Introduction

"A school is a complex organism. It is not just a building with people inside."

This paper examines the literature regarding the contextual factors that might support or block efforts to improve schools and their effectiveness for all students. Its purpose is to provide practitioners with useful information for implementing lasting change. Of particular interest are those factors of the school context that support changes aimed at improving schooling for at-risk students. The number of at-risk students continues to increase, presenting an increasing challenge to educators. Contextual factors such as attitudes toward at-risk students are particularly important for change efforts because attitudes influence actions. In addition, because at-risk students seem to be especially sensitive to the school context, contextual factors may influence changes aimed at improving schooling for at-risk students more than change in general.

A school is a complex organism. It is not just a building with people inside. To change schools it is necessary to consider the effects of change on all the parts of the organism. Each part is dependent upon the other parts and all parts react to changes in any other part. In addition, as Sarason (1990) notes, a school is part of a larger "system," and there are boundaries of varying strength and permeability, although fuzzy ones at best, between these parts. "[T]rying to change any part of the system requires knowledge and understanding of how parts are interrelated" (Sarason, 1990, p. 15).

The school is the unit of analysis for this synthesis because as Krueger and Parish (1982) note, research supports the idea that change efforts need to focus at the school level. The need for leadership in change efforts is well documented at the school level. The need for leadership in change efforts is well documented at the school level.

This paper is one of a series of three interrelated syntheses developed by the Southwest Educational Development Laboratory, all of them focused on factors that influence how school leaders successfully implement changes intended to benefit students, especially students at risk. The need for successful leadership strategies to implement change is discussed by Hord (1992) in one of these papers. The experiences and background characteristics of leaders that may facilitate or impede change are examined by Méndez-Morse (1992) in the third paper of this series.

It is the purpose of this paper to examine the context in which leaders find themselves as they engage in school improvement efforts. This method of examining change finds its roots in the cultural approach to school improvement, which suggests that "teachers and students are strongly influenced by the culture of the school, the mores, routines, and conventions about how things are done in their schools" (Deal & Peterson, 1990, p. 6). Attempts to improve the school using this approach take into account contextual aspects of schooling to assure lasting change. Operational definitions for these and other terms are described below.

Definitions

Certain terms that are used repeatedly in this paper bear defining at the beginning. Because of the many definitions offered for the term climate, that term is not used in this paper, though the reader may identify parts of the paper that seem to address "climate." The term "context" or "contextual factors" is a broad term that gets at the idea of the interrelatedness and interdependence of all facets of the school. Family background, personal characteristics of the child, the school context and the social behavior of children interact to create conditions that place children at risk of failing to achieve their academic potential, dropping out of school, and/or having limits placed on their ability to function as productive adults in society.

At-risk students.
Who are students at risk? Factors such as family background, personal characteristics, school context and school attitude or performance variables have been used to define at-risk status (Barnes, 1989). Richardson, Casanova, Placier, and Guilfoyle's study (1989) of at-risk students proposes that at-risk status is derived from an interaction between the characteristics of the child and the nature of the classroom and school. Family background, personal characteristics of the child, the school context and the social behavior of children interact to create conditions that place children at risk of failing to achieve their academic potential, dropping out of school, and/or having limits placed on their ability to function as productive adults in society.

Traditional research, according to Wehlage and Rutter (1986), has tended to identify characteristics of at-risk students least amenable to change. The focus of new research, they say, might better be directed toward understanding the institutional character of schools and how this affects the potential dropout.

Context.
Not only does this institutional character affect the potential dropout, it also has an impact on school improvement. Corbett, Dawson, and Firestone (1984) point out that "researchers are beginning to turn their attention…to understanding the conditions under which change projects succeed or fail" (p. 1). These conditions, which form the context of school improvement, are of particular importance to successful change. Not only does this institutional character affect the potential dropout, it also has an impact on school improvement.

