How power really works in schools

The complex nature of power and influence means that no one is entirely without power over what happens in schools.

Power in schools is often assumed to flow only downhill, from more powerful positions (such as superintendent or principal) to less powerful positions (such as teacher or student). But as I’ve discovered through my own research — a qualitative study that I’ve conducted over the last eight years at a public middle school in south Texas — power also flows uphill and sideways. Or, better yet, it doesn’t really “flow” at all. To understand how power actually functions in schools, it’s important to recognize that power isn’t a thing, or a substance, at all; it comes from everywhere; and it operates more like a web than a river. Further, rethinking our assumptions about power can have practical implications for teaching, learning, school leadership, and educational research.

Power is not a thing

It may seem to go without saying that different positions in schools entail differing amounts of power. So, for instance, a principal has more power than a teacher, and a teacher has more power than a student. As a result, the thinking goes, people in more powerful positions can impose their will on people in less powerful positions. Sometimes this thinking is even applied to inanimate objects, such as standardized tests, which are often characterized as having power over teaching and administrative practices. However, as the philosopher Michel Foucault (2000) once argued, “Power is not a substance” (p. 324), meaning that it “is not something that is acquired, seized, or shared, something that one holds on to or allows to slip away” (Foucault, 1978, p. 94).

I saw this for myself in my own research at Connors Middle School (all names in this article are pseudonyms), when studying how gifted and talented (GT) students in two 8th-grade social studies classes interpreted the meaning of the GT label (Meadows & Neumann, 2017). At Connors, students identified as gifted and talented take separate classes from their peers, and, as at most schools, Connors students are given no input into the official meaning of the GT label. Researchers and educators determine official and operative definitions of the label and apply those definitions to students. Thus, it would seem that students are powerless to challenge or rethink their own identity in school. And officially, they are. But practically, they are not.

In the classrooms that a colleague and I observed, no conversations ever took place about what it meant to be “gifted and talented”— for example, does being labeled GT suggest that these students are smarter than others, more studious, or more disciplined? Does it mean that they’re more deserving of the best teachers and learning opportunities? Does it mean that other students are not gifted or talented? Rather than trying to establish a shared definition of GT, or to bring it up for discussion at all, teachers simply went ahead and used the label, implying that everybody already knew what it meant. And because no students ever raised the issue in class, my colleague and I could easily have assumed that GT was in fact a settled term, one that everybody understood the same way.

However, when we interviewed students outside of the classroom, we found that the students actually held shifting and sometimes contradictory understandings of the GT label. Their views often conflicted not only with how the label was used in their social studies classroom but also with much of the research literature in this area. For example, the research on giftedness views giftedness either as a trait (something intrinsic within students) or in terms of academic performance (implying a volitional choice by students) (e.g., Kerr, Colangelo, & Gaeth, 1988). Additionally, giftedness researchers claim that GT students either accept or reject the GT label (e.g., Coleman & Cross, 1988; Robinson, 1990). Our study, in contrast, showed that GT students think of giftedness as both a trait and in terms of performance (in other words, as something both intrinsic and volitional), as well as both accept and reject aspects of the GT label.

Administrators, teachers, and students all have the capacity to exert power.

In short, the power to define the GT label was not a “thing” that was owned by the school district and denied to the students. Rather, the school district, the teachers, and the students were all able to exercise power in different ways over the meaning of the label. Why does this informal power matter? In this case, it led us to wonder how trustworthy research findings about students’ perceptions of the GT label could be if students were not able to express those complicated thoughts. It was essential for us to understand that power over others’ perception of the GT label was not something any one entity could possess.

Power comes from everywhere

Another misconception about power is that it operates linearly — and usually hierarchically. Teachers, for example, often feel that powerful people and interests are imposing upon them, especially with regards to standardized testing or school district scope-and-sequence plans. However, as we saw in the definition of the GT label, administrators, teachers, and students all have the capacity to exert power. As Foucault (1978) explains, “power is everywhere, not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere” (p. 93).

Of course, the nature of the power each person exerts varies, since the relationships between and among administrators, teachers, and students vary, and power is enacted and contained within those relationships. But no one is all-powerful and no one is entirely powerless. As Carrie Freie and Karen Eppley (2014) put it, “Power is not concentrated among decision makers, [and] resistance is not concentrated among rabble-rousers” (p. 656).

