Who Controls Teachers' Work: Power and Accountability in America's Schools (review)

Are schools best understood as highly bureaucratic, centralized organizations or are they better understood as decentralized, participatory workplaces? What role does (and should) teachers' control over their work have in either of these structures? In Who Controls Teachers' Work: Power and Accountability in America's Schools, Richard Ingersoll draws on organizational theory to analyze teachers' control over their work within these two different organizational models, each of which is used to support different approaches to school reform. Ingersoll provides us with some new insights into teachers' work in schools, although it may be that in attempting to use and inform organizational theory and address questions about effective approaches for school reform, he has taken on more than is possible in a single volume.

Ingersoll begins, in chapter 2, by describing the two major theoretical and research approaches in organizational theory that explain school structure. Those who use a rational bureaucracy model see schools as disorganized and support school reform that emphasizes greater hierarchy, accountability, and control. Those advocating a decentralization model locate educational problems in centralized regulation and reinforce reforms that call for teacher, principal, community, and parent empowerment. Ingersoll notes here and elsewhere in the book that schools are an anomaly within organizational theory, because definitions of "clients," "products," and "technology" within schools are multiple and contested. His clear presentation and analysis of each approach help us to see how these models have been used both to judge and to reform schools, but there remains the sense that organizational theory and its dichotomous explanations of school structure may, in fact, be a limited lens for analyzing schools. At minimum, organizational theory, as presented by Ingersoll, ignores how gender, race, or class might affect the distribution of power among those who work in schools (administrators, teachers, students, parents). For example, while Ingersoll mentions a few times that women predominate in the teaching force, he does not seriously explore how gender has historically and in the present affected teachers' position and their control over their work within educational systems.

Regardless of the organizational model used, Ingersoll argues, we must examine who controls key decisions in schools and how that control affects the educational process. In chapter 3, Ingersoll turns to data from the Schools and Staffing Survey conducted between 1987 and 1994 by the National Center for Education Statistics; the School Assessment Survey conducted in the 1980s by Research for Better Schools in Philadelphia; the International Survey of the Locus of Decision-Making in Educational Systems conducted in the 1990s; and a field study of four schools in Philadelphia. Ingersoll's use of both quantitative and qualitative data provides him, as he argues, with a comprehensive national and international perspective on issues of decision making and control in a broad range of schools. His analyses in chapters 3, 4, and 5 depend more on the quantitative data (and on a quantitative analysis of the data from his case studies); his fieldwork might be used more effectively to provide examples of the patterns he finds in the data. The data Ingersoll uses is also potentially limited by the dates of the various surveys he uses, given recent changes in educational policy. The feasibility of Ingersoll's ultimate recommendation that school reform should promote greater teacher empowerment is seriously challenged by the standards movement of the last ten years that has culminated in the No Child Left Behind Act.

In chapters 3, 4, and 5 Ingersoll uses his data to describe teachers' control over a variety of decisions in both public and private schools. He finds that, relative to principals and school district administration, teachers have little control over workplace decisions. Although teachers have some control over academic decisions in their classrooms, they tend to have little control over "social issues," defined here to include student discipline practices and tracking. Even teachers' classroom work is controlled in many ways...