LOOSE COUPLING IN SCHOOLS

Loose Coupling in Schools

Loose Coupling in Schools

Introduction

Loose Coupling means a description of the relationship between institutions that operate relatively autonomously but share similar purposes—for example, schools and colleges. Sometimes even elementary schools, middle schools, and high schools are said to be loosely coupled because of the discontinuities among them.

This paper discusses the concept of “Loose Coupling”, it also answers the following questions;

a.) Fragmentation, or loose coupling, is a common organizational problem. what is the nature of this problem?

b.) Why does loose coupling often prevent or weaken school-improvement change initatives?

c.) As a new principal of a school with loose coupling, what would you do to reduce fragmentation?

Discussion

Loose coupling refers to an organization "that permits considerable flexibility in the behavior of their subsystems. Offered as a model for understanding organizations, Weick (1976) describes the loose coupling model as a descriptive not normative model. He justifies its use to provide a framework for understanding our observations about organizations, particularly the organization of universities that previously had gone unaddressed. (Bolman 2003)

Loose Coupling as Common Organizational Problem

Education in the USA has long been described with loose coupling. Loose coupling means the weakness or relative lack of influence, interaction, coordination and control, among components or events within a system. Loose coupling is a concept developed and applied to educational systems including universities. Others support using loose coupling as a preferred model to understand schools. Schools are not well explained by a rational-economic production model of organization. Theory and research influenced by the loose coupling perspective has not gone far enough and has not fully brought out the implications of these insights for understanding the organization of schools. (Bolman 2003)

Five decades ago Charles Bidwell (1965) analyzed structural looseness in school organizations. He noted that in order to deal with the problem of variability in student abilities on a day-to-day basis, teachers need to have freedom to make professional judgments. Professional autonomy seems undeniable in schools. Teachers work alone in their classrooms, are relatively unobserved by colleagues and administrators, and possess broad discretionary authority over their students. The result is a structural looseness within the school. Similarly, structural looseness exists among the school units in the system. Administrators and teachers of each school enjoy broad discretionary powers with respect to curriculum, teaching methods, and teacher selection. For example, even though the system recruits teachers, they typically are not assigned to a particular school without the principal's approval.

The structural looseness of the school supports a professional basis of organization; however, the demand for uniformity in product, the need for movement of students from grade to grade and school to school in an orderly process, and the long period of time over which students are schooled require a routinization of activities and, hence, a bureaucratic basis of school organization. Bidwell (1965), therefore, depicts the school as a distinctive combination of bureaucracy and structural looseness. Loose coupling theorists and institutional theorists focus on the disconnectedness of behavior and outcomes in ...