The Devolution of the High School:
Leading From Behind

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(A photo from our 2005 Summer Leadership Institute.)

James E. Berry
Eastern Michigan University
    

Abstract

     The structure of the American educational system is built on a twentieth century model of bureaucracy and hierarchical control that evolved from the factory model of organization that emerged during the industrial revolution. We have entered an era when the K-12 school district must make an institutional commitment to revise its structure to improve learning outcomes. American high schools are in the middle of this reform and must examine their operations to improve how adults work and children learn in the global quest to obtain knowledge.

     The catalyst for the devolution of the secondary school was precipitated by a series of events that characterized the information age. These events produced changes in American life that went far beyond their original intent or purpose. For example, the GI Bill, passed at the end of WW II, gave returning soldiers an opportunity to attend college and train for jobs in the post-war economy. Few could argue the importance this single piece of legislation had in jump starting an era that brought us the transistor, television, computers, cell phones, and the internet. The information age is more than a long list of technological change, however. It is through the use of technology as a means to improve learning that the information age will achieve its most significant results. It is through educational organizations that the information age will advance learning in ways that the American high school is only beginning to consider.

     In 2006 communication is instant, information via the internet readily accessible, and knowledge the great equalizer among people and nations. Knowledge, because it is a great equalizer, has become a commodity that will be pursued in an institutional, systematic, and governmentally sponsored way to advance social order. It is the global pursuit of knowledge that will put pressure on the current educational system to perform at higher levels and obtain better results. States and nations are learning how nimble educational bureaucracies can be in educating able and lifelong learners at a more effective price in a more efficient way. The K-12 educational organization is about to go through its own version of downsizing, restructuring, and reallocation of assets in the face of a global quest for knowledge. It is an information age reorganization and consolidation of education across the planet.

     In the coming years, the real competition for American educational systems will emerge as a global demand for knowledge. The real competitors will become the state and nationally supported systems of education that organize for higher performance, with less cost, for long term knowledge results. This will put pressure on school districts greater than that demanded by current national and state reform efforts.

Changing an Institution

     Those who see the current educational system as too fractured and uncoordinated consider the decentralized American educational system, governed at the local level, a competitive weakness. When the Massachusetts legislature in 1647 required communities to oversee the governance of education at the local level, the model of decentralized American educational system was born (Cubberley, 1919). Every crossroad, rural community, village, town and city from the mid 1600’s to the late 1800’s eventually adopted the same basic organizational model to educate its children. As people cleared forests, built towns, moved westward, and settled territory it took the bureaucratic organization 200 years to co-opt competing models of American education (see for example Katz and Tyack). By the end of the 19th century the corporate, bureaucratic, locally controlled system of education prevailed from Maine to California. It took another seventy-five years of the twentieth century to modernize the system by adding professional credentials, specialized courses, tracking, and policies and procedures to govern an expanding bureaucratic system. It is this system, however, that confounds reformers and comforts traditionalists. The system, because it is bureaucratic, moves slowly and grudgingly adapts to external forces . . . unless those forces are too loud or too powerful to ignore.

     Educational systems—within communities, states, countries, and corporations—are increasingly hamstrung by the bureaucratic and hierarchical vestiges of factory learning while, at the same time, digital and virtual structures emerge to enhance, and perhaps, displace the traditional bureaucratic school. Those who master organizational learning will advance knowledge and learning at the classroom level.

Educational Reform: The Next Wave is Digital

     The American high school will become a major player in the global market for knowledge and it will have to be reinvented as a system with a structure built for a different kind of learning. In scaling up for this organizational challenge, education will have to think in smaller networked units within a virtual environment.

     Given the importance of, and quest for knowledge, one fundamental challenge for high school principals is to learn how to organize for virtual learning. It will require two general skills or aptitudes. Principals will need to develop 1) a keen awareness, understanding, and knowledge of organizational goals; and 2) leadership skills to facilitate change within a dynamic institutional environment. School districts will need leaders who can adapt to organizational configurations and methods of learning that don’t presently exist.

     The challenge faced by high school principals is to transform schools characterized by local control and state and national expectations for results into organizations that are more flexible, more virtual and offer a grater range of educational experiences. According to Friedman, while the world was opening up to markets, sharing knowledge and information through the internet, as well as becoming connected globally in a way to make itself more accessible, American schools were continuing to function in a bureaucratic, hierarchical, loosely controlled, and fragmented system.

     The reality is that it appears there is no one best system that can meet the high demands of a knowledge intensive world. However, it does appear there is an educational system with multiple delivery models that will require different approaches to leadership and different designs in organization.

    Rather than think of a traditional school organization as hierarchical, locally controlled, and managed by a school board, superintendent, principals, and teachers in one location, face-to-face, and at the same time, one should consider a competing design that distributes the operation of learning in a virtual format.

     Devolution expects networking, flexibility, ambiguity, continuity, and less control from a central authority in an ever-changing world. It requires leadership that is collaborative, and expected, from members of the organization no matter where work is performed, at what level an educator performs his/her role, and at what time of the day or night. The organization will be semi-virtual and learning will be remote. What will emerge is a bureaucratic educational organization that learns to incorporate the structures of the information age as an enhancement over what presently exists.

     Principals tolerant of the dissonance between the present system and the emerging distributed system are better positioned to gain leverage over organizational change. High schools are in the throes of recasting their structure, working environments, and decision-making processes to foster flexible structures that will support improved learning.

     Today, pressure to alter educational organizations is due in large part to state and national demands. The next wave of reform will come from the countries, corporations, and institutions around the world seeking their own effective educational systems. One thing is clear. These emerging educational systems will be more virtual.

