This monograph was published by Phi Delta Kappa International, 2005.
FIXING BROKEN SCHOOLS
Introduction
Consider the case of the young teacher who is not assigned a classroom until school has been in session for two days. When he goes with relief to this classroom, he finds it is without desks, chairs or any sort of teaching supplies. Or consider the case of the teacher who removes confidential information from a student’s file and makes this information widely available to people outside the school. His actions are known by the administration, but he is not chastised. Finally, consider the case of the administrator so intent on self-promotion that she provides teachers with copies of the district examinations and encourages teachers to make sure the students know the answers to the questions.
These scenarios all describe serious dysfunction in a school. While they may be severe cases, many school people will recognize the sad truth in these scenarios because they have been in similar situations of school dysfunction. Unfortunately, most people who have worked in education for more than just a few years will say that at some point they once worked at a dysfunctional institution. They do not say that all of the schools where they have worked were dysfunctional, or even that most of their institutions were. Yet, they quickly identify the one or two schools in their careers where they found the working conditions intolerable. Without defining terms or discussing criteria, school people know, perhaps intuitively, how a school should work.
This may be something we all know intuitively, but it is apparently not an area that is highly studied. To search the literature using the key terms, “dysfunctional schools” yields work on inclusion, mainstreaming and other special education topics. To search using “failing schools” yields abundant rhetoric surrounding the No Child Left Behind Act that views scores on standardized tests as the sole criterion for success or failure. Yet the schools that experienced educators are ready to identify as dysfunctional have much more complex problems than a standardized test can reveal. To begin to formulate a theory of dysfunction in schools will require that we broaden the field within educational research and also include areas of study in organizational psychology and health fields. And fixing these broken schools will mean we must use information from a wide variety of sources and begin to test our theories using more than a single quantitative measure. To that end, this fastback first looks at research on dysfunction from several angles. It then focuses on three particularly strong indicators of dysfunction, leadership, ethos and systems. Finally, it suggests ways to use this knowledge to improve schools that have become or are becoming dysfunctional.
Dysfunction
in Organizations
Dysfunctional schools is not a widely used phrase in the education literature. Currently the emphasis is on identifying failing schools through the standardized test scores of their students. However, an idea of dysfunction that extends far beyond this uni-dimensional view is not new. In 1965 Miles used a health metaphor to describe highly functioning schools. He described the healthy school as one that not only survived in its environment, but also continued to grow. In addition, Miles pointed out that the healthy school is persistently effective in achieving its goals. This sort of definition for a functional school does not discount test scores as important to the school’s goals, but it also includes other goals as important and emphasizes the need for continued growth.
Karns (2001) continued this use of a health metaphor by applying family systems theory from psychology to schools. She noted that low-performing schools bear many resemblances to dysfunctional families in that both systems are very complex, both must be looked at holistically in order to improve, and both can exhibit either positive or negative coping skills in the face of dysfunction. For example, in both dysfunctional families and schools the negative coping skills of in-fighting, scapegoating and indirect communication were common.
Work in the business field on organizational health also emphasizes complexity. Wheatley (1994) used the theories behind quantum physics to argue that it is impossible to study complex organizations as the sum of their parts. According to Wheatley, organizations can only make sense as a whole system with reality existing in the relationships between the various components.
This sort of systems thinking in business is also the premise of Senge’s book, The Fifth Discipline (1990). Senge listed four disciplines, personal mastery, mental models, shared vision and team learning, as being necessary for a functional and healthy organization. While he emphasized the importance of these four disciplines, it is the fifth discipline, the ability to think systemically, that integrates the other four and transforms a company into a learning organization.
Unfortunately, in business this sort of learning organization is not always prevalent. Dysfunctional businesses have been the topic of numerous studies. In The Neurotic Organization by Kets de Vries and Miller (1984) the authors used terms and theories from the field of psychology to explain why some businesses are dysfunctional. These authors argued that if key people in the organization are paranoid, compulsive or depressive, the entire organization can take on the same dysfunctional traits.
Schaef and Fassel (1990) agreed that entire companies can become unhealthy, but they were unwilling to place all the responsibility for this on key leadership. While leaders are important, Schaef and Fasel argued that the organization itself can demonstrate behaviors associated with addiction, such as denial, confusion, self-centeredness, dishonesty, perfectionism, and ethical deterioration. These characteristics of addictive behavior can be systemic within a company, as well as within an individual. Using these terms from the study of addictions agrees with Karnes (2001) who advocated applying the 12 Step recovery method to aid in the recovery of low-performing schools.