For example, school districts often give teachers a scope-and-sequence plan that outlines their teaching for a school year, and thus, the school appears to exercise power over teachers’ work. Yet teachers also have power over their teaching. Sometimes they exert it in small ways, such as through the selection of materials, and other times they exercise more power, such as by revising the scope and sequence, as did Mary Watson, a 6th-grade social studies teacher at Connors (Neumann, 2016). The district’s scope and sequence for Mary’s World Cultures course prescribed separate two-week units on North America and government, followed by one week on Central America and then two more weeks on South America, but Mary felt strongly that this plan did not benefit her students’ learning. She told me that the district scope and sequence was giving teachers “a million two-week units” arranged in an order that didn’t make sense:

All of that, can you imagine for 6th graders? Going from North America, and they barely remember that we have 50 states — you saw today how much they remember about the three branches of government. So I’m supposed to go from that and please have them compare at a higher level of thinking [softly laughs] our government with other forms of government?

Instead, Mary combined the North America and government units into one larger unit and combined the Central and South America units into a unit on Latin America. In each of these new units, she changed the scope of the content to first present a historical context through which students could then examine current conditions.

In this example, power acted on Mary’s teaching from multiple directions. The state of Texas influenced it by prescribing the overall subject matter for 6th-grade social studies. The school district influenced it by forming a scope and sequence for that content. And Mary shaped it by revising and fine-tuning that curriculum plan.

Power operates like a web

So we know that power is not a single, fixed thing that only certain people can possess, and we know that it moves in multiple directions at once and not just in linear fashion. Thus, instead of describing it as something that flows, like a river, it’s more helpful to think of power relations as forming a web. And as various people within a social, professional, or other kind of network exert power on each other, they all help to spin that web, making the connections more “dense,” as Foucault (1978) observed, noting that power relations are “produced from one moment to the next, at every point, or rather in every relation from one point to another” (p. 93).

This image of a web helps us better understand the factors that influence teachers’ work. Many researchers have studied how various phenomena — such as standardized testing (Faulkner & Cook, 2006; Smith, 1991; Vogler & Virtue, 2007), teachers’ milieu (Ballet & Kelchtermans, 2009; Easthope & Easthope, 2000; Valli & Buese, 2007), and teachers’ knowledge and beliefs (Cimbricz, 2002; Grant, 2001) — influence teachers’ work. While these isolated studies have contributed important insights into teachers’ work, they have also offered incomplete conclusions.

For instance, some researchers have claimed that standardized testing creates “multiple-choice” (Smith, 1991) and “just the facts, ma’am” (Vogler & Virtue, 2007) approaches to teaching social studies. However, such claims do not account for the combined influence of multiple factors that appear on the “web of influence.” That became evident, for example, when I examined the factors that influenced four social studies teachers’ work over a span of six years (Neumann, 2016).

Instead of describing power as something that flows, like a river, it’s more helpful to think of power relations as forming a web.

Connors had long enjoyed a reputation of success in the city and school district. Then, in 2011-12, the state of Texas changed the passing requirements for English language arts (ELA) and mathematics, and Connors did not achieve Adequate Yearly Progress in those two areas. In response, the school district implemented a variety of changes in the hopes of increasing the test scores. Administrators increased the pace of the district scope and sequence for all subjects, not just ELA and math, so that the social studies teachers had to move more quickly through their course content. Administrators then held teachers accountable to that new pace through benchmark exams that aligned with the new scope and sequence. Teachers who fell behind usually scored badly on the benchmarks. Those benchmark exams, combined with the practice tests the school district gave the students, as well as the real accountability exams, substantially shrunk teachers’ instructional time with students. Margaret Rhodes, a 35-year teaching veteran, explained the effect those changes had on her teaching: “The test doesn’t impact what I teach, but it does impact how I teach it. I have a wealth of training and materials, and sometimes I’ll think, can’t do that this year, not enough time.”

School administrators also implemented a homework initiative, which required teachers to perform intensive monitoring and remediation for students who consistently did not turn in homework, and instructional rounds, which required teachers to observe their colleagues teach and complete paperwork documenting the experiences. Mary Watson, who had been teaching for 25 years, lamented the effect that rounds had on her work:

I just feel stretched and pulled. That and go evaluate my peers? I work with great people and I see some neat teaching techniques. But then [I have to] do paperwork on that, too, and turn it in? I feel like all of our new technology and all of our new ideas are not time-saving, and I don’t know how much they’re improving my instruction for the kids.

These weren’t the only changes to the teachers’ milieu: Connors also became an International Baccalaureate (IB) school, which meant teachers had to alter lesson plans to fit with IB protocols, coordinate between the district scope and sequence and the IB curriculum plan, and reconcile the district grading policy with IB grading requirements. In addition, the school district gave iPads to all students and teachers and mandated that teachers use those iPads in their teaching, meaning that teachers had to spend time learning how to use the iPads and incorporate them into their instruction.

