Chapter 14 Schools as Cultures William A. Firestone and Karen Seashore Louis.

Chapter 14

Schools as Cultures

William A. Firestone and Karen Seashore Louis

Introduction

This chapter seeks to expand the understanding of culture that has dominated educational administration.

What Is Culture?

“A pattern of shared basic assumption that the group learned as it solved its problems of external adaptation and internal integration, that has worked well enough to be considered valid and, therefore to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems.”

Edgar Schein

Where Is Culture?

• The nation state and the school.

• Subcultures are adult staff and students.

National Variations in Educational Values and Beliefs

• Comparative analyses of education systems often focus on governance: who has the right to make decisions about educational policy or practice.

• Policy trends in many developed countries put more responsibility for making decisions into the hands of teachers or schools: Sweden, Norway, Russia, Spain, the Netherlands, and France are several where efforts to decentralize responsibility has occurred.

Cultural Values Related to Students and Teachers

• Bronfenbrenner (1972) points out that U.S. elementary school classrooms are organized to foster individual achievement and competition between students, while Russian classrooms are organized to promote collective responsibility for learning among students.

Cultural Values Related to Students and Teachers

• In Japan, students academic achievement is attributed to hard work and effort, while in the U.S., it is often attributed to intelligence or talent.

Hofstede’s Model of Work-Related Values

• Equality and Inequality

• Collectivism and Individualism

• Gendered Cultures

• What Is different Is dangerous?

Hofstede’s Model of Work-Related Values

• Equality and InequalityPower distance index

Where power distances are small, all members of the workplace expect to initiate and to be consulted on change; in high power-distance countries both “superior” and “ subordinates” prefer to have clear relationships of authority and change initiated from above.

• Most developed countries fall below the mean of preferences for inequality (Denmark and Austria).

Hofstede’s Model of Work-Related Values

• Collectivism and Individualism

This dimension refers to the relative important of individual challenge on the job versus loyalty and support of group goals.

Collectivism and Individualism

• Data suggest that there is a wide range among the developed countries.

• The English-speaking countries all rank at the top of the individualism scale, while Israel, Spain, and Japan have scores around the mean for the whole sample.

Gendered Cultures

• More masculine cultures hold “tough” values (advancement, opportunity) rather than “tender” values (cooperation, opportunities to contribute).

• The most masculine countries are Japan, Austria, and Switzerland and the most feminine countries are Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden.

Gendered Cultures

“Experiences in teaching abroad and the discussions with teachers from different have led me to conclude that in the more feminine cultures the average student is considered the norm, while in more masculine countries like the U.S.A. the best students are the norm.”

What Is different Is dangerous?

• In terms of education, uncertainty avoidance is related to expectations about expertise.

• In high avoidance countries, like Germany and France, teachers are expected to have the answers.

• In lower uncertainty avoidance countries, teachers may feel free to say to both students and colleagues “I don’t know,” and intellectual disagreement may be viewed as not only stimulating but essential for development.

National Codes

• In the U.S., the code in question is the bargain between teachers and high school students to reduce academic expectations.

• The Carnegie unit was a major advancement that helped to standardized high school curricula and competition for places in institutions of higher education.

National Codes

• The high school curriculum into high and low track classes.

Adult Culture and School Effectiveness

• The first issue what students are like addressed the fundamental conflict of interest between adults and children in school.

Adult Culture and School Effectiveness

• The second issue concerns the place of academics in schooling.

Rosenholtz(1989), suggests that where academics are important, teachers also share confidence that they know how to teach.

Recent research by Louis, Kruse, and Marks (1995) and Louis, Marks, and Kruse (1996) show that professional school cultures seem to increase teachers’ collective sense of responsibility for student achievement and common understandings of instructional processes.

Adult Culture and School Effectiveness

• The third issue addresses the interaction among educators in the school.

There has been relatively little research on the general social life of teachers, but studies suggest that the friendships and interpersonal support that teachers give each other support collective efforts to improve practice (Bryk, Lee & Holland, 1993).

Adult Subcultures

• Almost all American high schools and many middle and junior high schools share a common internal structure based on subject matter departments.

• High school teachers typically talk more to members of their own departments than other teachers in the school.

Student Cultures

• Commonalties in Student Culture

Even in elementary schools, one can see a characteristic common to all student social cultures: the development of labels that clearly identify popular/higher status and unpopular/lower status children.

Student Cultures

• Student Subculturesexample: the football players

• Gender and CultureResearch on girl’s subcultures in school is relatively recent.

• Race and Student CultureIn a school context, all minority children experience

problems of adjustment and learning that are greater than those majority groups, but in every country some minority groups are academically successful, while others are less so.

How Do Administrators Influence Culture?

• The “effective schools” research emphasized the principal’s importance in creating a culture of high expectation, orderliness, and teacher focus on student achievement (Mortimore, 1991; Rosenholz,1989); Teddlie & Springfield, 1993), others question the principal’s instructional leadership” in secondary schools and larger schools.

How Do Administrators Influence Culture?

• Transformational Leadership• Is conditioned by national and local culture and

policies

• Behaviors are creating a vision, setting high expectations for performance, creating consensus around group goals, and developing an intellectually stimulating climate.

How Do Administrators Influence Culture?

• Symbolic Leadership• The symbolic leader’s role has many aspects,

including (1) a historian, who reads current events in the school and reinterprets them for the rest of the staff; (2) an anthropological detective, who searches for meaning in the behavior of others; (3) a visionary, who projects hopes and dreams for the entire staff; (4) a symbol in him or herself; by making sure that important routines and ceremonies in the school’s life are reliable and communicate caring (Deal & Peterson, 1994).

Future Research

• Research on organizational culture has focused too exclusively on values and has paid too little attention to the linguistic and behavioral codes that provide the material for individual and group action.

• Comparative studies of the importance of national, regional, and local cultures are needed.

Future Research

• More research is needed that attends to the intersection of school cultures, leadership, and the outside environment,

• An important area of research would examine the interaction of school factors, including leadership, and student cultures.

• More could be done to explore the relationship between culture and effectiveness.