Structural Change in Educational Settings

     Most high school principals have not been prepared for teaching, administration, and school change in an era of global learning. Although school improvement efforts across the nation have been, on the whole, only marginally successful, the next era of reform will increase this pressure and go far beyond the demands of legislation like No Child Left Behind. In the face of a global desire for knowledge the organizational underpinnings of K-12 education will be recalibrated.

Leading From Behind : What High School Principals Should Know and Be Able to Do

    Leadership in the future educational organization will emerge as an individual quality prized by the organization for all of its employees. The ability to work in changing conditions, tolerate ambiguity, and delve through conflict represents the kind of institutional ability required of all educators. Schlechty (2005) summarized the transformation of teacher to leader as:

Every Teacher a Leader
Every Leader a Teacher
Every Child a Success (p. 106)

     As simple as it may be, a leadership transformation from an orientation toward controlling to a more collaborative model is emerging. It isn’t about reducing administrative power, it is about pulling together an organizational unit so that all individuals are empowered to initiate, network, and participate. They are empowered to respond in a highly flexible, individualized and virtual environment

     Elmore (2005) identifies “the core of educational practice” as an impenetrable barrier to improving teaching and learning and that few schools, or school districts, achieve significant long term reform because they fail in penetrating this core (p. 8). A key component of this core is the “structural arrangements in schools” (p. 8). If one accepts this element as core, it follows that leaders, at all levels of the educational organization, must alter structures and systems for transformational change. It is the virtual structure that needs to be recognized by educators as an emerging core element. Recognizing this core structure isn’t enough, however. Principals must adapt the core to improve learning.

     Leithwood (2000) found that the educational context creates conditions and expectations for leadership “as a distributed network of relationships within and across people and organizations” (p. 11). As external forces press against educational organizations leadership becomes a context based effort to address organizational adaptability and change. Leithwood’s model is a valuable one in addressing the demands of schooling on a short and long term basis. It is important to respond to an angry parent in context to a fight in the hallway. It is a daily problem and certainly an expectation of the job for a principal.

     Beyond these day-to-day routines, educational leaders must recognize the context of global learning and adapt to this context as well. The future of the high school hinges upon mastering the contexts at each level. With an emerging context of virtual organizations and electronic learning there is a compelling argument to be made for becoming familiar with the kind of leadership required for improving the organization as a foundation for learning.

     Educational systems are in the early stages of becoming more flexible, open, and responsive as well as less structured and less hierarchical in the pursuit of knowledge. It is following the path of global learning via the internet. The American high school will slowly evolve under leadership that frames a different kind of learning organization.

     High schools of the future will be unable to compartmentalize or control the flow of knowledge in an open environment. Schooling will be in smaller organizational configurations and supported by a multifaceted learning environment of face-to-face, on-the-ground, digital, virtual, textual, and, even perhaps, holographic. It is, in many ways, a Back to the Future model of schooling and learning. What was considered inefficient at the outset of the 20th century—small, multi-age, community oriented, personal, and individualized—is now being reincarnated, after a century of industrial mass learning, as a model of quality. The high school will follow learning models that support and enhance emerging learning technologies that emphasize the individual and personal learning. The school will emerge as a flatter, less controlling institution.

     The high school principal will see the virtual organization and distributed leadership emerge in some of the following ways:

1. Decisions that impact the entire school will be made at lower levels of the organization. Committee discussions, decisions by committee, and communication between members will become more electronic and more remote.

2. Communicating, directing, and leading groups within a virtual format will be an expected leadership skill and organizational process.

3. Learning will become more remote. A student will learn at home—or anywhere at the end of a computer—and outside the traditional span of control. The school will extend its span of control—thus its organization—to the limits of its teaching and learning. For example, the Michigan Board of Education is considering a high school graduation requirement that every student complete at least one on-line or electronically delivered course.

4. Teachers will instruct from a keyboard beyond the seat time of a typical school day. The secondary principal will need to evaluate good teaching as it is presented in an electronic format and in multiple settings.

5. A technology infrastructure will be the foundation for an entire system of electronic teaching and learning. Principals will be expected to adapt the current bureaucratic system to the emerging virtual system.

Summary

     High school principals will have to lead a hierarchically controlling and rigidly constructed system into an era of devolution that prizes skills such as facilitation, networking, and flexibility. “School leaders, the argument goes, will succeed or fail depending on whether they master the practice of instructional improvement at scale in classrooms and schools” (Elmore, 2005, p. 42). They will do so facing external pressures that will be more demanding upon schools because of the information age. In order to succeed a high school will have to operate in a virtually, bureaucratic, networked system of bricks and bytes that extends the definition of classroom and school into the electronic world.

     The key to developing an infrastructure to carry out a mandate for learning is to develop knowledge efficient organizations. Building capacity and integrating organizational structures within a recast educational system will be necessary to support the mandate. Managing and facilitating the transition is a primary responsibility for those who lead schools. The role of the high school principal will be forever altered.

References

Cubberley, E. P. (1919). Public education in the United States.    Cambridge, MA: Houghton Mifflin.

Elmore, R. F. (2005). School reform from the inside out.    Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press.

Friedman, T. L. (2005). The world is flat. New York: Farrar,    Straus and Giroux.

Gerth, H. H., & Mills, C. W. (1958). From Max Weber: Essays    in sociology. New York: Oxford University Press.

Katz. M. B. (1971). Class bureaucracy and schools. New York:    Praeger.

Leithwood, K. (2000, August). School leadership and    educational accountability: Toward a distributed Perspective.    Paper presented at the annual meeting of the National Council    of Professors of Educational Administration, Ypsilanti,    Michigan.

Toffler, A. and Toffler, H. (March-April, 1995). Getting set for the    coming millennium. The Futurist, 12(2) 10-15.

Tyack, D. B. (1974). The one best system. Cambridge, MA:    Harvard University Press.

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