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Building a New Structure for School Leadership

Administration in education, then, has come to mean not the management of instruction but the management of the structures and processes around instruction. That which cannot be directly managed must, in this view, be protected from external scrutiny. Buffering consists of creating structures and procedures around the technical core of teaching that, at the same time, (1) protect teachers from outside intrusions in their highly uncertain and murky work, and (2) create the appearance of rational management of the technical core, so as to allay the uncertainties of the public about the actual quality or legitimacy of what is happening in the technical core. This buffering creates what institutional theorists call a “logic of confidence” between public schools and their constituents.

Local board members, system-level administrators, and school administrators perform the ritualistic tasks of organizing, budgeting, managing, and dealing with disruptions inside and outside the system, all in the name of creating and maintaining public confidence in the institutions of public education.

Teachers, working in isolated classrooms, under highly uncertain conditions, manage the technical core. This division of labor has been amazingly constant over the past century. The institutional theory of loose-coupling explains a great deal about the strengths and pathologies of the existing structure of public education. It explains why, for example, most innovation in schools, and the most durable innovations, occur in the structures that surround teaching and learning, and only weakly and idiosyncratically in the actual processes of teaching and learning. Most innovation is about maintaining the logic of confidence between the public and the schools, not about changing the conditions of teaching and learning for actual teachers and students. The theory of loose-coupling explains why schools continue to promote structures and to engage in practices that research and experience suggest are manifestly not productive for the learning of certain students. They include extraordinarily large high schools that create anonymous and disengaging environments for learning; rigid tracking systems that exclude large numbers of students from serious academic work; athletic programs that keep large numbers of students from participation in extracurricular activities; grouping practices in elementary school classrooms that provide less stimulation for struggling learners; special programs that remove students from regular instruction in the name of remediation, instructional aide programs that are sometimes little more than public employment programs for community members; and site-based governance structures that engage in decision making about everything except the conditions of teaching and learning.

R. Elmore

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