Organizational Design in High Schools: A Multilevel Analysis

Advocates of school "restructuring" argue that organizational design features such as teacher involvement in decision making, staff collaboration, and supportive leadership by school administrators can enhance the effectiveness of secondary schools. Little is known, however, about the contextual and organizational conditions that support implementation of these "organic" design features in schools. This article investigates this issue. Following past research on the social organization of schools, we aggregate the perceptions of teachers within schools to form school-level measures of organic design features. The article then investigates the psychometric properties of these measures and tests various propositions about factors that affect their implementation in high schools. The results show that school-to-school differences in organic design features are strongly related to the public or private status of high schools. But the results also show that there is much within-school variance in perceptions of school organizational design, with teachers in different academic departments and curriculum tracks, as well as teachers with different social backgrounds, having varying perceptions of the structure of the schools in which they work. The implications of these findings for research on school organization and for debates about school restructuring are discussed.