Division of Labor

Scientific managers in the early twentieth century, including American theorist Frederick Taylor, designed strategies to increase industrial production and efficiency. One of the strategies developed was to divide work into specialized tasks that could be assigned to workers. The workers were expected to develop expertise at the task. Scientific management theorists reasoned that expertise enabled workers to complete tasks quickly and without error, thereby promoting efficient operation.

Scientific managers were not the only theorists to tout the benefits of a division of labor. Classic organizational structure as propounded by late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German sociologist Max Weber also proposed division of labor as one of five essential attributes of a bureaucracy. In a bureaucracy, division of labor led to specialization and subsequently to credentialing. Credentialing serves the purpose of providing assurance that an individual in a given position possesses the requisite skills to competently carry out the assigned tasks.

Division of labor in industry and in bureaucracies has been criticized for inducing worker boredom through tasks that are too narrowly defined and work that is too repetitive. Boredom reduces efficiency, which is at odds with the outcome a division of labor was intended to produce. Criticism also comes from feminist scholars who criticize bureaucracies as paternalistic, with division of labor serving to disguise the control function of the hierarchy.

Division of labor became a prominent feature of K–12 schooling during the twentieth century; it continues relatively unchanged today. Earlier in the history of U.S. education a single teacher was responsible for teaching children of multiple ages and ability levels to read, write, and figure. The so-called little red school house of the Midwestern prairie is a case in point. As changes in population patterns necessitated the establishment of bigger schools and of school districts, a need for school principals and central office administrators also arose. State laws were passed differentiating the work of teachers from administrators and requiring credentialing for teachers, principals, and other administrators. Credentialing also differentiates elementary from secondary teachers and teachers specializing in one discipline from those in other disciplines.

Specialization and credentialing are consistent with the practice of dividing and distributing work tasks to increase expertise and promote efficiency, as advocated by Taylor and Weber. In education, as in other fields such as medicine, specialization also creates fragmentation. Without structures in place to promote integration across these different areas of credentialing, the division of labor in schools, especially the secondary level, isolates by specialty. This division fosters a lack of understanding about the work and needs of other teachers within the same school. Similarly, principals view their responsibilities as different from those of teachers. Central office [Page 301]administrators see their responsibilities as different from those of teachers and principals. The effect of this separation is at odds with admonitions of the last 20 years that a single focus on the educational needs of students is needed for maximizing schooling outcomes for all students.