Coupling and Control in Educational Organizations

Abstract

The data used in this study were collected under a grant from the Spencer Foundation to Rebecca Barr and Robert Dreeben. Analyses were supported in part by the Graduate School at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. The authors are grateful for valuable advice from Rebecca Barr, Charles Bidwell, and the ASQ editors and referees. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, August 1985. Recent evidence suggests that the policies and practices of school systems are loosely structured and weakly controlled. This paper attempts to discover the mechanisms that coordinate school systems despite their structural looseness. The authors argue that by regulating the flow of resources from the district to the school and classroom, administrators influence the content of instruction as well as student Three resources are examined for their effects on the teaching and learning of reading in first grade: the allocation of time, the provision of curricular materials, and the array of students found in schools and classrooms. The analysis indicates that on the average, reading instruction in small groups is constrained by the regulation of these three resources. For students in highlevel ability groups, curricular materials play a particularly important role. Administrative decisions on resource allocations constrain teachers' use of resources, which in turn has an impact on student learning.