School Culture

Culture represents the organization’s cumulative learning, as reflected in organizational structures, people, administrative processes and the external environment. This tends to perpetuate beliefs and behavior and specifics the goals, values, and mission of the organization and the criteria by which to measure the organization’s success (Lunenburg, Ornstein, Potter, Bulach, et.el., 2000).

Subcultures. Large and complex organizations do not typically manifest single homogeneous beliefs, values, and behavior patterns. In other words, there may be more than one culture in an organization. First, there are differences between the formal culture, which consists of the ideal philosophy of the organization and how organizational members should behave, and the informal culture, which consists of the actual manifold the ideal philosophy in the day to day behavior of organizational members. Second, there are likely to be different cultures in various functional groups in the workplace, such as the divisions of instruction, business, personnel, research, technology, etc.in a large school district. Differences between students, teachers, and administrative groups and differences between elementary, middle school and high school levels. Put another way, whenever the task requirements have resulted in a unique combination of people, structures, and function, the requirement to fulfill the group’s goals will result in a unique culture (Kotter, 1992, Lunenburg and Ornstein, 2000).

Dominant Culture. Besides the subcultures that exist in an organization, the larger organization may also have a culture that distinguishes it from other large systems. For example, one large school district highly favored innovation. The philosophy translated itself into a variety of practices including advisor programs, report card conferences, use of speaker bureaus, collaboration with business firms, and internships. It resulted in values that emphasized good interpersonal relations among students and teachers, teachers and administrators, teachers and parents, and school and the community.

Thus, central office administrators created policies and made decisions that perpetuated the overall school district’s philosophy of innovation. Most key administrators portrayed the same image. They demonstrated excellence interpersonal and verbal skills and strived to be accessible to students, teachers, parents, and the community. They spent a portion of their time cultivating relations with the business and civic community. This example shows that even large and relatively heterogeneous school districts that are known to have dominant culture can improve their educational goals (Lunenburg and Ornstein, 2000, Deal and Peterson, 1998).

Written by Les Potter, Ed.D.

Les Potter is a retired educator with 35 years in US K-12 education (28 years in administration), 10 years in higher education and 8+ years in international education. Currently, Les is working as consultant and living in Cairo Egypt. He may reached at: [email protected]