that, in their efforts to promote e f f i~ iency ,~ administrators have been far more effective in retarding than in promoting educational change.j5

People often mention dedicated principals and superintendents who led their staffs to the frontiers of educational change, and protected those of their teachers who had the courage to experiment. Such men do exist. They are about as typical as air force generals who publicly condemn bombing as a means of reaching political objectives. The appearance of an occasional change-agent among administrators no more justifies our expecting changes to originate in this group than the appearance of an occasional Marcus Aurelius justifies our expecting emperors to be benevolent or democratic. Just as the concept of emperor implies ruling an empire, the concept of administrator implies administering an institution-not changmg it.

Whatever organization is needed by educational institutions may best be perceived by those who work in them and who are directly served by them. Thus effective school administration might be attained when teachers and citizens can hire, on a contract basis, teams of administrators sponsored by management firms.3 But until then, the dedication of school administrators to the maintenance of established institutional procedures will constitute only an obstacle to educational change. The same can be said for state and federal governmental and educational agencies. They only multiply the

30. See F. M. Wirt and M. W. Kirst, The Political Web of American Schools (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1972), pp. 61 67.

31. See Joseph Featherstone. “Wiping Out the Demonstration Schools,” The New Republic (Jan- uary 10, 1970). pp. 10-1 I . Featherstone recounts the sad history of unsuccessful efforts of local citizens to promote educational change in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville district of New York City.

32. That students cannot reasonably be depended on to risk coercive action on behalf of educational change is poignantly illustrated in Patricia Michaels, “Teaching and Rebellion at Union Springs,” N o More Teachers’ Dirfy Looks (January, 1971), pp. 262 266; reprinted in Smith and Kniker, op. cit., pp. 37-46.

33. See, for example, Ralph W. Larkin, “Pattern Maintenance and Change in Education,” Teachers College Record (September, 1970), pp. 11 1-1 19.

34. See, for example, Raymond E. Callahan, Education and the Cult of Efficiency (Chicago: Uni- versity of Chicago Press, 1962).

35. See Katz, Class. Bureaucracy, and Schools, op . cir. 36. See Charles H. Wilson, “School Administration by Contract,” School Monugement (March,

1971), pp. 11-13.


inefficiencies of local administrative units and add to them the ignorance of educational affairs that is characteristic of elected officials and the entrepreneurs and civil servants who staff the agencies.

Of all of the groups of people broadly concerned with education, only schoolteachers have the potential for initiating change. The training and experience that teachers can bring to bear upon the insight gained from daily contact with children makes them far more qualified to initiate changes than those who try it from administrative and legislative offices. Equally important, teachers directly undergo the consequences of change. If an experiment was ill-advised, they will be the first to hear about it and the most concerned to do something about it. This distinguishes teachers from people whose only conception of the value of a proposed change is based on how much they liked the original idea, and how much it costs to act on it.

I am not claiming that all teachers are wise, and that everyone else who cares about education is foolish. But I am claiming that among those who teach, there are many who could effect significant changes in classrooms and schools if they were not discouraged from acting by the existing educational bureaucracy. To find the impetus and the freedom to act on their own ideas, these teachers, acting not alone but in well organized groups, will have to confront and overcome the bureaucratic inertia and vested interests which cannot respond to mere requests. Thus the first change that is needed is a political one, and political changes do not just happen unless coercive pressures are exerted by seriously committed people.

I would like to close with an observation about the role in educational change that might be played by people trained in educational theory. Theorists still need to teach about what can be learned, about how things are learned. and about what is worth learning. Without this kind of study, education is only a trade.3 But without the study of more than this, I doubt that education will ever be a profession. Students and teachers want to know haw to put their ideas into action, but their professors are often silent on this point. It is not surprising that many students have unpleasant memories of their exposure to educational theory.

Educational theorists can meet this problem by bringing their theories to bear upon the situations that teachers Prospective teachers need to study school methods and aims in the context of examining not only classroom situations, but also the politics and the political philosophy of e d ~ c a t i o n . ~ Similarly, the in-service education of

37. See Harry S. Broudy, “Teaching-Craft or Profession,” The Educational Forum, vol. 20 no. 2 (January, 1956), pp. 175-184.

38. For further discussion of this approach to the use of theory in teacher education, see B. Othanel Smith, et al., Teacher.s for the Real World (Washington, D. C.: American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, 1969), p. 51; and John I . Goodlad, “The Reconstruction of Teacher Education,” Teachers College Record, vol. 72 no. I (September, 1970), p. 68; and Donald Arnstine, The Humanistic Foundations in Teacher Education (Washington, D. C.: ERIC Clearinghouse on Teacher Education: January, 1972). pp. 34 49.

39. See Joe R. Burnett, “Changing the Social Order: The Role of Schooling,” in Donald Arnstine (ed.), Philosophy of Education 1969: Proceedings of the Twenty-fifrh Annual Meering of rhe Philosophy of Education Society (Edwardsville, I l l . : Studies in Philosophy and Education, 1969), p. 241. This task may not be so easy. For example, while the state of California does not require prospective teachers to study any educational theory, it requires all of them to study pharmacology. Legislators apparently hoped that this would enable teachers to deal inlelligently with drug addicts. Needless to say, if the universities comply with state curriculum mandatcs, higher education will come increasingly to resemble what is offered in the lower schools. Many universities may have to choose between breaking the law or abandon- ing their traditional commitments to academic freedom and professional autonomy. Since most universities have become as bureaucratically inert as most public school systems, they may not be capable even of making the choice. Thus passivity leads to a gradual deterioration that is noticed only by a few scholars and political activists. Totalitarianism, like the end of the world, comes not with a bang, but a whimper.


practicing teachers needs to focus on the means and ends of change in educational bureaucracies. Theory and practice might even be more intimately joined when theorists work in on-going consulting relationships with school staffs that are trying to institute changes. Finally, professors can test the value of their theories by establishing consulting relationships with teacher organizations, for the latter’s efforts to secure greater power can obscure the goals and the interests for which that power was initially sought.

In order to operate effectively in settings like these, theorists will have to convince school staffs and organized teachers that they have something practical to offer. But the challenge of doing this raises a serious question: what if educational theorists didn’r have something practical to offer? I have argued that significant change in education is dependent on the use of coercion in overcoming the inertia of educational bureaucracies, and I have suggested that only schoolteachers have the potential to do this job. But there is no way of knowing whether any changes thus made will be for the better or the worse. If we can count on teachers’ being wise, then perhaps the changes will be for the better. But our schoolchildren would be less victimized by circumstance if theorists did have something practical to offer4’

40. The other option for theorists is, in Maxine Greene’s words, “to play a role like that of the 18th century blue-stocking lady, drawing her skirts around her and retiring from the leaking gutters and con- fusion of the streets to talk philosophy in her salon.” See Greene, “Morals, Ideology, and the Schools: A Foray into the Politics of Education,” in D. B. Gowin (ed.), Philosophy of Educaiion 1967: Proceedings of the Twenty-third Annual Meeting of: the Philosophy of Education Socieiy (Edwardsville, 111.: Studies in Philosophy and Education, 1967), p. 145.

the use of coercion in changing the schools

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