Organizing education: schools, school districts, and the study of organizational history
| Date | 03 August 2015 |
| Published date | 03 August 2015 |
| Pages | 682-697 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/JEA-08-2014-0097 |
| Author | Daniel L. Duke |
| Subject Matter | Education,Administration & policy in education,School administration/policy |
LEGACY PAPER
Organizing education: schools,
school districts, and the study of
organizational history
Daniel L. Duke
Curry School of Education, University of Virginia,
Charlottesville, Virginia, USA
Abstract
Purpose –The purpose of this paper is to present a rationale for organizational histories of schools
and school districts and discuss the findings of selected examples of the genre.
Design/methodology/approach –The author presents a vignette of an organizational history,
discusses key elements of the methodology, and offers seven ways in which organizational histories
address important issues in educational research.
Findings –A case is made, using actual examples of research, that organizational histories of schools
and school districts can contribute to testing existing theory, developing new theory, describing how
educational change occurs, accounting for the sustainability of educational change, explaining
organizational continuity over time, understanding school and district responses to persistent social
issues, and balancing an over-emphasis on the impact of school and district leaders.
Originality/value –The paper draws on the author’s original contributions to organizational history
as well as the contributions of his doctoral students and others.
Keywords Change, Schools, Organizational history, School districts
Paper type Conceptual paper
Introduction
Most people in developed societies spend a substantial portion of their lives in and
around formal organizations. One of the first formal organizations with which they
have significant contact is school. Parents impress on their children at an early age the
fact that being in school –in a formal organization –is different from being at home.
Schools have rules and punishments for those who do not obey the rules. Schools have
authority figures called teachers and principals who enforce the rules. As children grow
older, they are exposed to a variety of organizations, and they learn how these
organizations are similar and different. Unless these young people go on to graduate
school or business school and study organization theory, however, they are unlikely to
have occasion to look at organizations in a systematic way.
Organization theory is a field of inquiry, usually based in the disciplines of sociology
and social psychology, that is devoted to describing, understanding, and explaining
organizations and what goes on within and because of them. History is a much older
discipline. History is concerned with describing and accounting for continuity and
change over long periods of time. When history and organization theory are joined, we
have a combination of constructs, theories, research methods, and frameworks that
allow us to determine why and how organizations change (and resist change) over time.
Along with a small but growing group of scholars, I have spent much of my
academic career trying to make sense of organizational change and continuity in
schools and school districts. In this paper I share a rationale for the organizational
Journal of Educational
Administration
Vol. 53 No. 5, 2015
pp. 682-697
©Emerald Group Publishing Limited
0957-8234
DOI 10.1108/JEA-08-2014-0097
Received 15 August 2014
Revised 28 November 2014
Accepted 18 December 2014
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/0957-8234.htm
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JEA
53,5
history of schools and school districts, discuss key features of the methodology of
organizational history, and examine a sampling of what organizational histories have
revealed about schools and school districts.
Before embarking on this course, however, I want to present a brief overview of my
first organizational history project in order to illustrate what the genre is about.
The School That Refused to Die: Continuity and Change at Thomas Jefferson High
School (Duke, 1995) started out as an effort on my part to understand how the high
school I attended in Richmond, Virginia, had responded to desegregation. Only when I
got waist deep in its history did I realize that there was much more to be learned about
my school in particular and schools in general.
An academic odyssey
If there is one overarching theme that emerged from the organizational history of
Tee-Jay, as my high school was called, it concerned the lengths to which a dedicated
group of educators would go, first to establish a high school of academic excellence
and then to sustain it across decades marked by enrollment growth, token school
desegregation, court-ordered busing, white flight, and threatened closure.
After opening in 1930 during the early days of the great depression, Tee-Jay spent the
next two decades competing for academic and athletic honors with its cross-town rival,
John Marshall High School. Competition, however, was not limited to inter-scholastic sports
and comparisons of student achievement between the two Richmond high schools. Tee-Jay
teachers encouraged competition between classes and even rows of students in the same
class. Documents from the early years reveal that the faculty fully intended to create an
environment in which student success was encouraged, expected and rewarded.
By 1940 Tee-Jay enrolled 2,367 students, but growth slowed during Second
World War. A new principal attempted to consolidate various reforms that had been
introduced during the high school’s first decade, but the exigencies of war stalled these
efforts. Tee-Jay launched a Cadet Corps, and both teachers and students departed to
join the Armed Forces. Schools during this time doubled as centers for the distribution
of ration books and the sale of war bonds.
With the end of the war came renewed efforts to promote academic excellence.
The Virginia General Assembly had raised the school leaving age from 15 to 16, and
the Richmond Board of Education issued a far reaching set of recommendations.
The latter included the development of a course of study for every subject, the initiation
of cooperative planning among teachers, examination of the practice of ability
grouping in high school, provision for daily physical education for all students, and
expansion of guidance services in junior and senior high school. The Tee-Jay faculty
and administration responded enthusiastically to these challenges, and in so doing
built a reputation as a forward-looking academic institution. Students and teachers
alike referred to the period from the end of the war through the beginning of token
desegregation as the school’s“glory days.”
In light of the contemporary emphasis on standardized test scores as a measure of
academic success, it is worth pointing out that, from Tee-Jay’s inception, excellence
meant being well-rounded. Academic achievement, of course, was a key part of
well-roundedness, but so, too, was sound character, participation in school government,
and involvement in extra-curricular activities. Tee-Jay was believed to be the first high
school in the USA to develop an Honor System (modeled after the Honor System at the
University of Virginia). The Honor System placed students in charge of cases involving
lying, cheating, and stealing.
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