Creating an Excellent School

Some New Management Techniques

Hedley Beare, Brian J. Caldwell, Ross H. Millikan

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138487789
• eBook ISBN: 9781351041522
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Originally published in 1989. The pursuit of excellence is much discussed with reference to education, but the question remains, 'How can a school become excellent?' This book demonstrates that excellence depends on good management which, in turn, depends not only on a clear understanding of good management theory, but on the ability to translate theory into practice.

The authors offer profound insights into three crucial areas of leadership: culture, structure, and public accountability. Drawing on areas outside education, such as advertising and business, they discuss many innovations that are already current - flexitime, the vertical curriculum, mastery learning, community support - and depict ways in which these can be brought together into a total educational experience. More strikingly, however, they look ahead, examining the potential changes to our concept of schooling: for instance those brought about by the growth of information technology. This book emphasises that at the heart of outstanding schooling are visionary leadership, a clear sense of purpose, and creatively conceived and flexible support structures.

1

The Movement to Create
Excellent Schools

There are two strong trends which since the mid–1970s have substantially changed the way we now regard and manage schools. The first has been called ‘the effective schools movement’; it was in fact a concerted attempt in several countries to rediscover ways of creating really excellent schools. The movement has produced an impressive literature which school managers cannot afford now to overlook.

The second movement was a profound change in the field of study called educational management in Great Britain, and educational administration in North America and Australia, and which has tended to make many of the ideas inherited from before 1975 obsolescent. In this chapter, then, we deal both with the issue of effective schools and with why the matter became so prominent in the early 1980s. In the next chapter we address the advent of new ideas about educational administration and school management.

But this book is not merely an excursion into ideas. We want also to discover what can be done with the notions produced by these developments. In precise terms how can we change the ways schools are run and administered by capitalising on these developments of recent years? In Chapter 4, therefore, we return to the outcomes of these recent movements and endeavour to suggest patterns of operation which might embody the new ideas about school management.

From School Effects to Effective Schools: the movement from Coleman to Edmonds

One of the most influential scholars connected with the effective schools movement, Ronald Edmonds, wrote in December 1982, ‘Educators have become increasingly convinced that the characteristics of schools are important determinants of academic achievement’ (Edmonds, 1982: 4). This view is the antithesis of the one widely held in the late 1960s and early 1970s, namely that schools do not make much difference. As Shoemaker and Fraser (1981: 179) point out, disbelief in the efficacy of schools crystallised in 1966 with the publication of the Coleman Report in the USA, which had demonstrated that:

home environment variables were the most important in explaining the variance in achievement levels for all racial and regional groups, and school facilities and curriculum were the least important variables.

So what caused the change in attitude in the period between Coleman and Edmonds?

From the early 1960s investigation after investigation came up with the same result, that a student’s progress at school, his or her success in academic study, is overwhelmingly more dependent on home background than on what the school does for the students. As far back as 1959, the UK Crowther Report had shown the close association between a father’s occupation and the educational achievement of his children.

The Robbins Report in 1962, an investigation into the need for places in higher education in Great Britain, took the group of men and women who turned 21 in 1962 and classified them according to characteristics of their parents. Of those whose fathers left school before they turned 16, only 5 per cent went on to higher education; of those whose fathers studied beyond the age of 18, 57 per cent went on to higher education. Put another way, if that cohort is divided according to the occupation of their fathers, 45 per cent of those with fathers in the well-paid professions (doctors, lawyers, senior civil servants) went on to higher education, whereas of those whose fathers were in semi-skilled or unskilled jobs, only 2 per cent went on to higher education (Rob-bins Report, 1963: 49–54). On the basis of the socio-economic status of the parents, you can predict what the student’s school record will be like.

But the most impressive documentation of this thesis resulted from the American study headed by Professor James Coleman, and conducted in the USA in the mid–1960s. It was one of the most comprehensive student surveys ever attempted, covering thousands of children from every part of the nation. The Coleman Report (entitled Equality of Educational Opportunity) caused immediate argument around the world when it was published in 1966, for its most controversial finding was ‘that schools bring little influence to bear upon a child’s achievement that is independent of his background and general social context’ (Coleman, 1966: 325).