Fortunately, not all organizations are dysfunctional, and Collins (2001) reported on his work with highly functional corporations in his book, Good to Great. In studying companies that moved far beyond their expected productivity and sustained this improvement over at least fifteen years, Collins found that these companies all had singularly capable leaders who focused on a clear vision, spent great energy hiring and retaining competent people, and were committed to a fidelity to truth even when this was unpleasant.
These examples of studies of functional and dysfunctional organizations in the business field lead to the question of whether any of this might be applied to schools. Bonstingl (1996) began to do just that in his book, Schools of Quality, as he applied Deming’s work on Total Quality Management to the management of schools. Bonstingl listed Deming’s fourteen points for achieving quality in business and applied these to schools. For example, point one is to create a constancy of purpose, which for schools means helping students maximize their potentials. In addition, Bonstingl listed several stumbling blocks to quality schools. These include failure to set clear goals, fixing blame, excluding key players from meaningful participation and lack of training for staff. Obviously, dysfunction in schools, if it is anything like dysfunction in businesses, is going to be a complex and multi-dimensional construct to examine.
This proved to be true in a recent study of dysfunctional schools by O’Sullivan and Green (2005). Using both survey and interview data involving an international sample of experienced educators, this study identified more than 25 factors of dysfunction in schools, such as lack of trust, ethical deterioration and confused priorities, with an average of ten of these areas of concern being cited in each dysfunctional school. This showed that the problem of dysfunction was complex, and the symptoms were inextricably linked. In this study, the 25 factors were eventually narrowed to produce a focus on the areas of leadership, ethics and organizational systems as places likely to contribute to dysfunction in a school.
School climate issues have also been linked to school effectiveness. Ellett et al (1997) found correlations between teacher effectiveness and their perceptions of the learning environment of their schools. Sweetland and Hoy (2000) were also able to link school climate with school effectiveness in middle schools with teacher empowerment being the important link. Finally, Friedman (1991) correlated high teacher burn-out with several factors all relating to climate in some way. These factors included a heavy emphasis on test scores imposed from the outside, a lack of trust, a confining environment and isolation. In Friedman’s study low burn-out was associated with teachers who were treated as dependable professionals.
Friedman’s (1991) findings also indicated that the renewal of school people is central to the renewal of schools. Numerous voices have echoed this concern that schools will not be improved until the conditions of work for teachers, administrators and students are improved. Bolin (1987) stressed that the idea of teacher as a highly skilled technician will not sustain a teacher’s vision for long. Likewise, Palmer (2000) explained that teachers must find both purpose and community in their work.
Sirotnik (1999) linked personal renewal with educational renewal. He stressed that renewal, which is an interior process, is essentially different from reform, which is imposed from the outside. Renewal is long-term, purposeful and reflective. It is characterized in schools by teachers and administrators who embrace change, learn from failures, are respectful of each other, and are morally responsible. Sirotnik stressed that it is important in school renewal to remember that the people within the schools must also be engaged in personal renewal.
Perhaps Margaret Wheatley and Myron Kellner-Rogers (1996) best expressed the need for intrinsic value in work in their book on organizations, A Simpler Way. They wrote:
People do no
respond for long to small and self-centered purposes or to self-aggrandizing
work. Too many organizations ask us to
engage in hollow work, to be enthusiastic about small-minded visions, to commit
ourselves to selfish purposes, to engage our energy in competitive drives. Those wh
Life
and work are about meaning (Frankl, 1959).
If the work done in schools does not have meaning for teachers and
administrators, no amount of well-intentioned reform efforts will be able to
offset this lack. When the work school
people do becomes trivial, futile or purposeless, dysfunction has found its way
into a school. But what are the factors
that lead to this loss of meaning?
Surely n
Chapter 2
Characteristics of Dysfunctional Schools: Leadership
It is apparent from the work cited in the last chapter that dysfunction in any organism is a complex and intertwined phenomenon. If there is one factor, however, that has the most impact on the health of an organization, it is the factor of leadership. Studies of companies (Collins, 2001) and schools (O’Sullivan and Green, 2005) alike point to the importance of the leader in promoting either health or illness within the organization. This, then, is an obvious area in which to focus if we wish to fix broken schools. Obvious, yes, but not simple. As Christie and Lingard (2001) pointed out, educational leadership is itself “a complex interplay of personal, organizational and broader social contexts” that resists easy definition or interpretation. And the effect of this leadership upon schools is equally complex, threading its way through management style, decision-making, communication and ethos. The fingerprints of the leader, for good or ill, are on every aspect of a school, and the influence of the school leader cannot be overemphasized.
