Organization of Schools  School organization  Bureaucracy  Centralization  Decentralization

School Organization  A regular function of schools is to sort and categorize students as successes and failures  How do students get access to the courses, teachers, and schools that help ensure success and prevent failure

School Organization  Success and failure may result from student teacher, or course matches that are “capricious, unintentional, or irrelevant to the educational interests of proponents  Schools are “messy” places in that there is a degree of turbulence in the organizational processes that disrupts the smooth function of this matching function

School Organization  Schools do make an effort to place students according to rational criteria. But it doesn’t always happen  Students find themselves in particular classes because there was nothing else open or available  This is an outgrowth of bureaucracy

Bureaucracy  Vertical or hierarchical authority pattern  Maximum specialization  Roles governed by rules  Decisions based on expertise  Impersonal administration

Centralization  Early 19 th century schools were informally organized: ungraded, precarious financial support, no organized curriculum, ill- trained teachers  Some teacher organization—1795 Society of Associated Teachers—an informal group of teachers that accredited texts, maintained a professional library, maintained discipline records

Centralization  New York City’s first formal school system was the Free School or Public School Society  It was a private organization of upper class individuals with philanthropic interests in educating the poor  It wasn’t a public school system although by 1820 it became quasi-public (received public monies)

Religious Conflict  Public School Society was challenged by NYC’s Catholics because of its bias and refusal to hire Catholic teachers  Bishop John Hughes attempted to use this situation to set up a Catholic school system  Became a larger political between the Governor of New York William Seward and city Democrats

Religious Conflict  Conflict was settled by the replacement of the PSS with a central board of education that served the entire city and local or ward boards that managed schools within sections of the city  Pitted a central board appointed by the mayor (upper and upper middle class Protestants) against working class Catholics who dominated the ward boards

Resolution  Central board enlisted the support of urban reformers who were committed to ending what they claimed was the corruption of the ward boards  Reformers sought to replace the ward board with professional administrators who would manage the schools “scientifically”  1896-the creation of a single, central board of education appointed by the mayor

Why Centralization?  Model the school after what was perceived to be the efficiency of the modern corporation  Centralization would provide business leaders greater control over the schools  Business techniques as a way of asserting the professional status of administrators and their control over the schools

Decentralization  For much of the 20 th century the centralized school board was the dominant mode of school organization  Beginning in the 1960s a trend toward decentralization  A response to the racial and class conflict between citizens and school administration

Black-White Conflict  Blacks saw urban schools that were largely controlled by whites as denying their children a quality education  Urban whites saw the presence of blacks in the city as a threat to their safety, their property values, and quality education for their children  Black power and community control

Black-White Conflict  New York City’s 1968 teacher strike  Break-up of the city schools into 32 community districts  Black led cities  Recentralization  Detroit  New York City  Partnerships