The follow-up study by Christopher Jencks (1972) reaffirmed the same result and sparked off a similar public debate. The two reports, to quote Kerensky’s summary, seemed to prove that:

the school is a much smaller part of a child’s total education than most teachers and parents have assumed … What the child brings to school is more important than what happens in the classroom in determining the kind of person he will become (Kerensky, 1975: 44).

Australian evidence made the same kind of point. For example, in the 1960s and 1970s a team of researchers from the Centre for Research in Measurement and Evaluation in New South Wales followed a generation of students through their secondary schooling. From interviews with students and their parents, the researchers created an index to give a reading on ‘opinion of schooling’. In only 3 per cent of cases did father and mother have strongly different views about the school and in only 6 per cent of the cases did the student’s opinion vary strongly from the father’s and mother’s; in short, in most homes, mother, father and child all hold the same opinion about the child’s school. About one home in four, across all classes of society, was dissatisfied with schooling. The report stated that ‘the survival patterns of students from satisfied homes are strikingly different from the survival patterns of the dissatisfied students’ (Moore, 1974: 8).

Three-quarters of the students from satisfied homes survived beyond year 10 (age 15/16), yet from the dissatisfied homes, only one half survived to year 10 and only one in six went beyond that level. Thus the parent’s satisfaction with the school appears to be an accurate gauge of how well the student is performing. The Generation Study data could be considered from a second perspective. Define the parents’ satisfaction with their child’s schooling, their socio-economic level, their occupation and so on, feed this in to the computer, and one can predict fairly accurately what does in fact happen to the child, at what year she will drop out of schooling, what her achievement patterns will be up to that point, and what occupation she is likely to pursue.

So The Generation Study researchers concluded:

When home-based educational objectives clash with school-based objectives, the student normally resolves the conflict by rejecting school. The key figures in this whole dynamic social complex are the parents. It is the parents who can accept or reject aims projected into the home from the surrounding environment; it is parents who evolve the family system of values about education; and it is parents who reject or accept school values … It is a most curious paradox that the whole enterprise appears to stand or fall according to the support or opposition of parents – most of whom rarely, if ever, make an appearance on school premises or show any concern or interest in school happenings and affairs. (ibid.: 25)

If it is so demonstrable that home and family backgrounds have such an enormous impact on how well a student performs at school, why have not educators invented more efficient models of teaching and learning which link the two prime movers – the home and the school – in some clearly articulated, reinforcing way?

In fact, there were developments along these lines. The most obvious one to gather impetus from these studies was the movement to create boards or councils which involved parents (or parent representatives) in making the decisions about the school in which their children were enrolled. Across the Western world the powers and membership of school governing bodies were revised and where such bodies did not previously exist there were moves to set them up.

In several of the federal programmes instituted in the United States of America, it was a condition of receiving the grants that a school-site council be set up to help administer the funds. In several of the Australian States and Territories, school councils came into existence or else had their powers extended. And in Great Britain, the Taylor Report (1977) recomrrended important changes to the composition of Boards of Governors and Boards of Managers. In short, education authorities tried to invent formal mechanisms to link school and home in the management of the school.

There was also a concerted attempt to involve parents more fully in the learning programmes for their children. There was a variety of ‘open education’ techniques tried, and a proliferation of open-plan classrooms in which it was relatively easy for parent aides to be used as assistants to the teachers. A new range of assessment and reporting techniques came into play, and more adequate methods for the school to use to advise parents about the educational progress of their children were invented. In the process, of course, the management of schools became so much the more complicated.

Even so, it remains true that the children of the rich tend to go to richly endowed schools, that children whose parents are educated continue to win almost any educational race against those whose parents are uneducated, that children who have fathers in professional occupations crowd the others out of the available university places, that money spent on upper secondary and higher education continues to subsidise the children of the well-to-do and the middle class and that the school which deliberately sets out to serve the children of the uneducated and the poor is not looked upon as an excellent school until it can demonstrate that the children who attend it have made demonstrable gains on normal test scores or in examinations and can compete with students from the more privileged suburbs.

If we needed more evidence, one has only to study some of the effects of the programmes initiated by the Australian Schools Commission since 1972, or to read a book like Connell’s Making the Difference (1982). In short, the Coleman findings have not only stood scrutiny but also constitute a threat to the existing social order, as well as to the schools which serve that society.

