Administration, Theories of

The Industrial Revolution produced a growing number of increasingly complex organizations, including schools and school systems. Organizational scholars of the time, most often experienced practitioners, were [Page 24]seeking new and better ways to manage their organizations, focusing especially on the industrial worker. Many of the concepts and principles that were developed within classical organization theory had a lasting influence on organizational thought, essentially to maximize performance to increase production. Administration theory (formal organization theory) was one of three major strands identified within classical organizational theory that included scientific management and bureaucracy.

Within this growing group of organizational theorists, the professional school superintendency evolved as a new administrative position in educational systems only after other approaches failed to administer effectively the growing, complex, urban systems of public education. In the last 20 years of the nineteenth century, as industries were moving toward a model of efficiency and scientific rationality rose in full force to challenge religion, a potpourri of corporate-minded reformers, university professors, and other educators found urban schools inefficient and stuck in corrupt politics. From the factory-like city schools with unwieldy large school boards, these reformers began to professionalize the urban superintendency to the current model of the superintendency of the twentyfirst century schools.

The first movement to have a major impact on professionalizing the superintendency was scientific management, led by Frederick Taylor, credited as the founding father of the movement. Arguing in 1911 that there was much waste and inefficiency in industry, Taylor stressed the need for organizing human beings for work in the most efficient way possible. He emphasized a scientific analysis of each element of the work, job descriptions in terms of recruitment and training of employees, employee appraisal, and a reward system. His principles of management included time and motion studies, price per rate of work, the separation of planning from performance, and the principle of the scientific methods of work to increase efficiency.

Ellwood Cubberley, who was superintendent of schools in San Diego before becoming dean of the School of Education at Stanford University, designed an administrative system for schools. Cubberley took Taylor's methods and devised a new industrial management theory that applied scientific management theory to school leadership, effectively modernizing early twentieth-century school administration. Even then, Cubberley's model was criticized for stressing efficiency and bureaucracy as the answer to multifaceted pedagogical problems. Like those who disagreed with Taylor's methods, critics argued that students were not raw material and that schools were not factories charged with molding students in what amounted to a production process. Today, some consider Cubberley's views to be denigrating to women, non-Americans—his published views on European students were especially harsh, classifying those students as lacking both intelligence and motivation—and even the democratic process.

Raymond Callahan documented in 1962 the extent to which school administrators of this period adopted the business/efficiency ideology. He compared the efficiency experts of the industrial era with educational efficiency experts and the factory system of education. Efficiency was demonstrated, for example, using records and reports, educational cost accounting, the educational balance sheet, child accounting, and the standardized testing and accountability movement in schools.

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