Organizational Form and School Success: Examining an Integrated Bureaucratic Urban High School

• In Event: 207 - Section on Sociology of Education Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 20. Educational Policy

Abstract

In the era of school accountability, all schools have areas of innovation, problems to solve, and new initiatives that must be implemented. Because of the necessity for a diverse set of actors to align in order to make organization-wide change, schools with high levels of relational trust are more successful at these pursuits. While organizational trust may be prevalent at well-functioning elementary schools where an integrated bureaucratic form dominates, the concept appears antithetical to the culture of a more loosely coupled system, an organizational form commonly invoked to describe secondary schools. Findings from my comparative ethnographic study of a high achieving low-income high school and a more average low-income high school, matched on demographic features, show that leadership styles that invoke shared goals and responsibility for agenda setting at the secondary level, similar to a more integrated bureaucratic structure, are possible and facilitate higher levels of investment, cooperation, and performance among teachers. The relational trust that is fostered in these schools has powerful positive effects for teachers’ relationships with administrators, with each other and with students. Ultimately this results in better outcomes for student learning and achievement.

Author

• Alisa Szatrowski, University of California-Berkeley