More Than Metaphor: What We Miss in the Charge to “Change the Grammar of Schooling” by Dr. Ebony N. Bridwell-Mitchell

Note: This article is written as a rejoinder to Mehta and Datnow’s August 2020 article, “Changing the Grammar of Schooling: An Appraisal and a Research Agenda,” published in Vol. 126, No. 4 of the American Journal of Education. You can find that article here: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/709960

“Finally, thank goodness!”, I thought to myself when I saw Mehta and Datnow’s (2020) editorial introduction to AJE’s recent special issue, Changing the Grammar of Schooling.  As I read, I applauded with vim their important call for a research agenda reexamining the fundamental ways schools are organized in order to better understand how “innovations develop and sustain over time” and to “promote positive youth development and learning” (p. 491-92). At the same time, I found myself having an equally vigorous reaction to what appeared to be a distinct oversight in the research agenda being set.

Mehta and Datnow (2020) articulate an undeniably important research agenda for reimagining research in the field. At the same time, they notably overlook the considerably large and still growing body of research on institutions and institutional change. This oversight is unfortunate since the focus of Tyack and Tobin’s (1994) seminal article, The Grammar of Schooling, was the role and impact of “institutional forms”. Overlooking research on institutions and how institutions change seems a missed opportunity to encourage the kind of generative thinking and novel research approaches needed to understand and promote more widespread school reform.

While there are many definitions for what an institution is, said succinctly, an institution can be defined as a stable, legitimated system of beliefs, values, practices, and structures (Bridwell-Mitchell, 2018; Scott, 2008; Selznick, 1948). Institutions often are instantiated by organizations but not always; think, for example, about the institutions of marriage, democracy, or capitalism.  Ultimately, an institutional analysis of organizations calls researchers to look beyond espoused beliefs, conventional practice, standard roles, prescribed structures, and ubiquitous policies. The aim instead is to examine the broader patterns connecting individuals and organizations across social contexts and time periods that constrain but also enable work and outcomes in organizations. Hence, institutional analysis offers an expansive approach for understanding the promulgation, persistence, and possible change in beliefs, practices, and structures in school organizations and in education, more broadly (Meyer, 1977).

Therefore, in this essay, I offer a friendly amendment to the research agenda set out by Mehta and Datnow (2020). I have two main aims. One is to further elucidate some of the key ideas in Tyack and Tobin’s (1994) original article. The second is to point out the utility and importance of leveraging research on institutions and institutional change if we hope to bring about the kind of bold reimagining of the grammar of schooling so many of us seek.

Rhetoric and Reasoning in The Grammar of Schooling

Although Tyack and Tobin (1994) focus on institutional forms and the processes by which institutions operate, the institutional aspect of their argument often is overlooked for reasons others have noted. Namely, there can be great power and great danger in using metaphor and metonymy to characterize educational phenomena: “the former creates conditions of applicability between concepts, while the latter allows one thing to stand in for another, effectively subsuming meaning altogether” (Kupferman 2018, 906). This subsuming of meaning is one ill effect of Tyack and Tobin’s (1994) evocative use of the phrase “the grammar of schooling” since the phrase rather than the core argument to which it refers tends to be much more readily taken up. Yet, as Tyack and Tobin (1994) articulated, one of their aims in examining the graded school and Carnegie units, as well as three attempted reforms, was to consider how “enduring institutional forms” establish “regular structures and rules that organize the work of instruction and schools” (p. 453-454).

Even with the brilliance of Tyack and Tobin’s (1994) insights, including the use of a rhetorical device that makes otherwise abstract concepts more concrete and approachable, some blame for the selective application of their ideas must be attributed to the authors themselves. After all, in their thirty-five uses of the term institution and its variants – institutional forms, institutional arrangements, institutional patterns, institutionalized organization – the authors never provide a specific definition for what they mean by “institution”. Thus, most readers might read the terms to simply mean the forms, arrangements, and patterns particular to an institution, of which public schools are, of course, one example.

However, these phrases referring to institutions were, in fact, terms of art drawing on a specific set of concepts core to the lineage of institutional analysis. Indeed, Tyack and Tobin (1994) do not simply allude to ideas from institutional analysis but specifically refer readers to them in a lengthy footnote. This includes references to the seminal essays by Meyer and Rowan (1977) on Institutionalized Organizations and by DiMaggio and Powell (1983) on Institutional Isomorphism. Hence, in speaking of “the grammar of schooling”, Tyack and Tobin (1994) and later, Tyack in his book with Cuban (1997), were referring to the fundamental processes by which institutions operate, the study of which has long been the main focus of researchers undertaking an institutional analysis of organizations.

The Precepts and Power of Institutional Analysis

Institutional analysis gained prominence with sociologist’s Philip Selznick’s (1957) publication of Leadership in Administration, which offered a contrasting perspective to organizational research of the time, which focused on technical functions and economic efficiencies.  Instead, Selznick (1948, 1957) highlighted the central role of people’s values, their social and historical contexts, as well as the power dynamics and ideological conflicts that can arise. Such dynamics resulted, Selznick argued, in a distinctive character of some organizations, making them not merely organizations but institutions in that beliefs, practices, and structures in organizations were “infuse[d] with value beyond the technical requirements of the task at hand (Selznick 1957, 17).” 