But the social order itself was under attack from other quarters too. The period when the efficacy of conventional schooling was being questioned coincided with developments like the war on poverty; the emancipation of women and the feminist movement; civil rights and in particular the rights of minority groups; the so-called new international economic order, and the emergence politically, economically and ideologically of Third World countries; the conservation (‘green’) movement; and, importantly for our purposes, the alternative schools movement, acceptance of lifelong learning in a variety of locations, learning networks, alternative and new curricula and learning programmes, and the rise in influence of people like Paulo Freire and Ivan Illich.

People began to understand that conventional schools may unwittingly – or quite wittingly – reaffirm an unjust social order and notions of class distinctions and privilege, that they can be a means of cultural reproduction and that left to their own devices they will probably produce more of the same. To invent alternatives to the current models for schools can therefore be profoundly disturbing to those who now occupy positions of influence and authority, and threatening to those whom the present system has given preferential treatment, status and improved life chances. So it was almost inevitable that there would be some kind of counter-revolution.

The movement to re-establish the reputation of conventional schooling gathered momentum in the late 1970s. In an article published in the Winter of 1973, Klitgaard and Hall asked whether it was possible to identify ‘unusually effective schools’, for there appeared to be evidence of ‘schools and districts that consistently produced outstanding students, even after socio-economic factors were controlled for’ (Klitgaard and Hall, 1973: 90).

Of particular interest in this study is that neither researcher was an educator; Klitgaard was an economist with the Rand Corporation and Hall was a Deputy Assistant Secretary in the Department of Defence. Yet even to them it was obvious that something was wrong with the research which consistently failed to show that what goes on in schools influences both how and what children learn. They stated what educators know from experience:

Considering the enormous diversity among the nation’s public schools, it would surely be incredible if some were not much better than others. Furthermore, parents and children, administrators and teachers, journalists and taxpayers seem to act as if some schools were unusually effective, (ibid.: 91)

And, of course, it is demonstrable that schools do differ on important points.

Some schools consistently have higher achievement scores, lower dropout rates, more college-bound graduates, wealthier alumni and so forth. But these results cannot be entirely attributed to the schools themselves. Pupils bring different amounts of intellectual capital [hear the economists speaking!] to their educational experiences (ibid.: 91).

Schools can hardly pride themselves on making higher profits than their competitors if they have much more capital to work with in the first place. But of course they do pride themselves on that; everyone wants to be a millionaire, and envies those who are. That is the insistent problem concerning which schools are labelled effective.

Klitgaard and Hall made an important contribution to the debate by stating that researchers should be looking at the exceptions rather than the averages.

Surprisingly little research [they observed] has addressed the question of unusually effective schools. Scholarly analysis has concentrated on the average effects of all school policies on educational outcomes (ibid.: 92–93).

Although stories about successes existed, the analyses dwelt on programmes rather than schools, on averages across the student population rather than on pockets of ‘outliers’ – the students or schools where the unusual, unexpected, extraordinary seemed to be occurring. Might there not be more profit in following up the differences rather than the commonalities? So their article is indicative of the change in attitudes which was occurring in the mid–1970s. More importantly, it is a harbinger for a change in methodology, away from large-scale statistical reviews and towards case studies, towards analyses of exemplars.

Another provocative finding emerged too, for they raised the point that the school may not be the best unit of analysis. Might there not be unusually effective year-levels or individual classes? Might there not be unusually effective teachers? And are there unusually effective regions / districts / areas (or school systems)?

Rutter study

So the late 1970s produced some ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Foreword
• Preface: Why this Book is Necessary
• 1. The Movement to Create Excellent Schools
• 2. Educational Administration Theory Since 1975
• 3. Re-conceptualising the School
• 4. Coming to Terms with Administrative Structures
• 5. Leadership
• 6. A Model for Managing an Excellent School
• 7. Focus on Learning and Teaching
• 8. How to Enhance School Culture
• 9. Performance Indicators and Accountability
• 10. Projecting a Public Image About the School
• 11. Excellent Schools: Putting it All Together
• Bibliography
• Index