Amid all this complexity in leadership, though, there are patterns that can be observed about leaders in dysfunctional schools. The first such pattern is that these school administrators often operate at the extremes of management styles. On one extreme, these administrators are very authoritarian in the way they manage their schools. Words like dictator, tyrant and controlling are used to describe these administrators, and these traits are felt in many areas of the school. For example, policies and communication are always top-down in these schools with various constituencies having very little input into decision-making. And frequent unilateral changes in decisions lead to increased chaos and to a “Queen of Hearts” environment in which people are punished for breaking rules they are not aware of or do not understand. This sort of leadership leads to a general lack of trust in the leader, and a conscious or unconscious withdrawal by faculty and others who would rightfully be expected to play a part in the health of the school.
The other extreme of leadership, though, is equally damaging to schools. These are the laissez-faire leaders who provoke words like passive, disinterested and disengaged as descriptors. These administrators fail to exercise any leadership at all and appear to have no particular vision of how the school should run. These administrators say either verbally or by their attitudes, “Do whatever you want, but don’t bother me.” This style is also felt in every pocket of the school from ethos to decision-making, and it also leads to general chaos. However, instead of a “Queen of Hearts” atmosphere with the threat of top-down punishment, the laissez-faire leader encourages a Lord of the Flies environment of survival of the fittest. The young teacher at the beginning of this fastback who had no classroom, desks or supplies encountered this environment and found that the “snarling dog” technique was the preferred coping behavior of the faculty. Whoever snarled the loudest got the bone.
While the authoritarian and the laissez-faire leaders may look very different in style, they in fact share many attributes and produce many of the same effects of dysfunction in their schools. For one thing, both types of leaders are often rather insecure and focused on looking good. They zealously maintain what one educator termed a “veneer of acceptability”. This means that the tough decisions do not get made, and the sensitive issues do not get addressed. Going along with this desire to keep up appearances is often a strong need for self-promotion which can lead poor administrators to pass off others’ ideas as their own. Additionally, this desire to look good means these administrators are easily threatened, and therefore, have a difficult time listening to others’ ideas in the first place.
Another area in which the authoritarian and the laissez-faire leaders share attributes is in the lack of fairness they both display in running their schools. This lack of fairness is especially evident in the way personnel issues are handled in dysfunctional schools. People who work in dysfunctional schools regularly report that administrators do not deal fairly with people. Sometimes this favoritism falls along racial or gender lines, but often there is no discernible pattern as to who gets special treatment. As one educator put it, “I don’t know what I ever did wrong, but it is clear to me that I’m not one of the favored ones”. This bias in personnel matters can take many forms. In the hiring process, strong candidates are rejected while weaker candidates are hired. In the evaluation process, non-favored faculty are given unsubstantiated poor evaluations. In the assignment of duties, these teachers are given less desirable rooms, duties and students. These are just a few of the myriad of ways in which favoritism on the part of the administrator, either due to an authoritarian desire for control or due to a laissez-faire desire to not make waves, can impact people at a dysfunctional school.
A final similarity between these two extreme types of administrators can be seen in the area of ethics. Both authoritarian and laissez-faire leaders in dysfunctional schools can be prone to ethical lapses perhaps because of their extreme desire to maintain appearances. Regardless of the cause, ethical deterioration is a serious issue in dysfunctional schools, and it is often a function of poor leadership. Many of the issues already mentioned, such as appropriating another’s ideas as your own or playing favorites in personnel decisions are at their root ethical in nature. In addition, serious ethical failures like those that began this fastback in which confidentiality breaches went unpunished or teachers were instructed to teach to a test become more common as a school becomes more dysfunctional, and both types of extreme leadership styles can promote this.
It is clear that ineffective leadership is a vitally important aspect that must be corrected if a dysfunctional school is to be saved. Poor leadership at either extreme of the spectrum undermines a school in various and insidious ways. It can lead to unclear and indirect communication, endless non-productive meetings in which input is hypocritically elicited then disregarded, and generally chaotic decision-making. All of these eventually erode the trust so necessary in a healthy school. But it does not have to be this way.
Leadership, in schools or otherwise, is an area that has enjoyed a great deal of study and research. While the act of leadership is admittedly complex, Short and Greer (2002) noted many leadership studies and models in their book, Leadership for Empowered Schools, and Green (2004) noted that national standards for school administrators are available from a variety of sources. In addition to sources on educational leadership, there is also a wealth of leadership information coming from the field of organizational psychology. One of these, Collins (2001), is representative, and may be especially helpful in redirecting errant leadership in dysfunctional schools.
