ABSTRACT
The ubiquity of the phrase “school system” obscures the implications that system dynamics have for school operations in outcomes. This chapter reviews the history of conceptualizing organizations, including school organizations, as systems, and examines how this perspective helps explain how schools respond to state-mandated reform. The findings from an illustrative case show that school responses are driven, in part, by socio-cognitive control processes, which regulate system behaviors and tend to reinforce a static equilibrium, which is to say, maintain the status quo. In the current case, this results from the school having highly differentiated informal subsystems, instantiated as teachers’ collegial communities. It is argued that an inability to coordinate or integrate competing sub-goals across these subsystems contributed to the school being closed by the state department of education. Broader implications of the systems perspective are discussed.
