Social Organization Of Schools

Understanding contemporary schools requires examining their purposes, evolution, structure, and political dynamics. Ordinary ideas of how schools operate are clouded by a number of misconceptions and assumptions. People often think that schools only teach skills and content, such as reading, writing, and math; or history, English, and social studies. They also think about extracurricular activities, such as football, proms, and childhood peer groups. When visualizing schools, people think of buildings like the elementary, secondary, or tertiary ones they attended. Further, given how politicians talk about their “education agendas,” people assume that most control and funding of schools comes from the state or national government. However, schools do much more than just teach content, and encompass more than individual buildings. Regardless of their size or complexity, schools fulfill a wide range of overt and less obvious functions.
Schools are embedded within districts established by communities to provide both educational and extracurricular activities for young people and a center for social, political, and cultural community events. Moreover, in the United States, schools are preeminently local, not national. They are controlled by locally elected officials and their appointed superintendents, and are largely funded by local property taxes. Thus, what is described here is only typical of schools and districts in the United States, where pressures for democratic localism conduce to an almost radical decentralization–at least compared to schools in other countries.
American Public Schools in Context
In most other countries, a national ministry or office controls curricula, instructional methods, teacher qualifications and salaries, and individual school budgets. In the United States, however, the Constitution specifies that education must be provided by the individual states, which in turn have delegated responsibility for schooling to local communities. While funding for and control over schools in other countries is often shared by the national government and the established church, the U.S. Constitution mandates a marked separation between secular and religious affairs–a mandate with which public schools comply. While strong systems of parochial schools exist in some communities–particularly ones with large Catholic populations–and while private schools, semi-private charter schools, and home-schooling have become increasingly popular, these enroll only a small minority of U.S. children.
Local control–a response to both constitutional silence and to deep-seated cultural aversion in the United States to centralization–is one of the most unique characteristics of American public schools. Nowhere else are public schools so explicitly run by locally elected school boards. This means that those most active in educational affairs are often business and professional persons, since they are more likely than working and middle-class individuals to have the time and money to run for elected office. The United States also differs from other countries in that more than half of all revenue for schools comes from the local community. The federal government, in fact, contributes only about 7 percent of all educational revenues, and only for specific programs such as school lunches; vocational training; impact aid to districts located on military bases or Indian reservations, which generate no property taxes; entitlement programs to educate disabled and language minority students; and compensatory educational programs for children in economically disadvantaged communities. These patterns of governance and funding make U.S. schools extremely vulnerable to influences from interest groups, taxpayers (particularly property owners), upper and middle-class residents, and business interests.
Schools and school districts must be understood and analyzed on many academic and organizational levels and in terms of often conflicting demands for their services. Contradictions of goals, purposes, control, and functioning complicate a clear understanding of how schools, broadly defined, really work–in general, and in different communities. Differences in demographic characteristics; economic resource bases; proximity to urban centers; specific constituencies such as labor unions, religious groups, and industries; and historical factors make each
school district, and each school within districts, unique.
The Purposes of Schooling
Schools have multiple purposes, and each of these purposes has its own constituency or advocacy group, and each affects the goals and organization of schools. Since the goals of advocacy groups may contradict one another, schools face important dilemmas that can complicate their organizational structure and goals. As will become clear, schools are called upon to provide solutions to a variety of social problems, including poverty, disability, and illness of students, and the fraying of civic culture.
Academic competencies: basic skills or college preparatory? American society asks schools simultaneously to provide job training for children who will not go to college and college preparatory training for those who will. Historically, these two types of training were provided in separate institutions. Public schools initially were established in the mid-nineteenth century to provide primary school training in reading, writing, computation, and, sometimes, citizenship to the children of poor and working-class families who could not, or would not, educate their children themselves. Public elementary schools supplanted earlier programs of apprenticeship, in which poor and working-class children were apprenticed out to learn a trade, and the masters they worked for were required to teach them basic literacy skills.
Children of the wealthy learned their “three R’s” at home from parents, governesses, or tutors, while secondary academic schooling was provided by private academies with a classical liberal arts and college preparatory curriculum program–and was usually limited to males. Maintaining public elementary training for the lower classes and private secondary academic training for the wealthy reinforced the social class structure, even though private academies offered scholarships to some deserving and needy children. This system gave working-class children sufficient literacy for citizenship and the labor market, and provided advantaged children the academic training, cultural knowledge, and contacts needed to assume positions of leadership in society. The comprehensive public high school that evolved to eliminate this dichotomy has not resolved the tension between these two types of schooling.

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