Authors: Richard M. Ingersoll
ISBN-13: 9780674019904, ISBN-10: 0674019903
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Date Published: March 2006
Edition: 1st Edition
Richard M. Ingersoll is Professor of Education and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania.
Schools are places of learning but they are also workplaces, and teachers are employees. As such, are teachers more akin to professionals or to factory workers in the amount of control they have over their work? And what difference does it make?
Drawing on large national surveys as well as wide-ranging interviews with high school teachers and administrators, Richard Ingersoll reveals the shortcomings in the two opposing viewpoints that dominate thought on this subject: that schools are too decentralized and lack adequate control and accountability; and that schools are too centralized, giving teachers too little autonomy. Both views, he shows, overlook one of the most important parts of teachers' work: schools are not simply organizations engineered to deliver academic instruction to students, as measured by test scores; schools and teachers also play a large part in the social and behavioral development of our children. As a result, both views overlook the power of implicit social controls in schools that are virtually invisible to outsiders but keenly felt by insiders. Given these blind spots, this book demonstrates that reforms from either camp begin with inaccurate premises about how schools work and so are bound not only to fail, but to exacerbate the problems they propose to solve.
Ingersoll offers a significant contribution in theory, and he manages to answer questions about the distribution of power and control in schools in the United States.
List of Tables and Figures | ||
1 | Introduction | 1 |
2 | The Debate over Control | 29 |
3 | Teachers and Decision Making in Schools | 66 |
4 | Rules for Teachers | 96 |
5 | The Teacher in the Middle | 136 |
6 | The Effects of Teacher Control | 190 |
7 | Conclusion | 217 |
Appendix | 251 | |
Notes | 277 | |
References | 309 | |
Index | 337 |