The Classroom as a Sanctuary for Teachers: Discontinuities in Social Control¹

The article develops the thesis that the classroom provides teachers a sanctuary from effective social control by the broader culture. Social control processes discussed are (1) formal organizational procedures for evaluating teacher classroom performance, and (2) both formalized and unstructured interventions by parents in the life of the school and the domain of the individual teacher's classroom. The thesis is developed through a comparative analysis of data from field studies of two elementary schools: one in Germany, the second in the United States.