In Collins’ (2001) study of companies that enjoyed high and long-lasting success, leadership was the single most important factor in this success. After intense study of the leaders of these companies, Collins’ team described these leaders as paradoxical in that they displayed both a personal humility and a professional drive. These leaders were not especially charismatic, but did incite loyalty from their followers by putting the good of the company above their own promotion, by crediting other people for success and taking blame onto themselves, and by demonstrating extreme diligence and resolve toward the goals of the company.
This combination of a secure and confident person with a clear professional vision is in direct contrast to the easily threatened and chaos-producing leader of a dysfunctional school. Since leadership is such an important and pervasive factor in the health of a school, it is imperative that we recognize poor leadership early and move to correct it. The earlier this can happen, the easier it will be to move a dysfunctional school toward good health. Serious dysfunction does not happen suddenly. Blatant favoritism, unchecked power plays and egregious ethical breaches such as those mentioned previously in this fastback are not the first instances of dysfunction in a school. Rather, these serious problems are signs of firmly established disease. Small instances of bias, manipulation and moral decay have led up to these more serious instances and have not been countered. It is important, especially in the crucial area of leadership, that small signs that a trajectory has been set toward dysfunction are noted and corrected before they have the opportunity to take root. As we have seen, many of these early leadership failures have to do with issues of ethics, ethos and climate, and we will now discuss these areas in greater detail.
Chapter 4
Characteristics of Dysfunction: Organizational Systems
In this fastback so far we have seen that leadership and school ethos are often two areas of concern in a dysfunctional school. As such, these two areas deserve special vigilance, for when dysfunction is noted in these areas, the sooner intervention can take place the more easily the school can be returned to good health. There is one final area which also bears close monitoring because it is so often present in dysfunctional schools. This is the general area of organizational systems. These systems are as diverse as how personnel decisions are made, how policies are decided and implemented, and how decisions are communicated. For individual schools, they may include for example, systems for hiring and firing faculty, assigning students to classrooms, managing the budget, ordering supplies and administering discipline, among many others. The young teacher mentioned at the beginning of this fastback who had not been assigned to a classroom and had not be allocated desks or books is an example of a faculty member coping with systemic breakdown.
Just as leadership and ethos are complex factors, so too, organizational systems are equally complex. Yet, Senge (1990) argues that systemically is the only way to approach the study of any learning organization. Schools are not the sum of their parts and cannot be studied well in a linear, fragmented fashion. Margaret Wheatley (1992), in her book, Leadership and the New Science, uses the theories of quantum physics to show why this is so. Quantum physics theories state that space between two bodies is not empty, as it appears, but instead is a field filled with elementary particles which change in relationship to each other. As Wheatley says, “In the quantum world, relationships are not just interesting;…they are all there is to reality” (p. 32). To apply this to the study of dysfunction in schools says that we must look at the various practices within a school, and their relationships to each other and to various people within the school, in a holistic and systemic way. For talented leadership and a healthy ethos, while crucial, may not be enough to produce a strong school. Stephen Covey (1989) puts it succinctly when he says, “If you put good people in bad systems, you get bad results.” (p. 232).
There are three attributes to systemic failure that merit close attention. These are the wild vacillations between extremes, the presence of widespread chaos, and the realization that systems are deteriorating to the point of hopelessness. Let’s examine the issue of operating at the extremes first.
Just as leadership in a dysfunctional school tends to operate at the extremes of autocratic or laissez-faire styles, so the systems in a dysfunctional school tend to be organized at the extreme edges. In some schools, nearly all systems are generated and controlled centrally. Hiring is done by central office staff; policies are generated by someone far removed from the school; communication is top-down and in only one direction. This autocratic way of administering the systems of a school has at least two unfortunate results. First, some policies and systems will be inappropriate, if not downright ludicrous, at the school level. One teacher reported, for example, that her students were required by the district to take a recess break only ten minutes after retuning from a long lunch break. Teachers at the school could readily see the futility of this policy, but year after year they watched their students coming and going from back-to-back recesses. This example also illustrates the second result of rigidly controlled administrative systems, and that is that the people who see and live the systems most intimately have no power to effect change in these systems. This leads to a feeling of powerlessness by the very people who should be most likely to produce positive change.
Not all dysfunctional schools suffer from centrally controlled administrative systems, however. Some suffer from the apparent lack of any systems at all. There are few written policies or procedures; precedents for decisions are unknown or ignored; favoritism is rampant. Teachers operating under this “systemless” system say things like, “I don’t really know who made that decision,” or “I found out about that through the grapevine.” Personal lobbying becomes the main way of getting by under these circumstances with teachers saying things like, “The first (or last) one into the administrator’s office is the one who gets his way.”
