In 2020, there were calls for defunding the police and arguments that reform is impossible. The arguments claimed that the institution and chain of command were corrupt and that the system itself bred the harm, violence, cruelty, and death that we see over and over again. Defund and redistribute. The more I read, the more I started to think about the ways that schools function as an institution that police and monitor and control in the same way as the actual police. The school-to-prison pipeline is real because schools often mimic the institutional bias, racist and classist labeling, and punishment that exist in our legal system. Teachers, like police, also do not have enough training and knowledge of the history to be able to move beyond compliance with these systems, therefore perpetuating harm.
Abolitionist organizer, Mariame Kaba’s work pointed me in the direction of Paula Roja’s essay, “Are the Cops in Our Heads and Hearts?” Roja analyzes the role of revolution and the flawed cycle that happens when old power is replaced with new: “Historically, both political and revolutionary struggles focus on toppling state power and replacing it with people’s power. One problem with this model is that most of these movements re-created oppressive governance structures modeled on the same system they were trying to replace.” Humans are slow and also simple. We often rely on solutions for current problems based on things that we have done before instead of thinking creatively to solve problems in new ways. We often lack the vision, creativity, and will to move beyond what has already been experienced. This way of thinking and acting also holds the hierarchy as the model for management.
The hierarchy has long been essential to the governance of people, yet it was not until the early 1900s during the Progressive Era that schools started to use it in their governance. Harvard Graduate School of Education professor, Jal Mehta’s book, The Allure of Order delineates three social movements that have systemically caused institutional power to trend upwards on the hierarchy in schools. Mehta begins with the Progressive Era and argues that Taylorism, a form of the efficient, industrial organization named after Frederick Taylor, changed the purpose of schools. Taylor sought to find the most efficient movement and organization to maximize profits in the industrial workplace. That managerial style transformed schools. Mehta explains, “At the top of this pyramid was a group of city superintendents, who utilized rudimentary tests and cost accounting procedures to compare teachers and schools in an effort to hold practitioners accountable and derive the most bang for their buck. Then, as now, teachers charged that such movements were wrongly applying the logic of industry to schools and argued that education had a deeper ‘bottom line’ than could be measured through actuarial techniques.”
With Taylorism, schools moved from multi-age, one-room places for exploration, literacy, and community building to the preparation of skills and tasks that were needed to fulfill the boom in factory jobs during the Industrial Revolution managed from the top-down in theory and in practice. The sexism in the profession also allowed this to be possible. Historically, teaching is a profession that is dominated by women, while managerial positions like administration roles and superintendent positions are filled by men. In my hope-filled ignorance, I used to claim that I liked being a teacher because I was not turned into a commodity like many other professions. Yet, I did not have to dig much to understand economic structure’s (read: capitalism) influence on the operation of schools.
Although an older theory, David McGregor's Theory X and Theory Y can still be evidenced by the managerial styles of school boards, superintendents, administrators, and teachers. David McGregor was a psychologist in the 1960s who theorized that human organization had two approaches: “Theory X assumes that people dislike work and must be coerced, controlled, and directed toward organizational goals. Furthermore, most people prefer to be treated this way, so they can avoid responsibility. Theory Y—the integration of goals—emphasizes the average person’s intrinsic interest in [their] work, [their] desire to be self-directing and to seek responsibility, and [their] capacity to be creative in solving business problems.” Hierarchies breed Theory X approaches to management that seek compliance and little imagination. In fact, it often entices conformity with feelings of comfort and belonging to the institution that the worker becomes a part of. What does teacher tenure say besides, “Good job, you are compliant with standards-based instruction, the top-down discipline of students, and you do not rock the boat to make anyone in charge feel uncomfortable.”
Theory X is the reason that schools and school districts rely on top-down rollouts of programs, policies, and practices. The irony is that usually, the people who make the decisions to roll out said programs, policies, and practices are often the people who are the furthest removed from the classroom, the actual practice, and the relationships with students and staff. Institutional power is maintained by the most powerful regularly exercising it over whatever it controls; in this instance, district offices control schools. The unfortunate error in this hierarchical thinking is that it often also misunderstands (or maybe completely understands) the idea of scale and places too much trust in the efficiency of scale (again, proving that most district-led initiatives have a "get it done" approach rather than "do a good job" or, even more importantly, “do what is best for the students”). A district often has several schools within its operation. Each school has a different culture, a different staff, and different students from varying pockets of local communities with different home lives. When the operation begins at the district office and then is expected to scale to multiple schools, it often flops. It takes a uniform approach or provides a template-based, hierarchical approach. It then expects that approach to work for all schools in the district (and all the people operating and learning in those schools). The template is a lazy, catch-all that is intended to make change but often is done for the sake of getting something completed, not to actually make a difference. Templates for writing, templates for program creation, templates for equity work…they all are lazy, create conformity and compliance, and do not make anyone free in their implementation, but further bind us to the hierarchical structures when they are rolled out from the top. When they are instructed for use from the top-down, they also demonstrate a lack of trust for people to be able to figure things out, navigate complexity, and use what they know to fix the problems that they are close to. Why do we go to people above us in these hierarchies to fix our problems when they do not have the specialized and intimate knowledge that we (teachers) do?
(Answers to come in the next draft)
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