Organizational Control in Secondary Schools

In educational research and policy, there are two viewpoints on organizational control in secondary schools: one, that schools are highly decentralized organizations in which teachers have workplace autonomy and discretion; two, that schools are top-down bureaucracies in which teachers have little influence over school operations. Both of these perspectives show substantial empirical support, but there has been little effort to explain the simultaneous presence of these contradictory images. Richard Ingersoll argues in this article that these two images derive from implicit differences in their emphases and in their assumptions concerning how to assess organizational control in schools. In order to empirically ground the debate and offer a more elaborated and refined view of the issues, Ingersoll presents an analysis of data from the 1987-1988 Schools and Staffing Survey conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics. He examines who controls key social, sorting, and behavioral activities and decisions occurring in schools, comparing the control reportedly exercised by faculties with that exercised by principals and central boards across different types of schools.