The diversity of school organizational configurations

Abstract

School reform on a large scale has largely been unsuccessful. Approaches designed to document and understand the variety of organizational conditions that comprise our school systems are needed so that reforms can be tailored and results scaled. Therefore, this article develops a configurational framework that allows a systematic analysis of many school organizational forms. The approach is adapted from the logic of Charles Ragin's comparative method and qualitative comparative analysis; it allows researchers to analyse many schools while still preserving them as holistic entities. Each school is depicted as a particular constellation of coordination and control elements, and these configurations are linked to important instructional patterns. To demonstrate the approach, data on the elementary schools in the Chicago Public School (CPS) system are analysed. The distribution of the different configurations that comprise CPS is documented, and multiple regressions of the configurations indicate their varied instructional patterns. The results show that CPS schools exhibit a wide variety of organizational configurations, and these different configurations vary in patterned ways with respect to instructional coherence and academic achievement. Implications for tailoring reform efforts to distinct groups of schools so that results can be scaled are discussed.

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