Age-Grade Structure, Goals, and Compliance in the School

This paper sets forth a model of the school as a social organization within an institutional framework and relates its organizational characteristics to its agegrade structure. Employing Etzioni's concepts of organizational goal and compliance, three hypotheses relating goals, student compliance, and teacher compliance to organizational age-grade structure are developed. A preliminary test of the teacher compliance hypotheses then is offered using a secondary analysis of data gathered in 1960-61 from a national sample of urban elementary, junior, and senior high schools. The responses of 3039 teachers to 14 questionnaire items about the behavior of their principals are examined. The results are supportive of the hypothesis that a strong normative teacher compliance structure in the lower age-grade levels gradually becomes increasingly utilitarian at the higher age-grade levels. Implications of both reasoning and data for the further analysis of schools as social organizations within an institutional framework are considered, with particular emphasis upon how different social class contexts of schools might place conditions upon the relationship of goals and compliance to their age-grade structures

Compliance (psychology) · Mathematics education · Normative · Organizational culture · Organizational structure · Pedagogy · Political science · Public relations · Sample (material) · Social class · Social influence · Sociology of Education · Test (biology) · Parental Involvement in Education · Psychology · Social Psychology · Teacher Education and Leadership Studies

• Education, economy, and society

  Albert Henry Halsey•Education, economy, and society•1961

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