The Culture of the School and the Problem of Change The Culture of the School and the Problem of Change c.__ Seymour B. Sarason _::;> Yale University Allyn and Bacon, Inc. Boston To my wife, Esther, and dear friends Murray Levine and Anita Miller for their help and support, par­ ticularly during the first two years of the Psycho Educational Clinic when it was not at all clear whether we would make it. • © Copyright 1971 by Allyn and Bacon, Inc., 470 Atlantic Avenue, Boston. All rights reserved. No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any informational storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 70 116572 Printed in the United States of America Third printing ... April, 1972 c__,Con ten ts -.::J PREFACE IX 1 / THE PLAN OF THE BOOK I 2 / THE SCHOOL AND THE OUTSIDER 7 A Glimpse of the Problem, 10. 3 / UNIVERSITY AND SCHOOL CULTURES 15 4 / The Observer from the University, 15. The Critic from the Schools, 19. The Untestable Abstraction, 24. THE MODAL PROCESS OF CHANGE: A CASE REPORT 29 Again the University Critic, 30. The Lack of Descrip­ tive Data, 31. The Beginning Context: the Larger Society, 34. The Beginning Context: the Smaller Society, 36. The Nature of the Diagnosis, 38. The Non-Public Aspect of the Problem, 40. The Curricu­ lum and the Training Workshops, 41. The School Year and the Problem of Supervision, 43. Some Out­ comes, 45. V Conlenls 5 /THE MODAL PROCESS OF CHANGE: AN EXAMPLE FROM THE UNIVERSITY 49 An Educalional Innovalion in a Universily, 50. Some Serendipilous Dala on Ou/comes, 54. 6 /PROGRAMMATIC AND BEHAVIORAL REGULARITIES 62 The Exisling Regularilies, 63. The Physical Educa­ tion Program, 66. The Arithmetic-Mathemalics Pro­ grammalic Reg11lari1y, 69. Behavioral Reg11larities, 71. Queslion-Asking: A Behavioral Regularily, 72. Whal Is the Intended Outcome? 79. Discontinuities and Social Studies, 8/. 7 /THE ECOLOGICAL APPROACH 88 The Kindergarlen, 89. Big School, Small School, 94. Population Exchange as an Ecological Variable and Basis for Change, 101. The Need for the Ecological Approach, 103. The Defects of the Virtues of Strongly Held Values, 108. 8 / THE PRINCIPAL 110 Why Siar/ with the Principal? JIO. The Classroom as Preparation for the Principal's Office, ll2. The Teach­ er Becomes a Principal, II 5. Power and Influence, II 8. The Principal vs. I he Yale Psycho-Educational Clinic, 121. The Principal and Special Services, 126. A Major Dilemma, 129. The Incomplete Picture, 131. 9 / THE PRINCIPAL AND THE USE OF "THE SYSTEM" 133 Variability among Principals, 134. Lorns of Conlrol, 142. Ideas: !he Necessmy Ingredienl, 146. The Princi­ pal as Scapegoal, 149. Contents Vil 10 / THE TEACHER: THE ROLE AND lTS DILEMMAS 151 The Perennial Problem: Number and Diversity of Children, 152. Segregation: the Prepotent Response, 155. The Fantasy of Reduced Class Size, 157. The Effects of Boredom and Routine, 161. The Outstand­ ing Teacher, 169. 11 /THE TEACHER: CONSTITUTIONAL ISSUES IN THE CLASSROOM 174 Constitutional Issues, 175. The Student's and Teach­ er's Conception of Learning, 179. Classroom Sealing, 182. The Teacher as a Thinking Model, 185. The Prepotent Response lo Misbehavior, 187. The Goals of Change in the Classroom, 192. 12 /THE DEWEY SCHOOL 195 The Principal, 197. The Teacher, 200. The Use of Records, 202. Realization of Theory in Classroom Method, 203. Again the Principal, 207. 13 / THE PROBLEM OF CHANGE 212 The Scope of the Change, 213. Time Perspective and the Change Process, 218. Implemented and Non­ Implemented Change Proposals, 219. The Universe of Alternatives, 222. 14 / THE BASIS FOR HOPE 227 BIBLIOGRAPHY 237 INDEX 243 c__ Preface -..__J The ten years I spent planning and directing the Yale Psycho­ Educational Clinic was the most exciting, interesting, and instruc­ tive period of my life. Whatever contributions this clinic has made are in large measure due to a group of staff colleagues, each of whom played a unique role in my own development as well as that of the clinic. In different ways some part of them and their work is in this book. It is with great pleasure that I note my thanks and debt to the late Dennis Cherlin, Ira Goldenberg, Frances Kaplan, Kate McGraw, and Dick Reppucci. As for Esther Sarason, Murray Levine, and Anita Miller, the dedication speaks for itself. I am quite aware that the many graduate students and interns who worked at the Clinic from Yale and elsewhere were a remark­ able group, intellectually and personally. They kept us going and on our toes. This past decade has taught me well that indeed life is with people. In writing a book I have always found it helpful and neces­ sary early in the process to decide what I was not going to