Selznick’s foundational viewpoint became imprinted on later approaches to institutional analysis (Selznick 1996). Yet, later approaches also emphasized how institutions were not only undergirded by the normative values of particular social groups but also by deeply ingrained cultural-cognitive schema and scripts as well as tangible rules, regulations and resource allocations serving particular interests (Scott 2008). Hence, institutional analysis asks researchers to question taken-for-granted explanations about how organizations operate and tries to illuminate the broader social and historical patterns providing an alternative explanation.

Think, for example, about how in most K-12 U.S. public schools there continues to be an agrarian-oriented school calendar, age-graded classrooms, teacher-centered instruction, disciplinary policies enacting race-based privilege and discrimination, siloed district offices with centralized, top-down decision making, and school-funding formulas tied to property values.  These practices and structures do not persist because they are especially good ways of accomplishing the outcomes we want from schools – some accomplish exactly opposite. The practices and structures persist because of a historical legacy, which has imbued them with special value – given particular cultural schema, social identities, and group and individual interests. Hence, such practices and structures persist, with their stated functions most often going unquestioned and their outcomes divorced from or in direct opposition to what we most desire for students and schools. Institutional analysis sheds light on the underlying process and patterns producing this paradoxical result.

Moving Beyond Structure to Action and Intervention

Unfortunately, in addition to obscuring the importance of institutional analysis, there is at least one other unanticipated consequence of Tyack and Tobin’s (1994) article being the most accessible entry point for institutional analysis in education research. Namely, the article gives the impression that institutional analysis is used only to study organizational structures, which is a consequence of the article being anchored in a very particular era of institutional analysis research. When The Grammar of Schooling was written, institutional analysis research focused primarily on how organization structures, such as personnel roles, programs, departments, and policies, diffused widely across numerous organizations in a field due to pressures to gain and maintain legitimacy from stakeholders in external environments (Meyer and Rowan 1977; DiMaggio and Powell 1983; Rowan 1982).  One consequence is that the ceremonial adoption of structures is decoupled – one of the most well-recognized constructs from institutional analysis – from work at the technical core (Meyer and Rowan 1977; Weick 1976). One example is how schools might adopt new curriculum standards, scheduling practices, or staff positions but teaching and learning in the instructional core remains largely unchanged.

Understanding why some organizational structures diffuse widely and others do not is essential to understanding the challenges of school reform. Why, for example, might reforms, such as teacher evaluation, the Common Core, or continuous improvement have been taken up so readily in so many schools and districts? Meanwhile, why do other initiatives to improve schools, such as increasing teacher pay, adopting culturally relevant curriculum, or changing school start times face much more resistance? Answering such questions is, of course, partly why Tobin and Tyack (1994) and other researchers adopt institutional analysis to understand school structures. Indeed, while the institutional analysis tradition is less prevalent in education research than in other fields, there is a notable body of education research leveraging the lens (i.e., Burch 2007; Coburn 2004; Rowan and Miskel 1999; Bidwell 2006; Chubb and Moe 2000), including work collected in a 2006 edited volume by Meyer and Rowan (2006).

Importantly, however, questions about structure, isomorphism, and field level dynamics are not the only ones or even still the main ones of interest for institutional analysis. Much current institutional analysis research focuses on beliefs and practices inside organizations, on patterned variation and change in fields, and on the role of individuals and agency in institutional change. This alternative focus for institutional analysis illuminates the actors, actions, and interactions, which maintain, disrupt, or create new institutions – sometimes intentionally but just as often incidentally. So, rather than focusing on organizational structures as a static end result of institutional processes, more recent institutional analysis research sheds light on how particular actors, actions, and interactions can be potential intervention points in institutional processes.

Research in this newer institutional analysis tradition – which some might argue is, in fact, a return to the earliest tradition established by Selznick (1948,1957,1996) and his focus on people, power, and conflict – includes a diverse set of conceptual and empirical tools for studying schools. This includes research on institutional complexity, institutional logics, inhabited institutionalism, institutional agency and work, and, as chronicled in a recent special issue of The Peabody Journal of Education, research on the micro-foundations of institutions (Hallett 2010; Russell 2010; Bridwell-Mitchell and Sherer 2017; Woulfin and Weiner 2019; Rigby 2014; Bridwell-Mitchell 2015; Crowson and Deal 2020; Davies and Quirke 2007). Indeed, one article by Marsh and colleagues (Marsh et al. 2020) in the AJE special issue on Changing the Grammar of Schooling provides an illustrative example of how an analysis through the lens of institutional logics reveals nuances in just how much the organizational characteristics of schools and districts can be expected to change.

The Road Less Traveled

So, as we embark on Mehta and Datnow’s (2020) research agenda rightly calling into question the fundamental grammar of schooling, I argue that our journey would be greatly aided by relying on a readily available map provided by research on institutions and institutional change.  Having a map does not mean that there are no new important discoveries to be made, no new avenues to be explored or paths to be paved. Having a map means being able to orient oneself in otherwise uncharted territory with the possibility of reaching one’s destination more surely and more successfully. Tyack and Tobin’s (1994) original essay provided one institutionally oriented compass point showing the way forward. It is up to us not to make the map anew but to bring all its contours into starker relief.

Ebony N. Bridwell-Mitchell is an Associate Professor of Education at Harvard University. She studies how organizational dynamics and institutional conditions inhibit or enable the implementation of U.S. education reform policies. Her academic and professional interests in education, organizations, and public policy are an extension of her desire to encourage human development, public value, and social equity through the systemic reform of American institutions.

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