[Author’s Name]
[Institution’s Name]
Essay on Bureaucracy and School Systems
James Q. Wilson describes organizational culture as a "...patterned way of thinking about the central tasks of and human relations within an organization."(Wilson, 1991) Culture, as Wilson identifies it, involves task fulfillment and human relations and how they mesh together to form a cohesive entity where an organization's employees share in the accomplishment of its mission. (Wilson, 1991)
In 1966, virtually none of the obvious differences among schools--pupil-teacher ratios, per-pupil expenditures, the age and quality of physical facilities, the number of books in the library--explained differences in educational attainment. How much students learned seemed to be associated almost entirely with their family backgrounds and the backgrounds of their peers. The inputs into schools--for example, money--did not have much effect on the outputs of those schools.
But in this matter there is another sort of received opinion: the opinion of typical parents. Millions of American families decided where to live partly on the basis of the quality of the schools available to their children in various neighborhoods and suburbs. And having chosen a home, many of those parents promptly joined PTAs, lobbied school boards, and argued with principals, all with an eye toward improving school quality. Were these parents ignoramuses who needed only to read a 737-page government report, together with its 548-page statistical appendix, to learn the error of their ways? And having read these documents, would they have been well-advised to ignore schools in choosing a neighborhood and watch television instead of going to PTA meetings?
Schools differ in quality, but the quality differences cannot be measured in terms of objective characteristics. The problem facing social scientists was to observe the intangible characteristics of schools. This meant, alas, trying to measure the unmeasurable (or at least the very hard to measure). To accomplish..........
