The School that Refused to Die: Continuity and Change at Thomas Jefferson High School. - book reviews

Administrative Science Quarterly,  Dec, 1996  by Roslyn Arlin Mickelson

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Over the last four decades, Thomas Jefferson (Tee-Jay) High School has been both an icon of resistance to school integration and a symbol of Richmond, Virginia's best attempts to offer excellent, desegregated public education. Daniel Duke's story of his alma mater covers the high school's struggles to adapt, continue, and survive in the face of the numerous challenges the school encountered during its 60-year history. Neither court-ordered busing, student unrest, white flight, district-sponsored alternative schools, consolidation efforts, budget crises, threats of closure, the institution of magnet programs, nor other reforms and pressures destroyed Tee-Jay. In fact, the school operates today. The book attempts to explain why the organization survived.

This book is an organizational history of Thomas Jefferson High School, a worthy scholarly goal. This approach allows Duke to use the history of the school as a case study to demonstrate how one organization responded to the central challenges of adaptation (represented by school desegregation), continuity (represented by the commitment to excellence in times of shifting demographics and fiscal constraints), and survival in relationship to the competing pressures created by the adaptation and continuity processes. Throughout the decades chronicled in the book, the school consistently responded to challenges by maintaining high academic standards and school order and by involving faculty in leadership roles.

Like Daniel Duke, I taught at my alma mater before leaving secondary teaching for graduate school. My own school and its district are noteworthy for their role in California's early struggle to desegregate its public educational system. Since 1980, my alma mater has faced a unique succession of demographic transformations that have pitted African-Americans against recent Hispanic immigrants for control of the schools. These struggles have been complicated by the fiscal crises wrought by the infamous Proposition 13 and its sequela. I have been tempted to write the story of my school and therefore greatly empathize with Duke's desire to draw on social science to help explain the history of a school to which he has such longstanding ties and for which he holds deep affection.

Unfortunately, his intimate familiarity with Tee-Jay frequently interferes with his social science mission. A good organizational history describes and analyzes how exogenous and endogenous forces interact to produce change. While Duke attempts such an analysis, it falters. He apparently lacks a perspective that is sufficiently detached to let him distinguish between the decisive and the trivial. Instead, the first few chapters often resemble a raw ethnography. For example, in one chapter the author lists service organizations and clubs, revised curricula, progress toward graduation of students from 1946 to 1947 - complete with the percent who graduated on time, a table with the reasons and frequencies for pupil elimination from 1946 to 1963, and career histories of many administrators and teachers: "Mary Maddox came to Tee-Jay in 1939 to teach European History and eventually taught every course in social studies except economics." Readers also learn that Tee-Jay's first principal, Ernest Shawen, grew up on a farm and attended a one-room school house. What is the significance of this information? These factoids contribute little to Duke's argument. They clutter up the first chapters by diverting readers' attention from the broader themes and development of his theoretical arguments.

At the same time, the book's narrative does not pay enough attention to exogenous forces shaping the school's organizational responses to desegregation pressures. Although the school's responses to desegregation frame much of Tee-Jay's organizational history during the last four decades, Duke's discussions of the implementation of desegregation typically focus on endogenous forces. His descriptions are generally about technical matters such as curricular and instructional adjustments to changing student bodies, what administrative personnel did, or vignettes about colorful characters associated with the school during these years. The relative dearth of treatment of the exogenous factors central to the unfolding desegregation saga leaves the reader with a limited sense of its significance to the larger community: What was the nature of the opposition to integration, what were the terms of debates among the stakeholders, what were the political, social, and economic dynamics of school desegregation implementation, and how were compromises crafted? In a book that otherwise painstakingly details the school's internal history, the relative inattention to how desegregation politically and socially was implemented is striking.

Despite these shortcomings, this book can be useful to scholars interested in organizational change, school reform, and both the history and sociology of education. Knowledge about how and why school organizations evolve can contribute to a general understanding of organizational theory. His chapter discussing organizational history research is excellent in this regard.