One complaint that appears in dysfunctional schools with either centrally controlled or chaotic systems, oddly enough, is the overabundance of meetings. As one teacher put it, “Meetings, meetings, meetings! Sometimes we had three meetings a day. And nothing was ever accomplished.” For the people with centrally controlled systems, these meetings represent what one teacher called a “bogus TQM model.” The decisions generated in meetings have no impact on the decisions of the central office. People in the schools with chaotic systems often find that any decisions reached in the meetings are quickly overturned in response to special interests or expediency. Either way, professionals in the school feel a hopelessness set in as they realize how powerless they are to change things in any sort of systemic way.
A second common attribute of the organizational systems in dysfunctional schools is the presence of widespread chaos. This is an obvious by-product for schools that lack guiding administrative systems, yet sadly, this can even be true in broken schools with autocratic, centrally controlled systems because of the tendency for people at the schools to selectively ignore the rules propagated by the central office. Since the selection of rules to ignore is individualistic or connected to the site administrator, people are often confused about which ones are “real” rules and which ones are not.
Communication strategies at these schools foster this chaos at every turn. Indirect communication that depends on “lounge talk” lends itself to miscommunication. Eventually this ambiguous method of communication deteriorates from mere misunderstanding to a more adversarial stance which inevitably undermines trust. As one teacher said, “It got to the point where most of my time was spent guarding my back and the backs of my students.”
Chaos in the systems of a school also manifests itself in another damaging way. It leads to constant, rapid, and often inexplicable change in the school. While a school that has calcified and is unable to change is surely not the goal, expectations that change too frequently sap the energy and the will of the people most necessary to a healthy school. If a school is enduring frequent changes in procedures, forms, curricula, texts, assessments and other expectations, and especially if these rapid changes are seen as capricious and often-reversed, chaos and dysfunction are likely. Covey (1989) states the effects of chaos well when he says, “We can be certain that unclear expectations will lead to misunderstanding, disappointment, and withdrawals of trust” (p. 195).
The final attribute we will examine has also made itself felt in the areas of leadership and ethos, and it continues to be important in the area of organizational systems. That is the concept of the trajectory. In dysfunctional schools, systems are broken and they are getting worse. A trajectory has been set toward decline in many different areas. As one teacher said, “When I first came to the school things were kind of confusing, but by the time I left, everything was broken. We didn’t know from day to day how the place kept running.” The common leadership analogy of the splinter in the hand is useful here for schools. The trajectory of the school becoming dysfunctional is like having one or two splinters in your hand. It isn’t pleasant, but it doesn’t impair your functioning too much. But as more and more splinters get into your hand without any intervention, the situation deteriorates until you can no longer use your hand. The analogous situation in a school often leads to a moment of clarity for the people at the dysfunctional school in which they see the hopelessness of the situation. At times, numerous people will arrive at this moment of clarity at the same time which can result in what one faculty member called, “the Exodus year”. If the trajectory of decline has been set, when strong and talented people leave en masse like this, they will be replaced with weaker personnel. And the slide into dysfunction intensifies.
While it is important to recognize dysfunction in organizational systems early, and this is aided by keeping in mind the attributes of extremes, chaos and decline, it is not necessary to lose hope if these symptoms are noted. In fact, chaos theory points out that it is disorder itself that provides the impetus for improvement. Wheatley (1992) says, “Disequilibrium is the necessary condition for a system’s growth,” (p. 88) and “the greatest generator of information is chaos” (p. 105). In chaos theory, chaos is seen as a positive force, and in fact is more orderly at the root than we are able to observe. The force which keeps seeming chaos under control has been labeled by scientists as the strange attractor. According to Wheatley, the strange attractor for organizations is meaning. Applying this idea to dysfunctional schools, it is not the chaos in organizational systems that is to be feared, but the resulting meaninglessness that comes when people in the school feel powerless to change a situation they are beginning to see as hopeless. The resurrection of meaning, then, in the work that faculty, staff and administrators at the school are doing, is the place to begin if we wish to save a dysfunctional school. Once we have observed that the leadership, ethos and/or organizational systems of a school have become dysfunctional, we have the choice of becoming so reliant on dysfunction that we consider it normal (Karns, 2001), or using the influx of information generated by chaos (Wheatley, 1992) to instigate change. Either way, we now see clearly the gravity of the situation.
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