include. This was a particularly difficult decision to make with this book, as one might expect when one is writing about schools. I finally decided that it would be best for me and the reader to give pri­ ority to an attempt to make sense out of what I have experienced in schools. Although this has narrowed the scope of the book in terms of problems and literature that are covered, I hope that what I do describe and discuss will be helpful to future, more ambitious attempts to understand the culture of the school and the problem of change. S.B.S. IX The Plan of the Book It is not possible for one person to describe the culture of the school. In our urban centers particularly, there are different kinds of schools (elementary, junior, senior high, technical, and "spe­ cial"), each of which is an entity with distinctive characteristics and yet bearing the stamp of the larger system of which it is a part. The types of schools are finite, but that is not the impres­ sion one receives when one talks of programs which seem to mul­ tiply by some exponential factor. The categories of personnel are numerous and they include more traditional as well as newer types of position. This complexity is more than one person can grasp and experience, especially if one's goal is to do more than deal with organizational charts, job descriptions, and written ac­ counts of what school personnel say they do. To complicate fur­ ther the problem of understanding the school culture are three other considerations: the school culture reflects and is a part of a larger society; like the larger society, and because of it, it is far from static; and its present characteristics have a history. Finally, the conceptual complexity of the problem is not made any easier by a literature which is staggering in its size and range of quality. For reasons that are taken up elsewhere (Sarason, Levme, Goldenberg, Cherlin, and Bennett, 1966) and briefly discussed in Chapter 8 of this book, I concluded that my attempt to study and understand the school culture should be based on my being in a helping relationship to schools, and that decision was one of 1 2 The Culture of the School and the Problem of Change several reasons for starting the Yale Psycho-Educational Clinic. What one learns via the helping relationship is hard, if not im­ possible, to learn by other means. I was also impressed by the fact that practically all of the literature bearing on the school culture was written by people who were not in a working or service rela­ tionship to the school setting. I am not saying that what one learns about the school culture via the helping relationship is superior to what one learns in other ways; it is different, and the nature of the difference fills in or rounds out the emerging pic­ ture. The work of any one individual, based as it is on the par­ ticular perspective from which he views the problem, hopefully alters the perspective of others, regardless of the particular meth­ odology they may choose to adopt. Choosing to experience the school culture via the helping relationship determined the way this book was planned and orga­ nized. Nowhere is this more true than in the first several chapters, which in diverse ways take up the issue of how the outsider's sub­ culture (for example, the university) inevitably affects and distorts the way he looks at the school culture. This issue is interesting and important because the critical outsider is often intent on changing something in the schools. Rare indeed is the individual who does not consider himself expert about some aspect of our schools. There is a surprising 'I degree of similarity in the thinking of the outsider who wants to change the schools and the insider who has a similar goal: both ( the insider and outsider show an amazing degree of ignorance about the culture of the school, and (equally as fateful) both seem ) to have no theory of the change process. The more things change the more they remain the same - that is a recurring statement in this book, which in part is devoted to trying to understand why this is so. If any statement is, unfortu­ nately, unassailable in these chapters it is that about the unavail­ ability of adequate descriptions of the modal process of change in the school culture. I discuss this problem in terms of the new math, which was introduced a number of years ago into a school system in which we happened to be conducting research. My opinion, based on a fair amount of experience in a variety of schools, is that it is quintessentially representative of how change takes place in the school culture, and how the outsider and in­ sider unwittingly cooperate in self-defeating efforts.