Not all influences on the teachers’ working lives were external. Their own knowledge and beliefs also played a role, as was the case for Bill Trammel. Throughout his first eight years of teaching, most of Bill’s teaching practices would have been considered teacher-centered, such as lecturing, having students read the textbook in class, and answering review questions. However, during the study, Bill began shifting toward more student-centered methods, such as projects and cooperative learning, that had previously been a smaller part of his practice. This new emphasis, based on his beliefs about how to promote deeper thinking, changed how he approached his planning:

I didn’t do CSCOPE [the district scope and sequence]. I looked at the exemplary lessons; I looked at the year at a glance; and I said these are the objectives I need to teach, but I’ll do it my own way. I wrote all new lessons. I wrote all new objectives.

All of these various influences — standardized testing, the teachers’ milieu, and the teachers’ knowledge and beliefs — operated on the teachers’ work simultaneously. The image of a web helps us to visualize how these different influences tugged at the teachers and at each other. The web also helps us to see how difficult — and I believe inaccurate — it is to separate out the effects that any one point on the web had on the teachers’ work.

Implications

Some practical implications follow from the understanding that power is not a fixed substance, that it is multidirectional, and that it is caught up in a web of relations. For one, it suggests that students and teachers are never powerless, no matter how powerful other forces seem to be. Students always exert power, whether directly or tacitly, in ways that shape their learning environments and even distort the findings of researchers. And teachers exert power over their teaching even in the face of intense testing demands or burdensome school initiatives.

Further, if school administrators recognize that everybody in the school community is bound together in a web of power relations, then it should become obvious to them that no initiative or program ever gets to start with a blank slate. As soon as a program has been introduced, it has already begun pulling on the countless invisible threads that connect all of the people in and around the building. Thus, administrators should think very carefully about the many and often surprising ways in which an initiative meant to change one part of the organization can affect, and be affected by, another part. Actions always have unforeseen consequences, but at least administrators can try to assess how their decisions might ripple across the school’s network of personal and professional relationships, potentially creating as many problems as they solve.

Finally, the more education researchers do to understand the complex ways in which power operates in classrooms, schools, and districts, the more success they will have in capturing the nuances of educational practice. As we investigate power in schools, let’s not focus so intently on particulars that we lose sight of the bigger picture. A richer understanding of power and influence gives us clearer insights into teaching, learning, and life in schools.

References

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Cimbricz, S. (2002). State-mandated testing and teachers’ beliefs and practices. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 10 (2).

Coleman, L.J. & Cross, T. (1988). Is being gifted a social handicap? Journal for the Education of the Gifted, 11, 41-56.

Easthope, C. & Easthope, G. (2000). Intensification, extension, and complexity of teachers’ workload. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 21 (1), 43-58.

Faulkner, S.A. & Cook, C.M. (2006). Testing v. teaching: The perceived impact of assessment demands on middle grades instructional practices. Research in Middle Level Education Online, 29 (7), 1-13.

Foucault, M. (1978). The history of sexuality: Volume I. New York: Vintage Books.

Foucault, M. (2000). Power. J.D. Faubion (Ed.). New York: The New Press.

Freie, C. & Eppley, K. (2014). Putting Foucault to work: Understanding power in a rural school. Peabody Journal of Education, 89 (5), 652-669.

Grant, S.G. (2001). An uncertain lever: Exploring the influence of state-level testing in New York State on teaching social studies. Teachers College Record, 103 (3), 398-426.

Kerr, B., Colangelo, N., & Gaeth, J. (1988). Gifted adolescents’ attitudes toward their giftedness. Gifted Child Quarterly, 32 (2), 245-247.

Meadows, B. & Neumann, J.W. (2017). What does it mean to assess gifted students’ perceptions of giftedness labels? Interchange, 48, 145-165.

Neumann, J.W. (2016). Examining mandated testing, teachers’ milieu, and teachers’ knowledge and beliefs: Gaining a fuller understanding of the web of influence on teachers’ classroom practices. Teachers College Record, 118 (2), 1-50.

Robinson, A. (1990). Does that describe me? Adolescents’ acceptance of the gifted label. Journal for the Education of the Gifted, 13, 245-255.

Smith, M.L. (1991). Put to the test: The effects of external testing on teachers. Educational Researcher, 20 (5), 8-11.

Valli, L. & Buese, D. (2007). The changing roles of teachers in an era of high-stakes accountability. American Educational Research Journal, 44 (3), 519-558.

Vogler, K.E. & Virtue, D. (2007). “Just the facts, ma’am”: Teaching social studies in the era of standards and high-stakes testing. The Social Studies, 98 (2), 54-58.