Several definitions of context may be found in the literature. Taguiri (1968, cited by Smey-Richman, 1991) defines the school context in terms of four dimensions:

• ecology (physical and material aspects)
• milieu (social dimension created by the characteristics of groups of persons)
• culture (social dimension created by belief systems, values, cognitive structures, and meaning)
• social system (social dimension created by the relationships of persons and groups) (p. 2)

The weaving together and interdependence of all the facets of the school create its environment or context. The context of the school is defined by the original Latin term contextere, "to weave together" (Cole & Griffin, 1987). Webster's Third New International Dictionary (1966, p. 492) defines context as "the interrelated conditions in which something exists or occurs." Corbett, Dawson, and Firestone (1984) define context as a set of "local conditions," which include the availability of resources, relationships between persons and groups, use of educational knowledge, norms, in terms of goals and availability of incentives and disincentives, and rate of turnover. These are some of the circumstances surrounding change efforts that may impact that effort.

For the purposes of this paper, context will be viewed as consisting of two dimensions. As shown in Figure 1, the first dimension, the ecology, includes the inorganic elements of the school: those things that, while not living, have an impact on persons in the school. The resources available, policies and rules, and size of the school are examples of this dimension of school context.

Figure 1

Ecology

The second dimension of the school context is the culture. Culture is an expression that tries to capture the informal side of social organizations such as schools. Schein (1985) delineates several meanings of culture that appear in the literature:

• Observed behavioral regularities when people interact, such as the language used and the rituals around deference and demeanor.
• The norms that evolve in working groups, such as the particular norm of "a fair day's work for a fair day's pay" that evolved in the Bank Wiring Room in the Hawthorne studies.
• The dominant values espoused by an organization, such as "product quality" or "price leadership."
• The philosophy that guides an organization's policy toward employees and/or customers.
• The [informal] rules of the game for getting along in the organization, "the ropes" that a newcomer must learn in order to become an accepted member.
• The feeling ...that is conveyed in an organization by the physical layout and the way in which members of the organization interact with customers or other outsiders. (p. 6)

Schein (1985) goes on to define culture as "the deeper level of basic assumptions and beliefs that are shared by members of an organization, that operate unconsciously, and that define in a basic `taken-for-granted' fashion an organization's view of itself and its environment" (p. 6).

Similarly, school culture is defined by Smey-Richman (1991) to mean "the common set of values, beliefs, and practices that act as a social control mechanism directing behavior through institutionalized norms (i.e. informal rules) generally subscribed to by organization participants… By influencing behavior, culture affects productivity or how well teachers teach and how much students learn" (p. 4). School culture is conceptualized to include attitudes and beliefs, cultural norms, and relationships.

For the purposes of this paper, school culture is conceptualized to include the three elements shown in Figure 2: the attitudes and beliefs held by persons both inside and outside the school, particularly attitudes about schooling, change, students, and other persons; the cultural norms of the school, composed of the set of informal, unwritten rules governing behavior in the school and community; and the relationships of persons inside the school, on both an individual and group level. The ways in which teachers relate to other teachers, students and teachers interact, and the relationships between teachers and administrators are examples of this element.

This definition of culture is supported by the research of Hargreaves (1992) in his study of school and teacher cultures. He found that relationships are indeed part of the culture of the school. The personal characteristics and experiences of school leaders also may be thought of as part of the school culture. However, this is the subject of one of the two companion papers to this synthesis paper (Méndez-Morse, 1992) and the reader is referred to that paper to examine the effects of leaders' characteristics on school improvement.

Figure 2

Culture

It should be kept in mind that the interrelatedness and interaction of these elements of culture, along with the ecology of the school, create the context in which school improvement efforts are undertaken. The physical setting created by the school building and school organization interacts with the beliefs, attitudes and values of people. Attitudes and beliefs held by individuals influence the norms and relationships in the school, and, conversely, cultural norms influence attitudes and beliefs. Relationships between persons in the school are influenced by and exert influence on other elements of the school culture. Although this paper looks at these interrelated parts separately for purposes of analysis, it is recognized that these elements do not, in reality, exist as such disparate pieces. It is precisely because of the interrelationships and interrelatedness of elements of the school that context is a factor in change (Sarason, 1990).