IPR News-Summer 1997-Study Finds School Climate Stifles Reform

Institute for Policy Reserach News, Northwestern University

Study Finds School Climate Stifles Reform

Summer 1997, Volume 18, Number 2

School reformers face an uphill battle to implement change in inner-city schools because of the damaged social relationships that exist among teachers and administrators.

And unless they take into account this "irrational, often self-destructive behavior," says Charles Payne (IPR-African-American Studies), the grandest plan may be doomed to failure.

In a new IPR working paper, "I Don't Want Your Nasty Pot of Gold: Urban School Climate Revisited," Payne reports that "in the worst of inner-city schools, the social infrastructure has been so damaged by mutual suspicion, low expectations, factionalization of staff, and general pessimism as to make most school reform efforts irrelevant."

The sociologist reached this conclusion after analyzing six years of ethnographic data on 16 Chicago elementary schools that are implementing the Comer program (see story, p. 1). He is concerned with what facilitates or impedes the process of change.

Payne estimates that about half of the schools in Chicago have the kind of internal power structures likely to be associated with distrustful, suspicious relationships between and among teachers and principals. The effects are so insidious that even the most modest initiatives frequently flounder--including those that would clearly benefit the teachers.

In a typical example, he describes how one school's middle-grade teachers initiated their own discipline policy. The policy worked quite well for about a year, but slowly "withered away," as it fell victim to teacher apathy, backbiting, and petty jealousies.

When it came to preparing a new curriculum handbook, some teachers were so suspicious of each other that they were visibly uncomfortable with the idea of sharing what they were doing in the classroom, Payne relates. "The very idea of visiting someone else's classroom was still commonly referred to as spying."

Payne also observed that principals were antagonizing teachers by their inconsistent attitudes toward collaboration. "A principal may firmly believe in collaborative, egalitarian ideals, and yet bracket them off as not being applicable to particular situations," he found.

In Chicago's decentralized school system, which was designed in part to empower parents, Payne says studies have shown that principals have consolidated power in their own hands in 40% of the schools. He feels that many parents lack the social capital, including the self-confidence necessary for them to take full advantage of the formal change in the power structure.

Payne suggests that reformers build into their plans some mechanisms that would prevent local decisionmakers from exerting unhealthy influence and insure that appropriate in -building communication does in fact occur. "It might mean that we would simply never have programs where teachers are 'retrained' and then left to implement on their own," he says.

Funders who seek to maximize their investments in schools are also missing these points, Payne says. Though Comer himself wanted to begin with only two schools in Chicago, local foundations wanted to begin with schools in almost every city neighborhood. They compromised on four in each of the first two years, which was much too fast, says Payne, since "they were moving into new schools before they completely had a handle on what was going on in their old ones."

After six years of observing Chicago schools in the process of change, Payne believes that the first two or three years of school reform typically involve clearing away social impediments to change rather than actually implementing any specific program. "It may take some schools that long to create a social infrastructure that will give them a chance to start actual implementation," he concludes.

And he thinks it is high time that reformers paid heed.