he complex nature of power and influence means that no one is entirely

without power over what happens in schools.

Power in schools is often assumed to flow only downhill, from more

powerful positions (such as superintendent or principal) to less powerful
positions (such as teacher or student). But as I’ve discovered through my
own research — a qualitative study that I’ve conducted over the last eight
years at a public middle school in south Texas — power also flows uphill
and sideways. Or, better yet, it doesn’t really “flow” at all. To understand
how power actually functions in schools, it’s important to recognize that
power isn’t a thing, or a substance, at all; it comes from everywhere; and it
operates more like a web than a river. Further, rethinking our assumptions
about power can have practical implications for teaching, learning, school
leadership, and educational research.
Power is not a thing
It may seem to go without saying that different positions in schools entail
differing amounts of power. So, for instance, a principal has more power
than a teacher, and a teacher has more power than a student. As a result, the
thinking goes, people in more powerful positions can impose their will on
people in less powerful positions. Sometimes this thinking is even applied to
inanimate objects, such as standardized tests, which are often characterized
as having power over teaching and administrative practices. However, as the
philosopher Michel Foucault (2000) once argued, “Power is not a
substance” (p. 324), meaning that it “is not something that is acquired,
seized, or shared, something that one holds on to or allows to slip away”
(Foucault, 1978, p. 94).
I saw this for myself in my own research at Connors Middle School (all
names in this article are pseudonyms), when studying how gifted and
talented (GT) students in two 8th-grade social studies classes interpreted the
meaning of the GT label (Meadows & Neumann, 2017). At Connors,
students identified as gifted and talented take separate classes from their
peers, and, as at most schools, Connors students are given no input into the
official meaning of the GT label. Researchers and educators determine
official and operative definitions of the label and apply those definitions to
students. Thus, it would seem that students are powerless to challenge or
rethink their own identity in school. And officially, they are. But practically,
they are not.
In the classrooms that a colleague and I observed, no conversations ever
took place about what it meant to be “gifted and talented”— for example,
does being labeled GT suggest that these students are smarter than others,
more studious, or more disciplined? Does it mean that they’re more
deserving of the best teachers and learning opportunities? Does it mean that
other students are not gifted or talented? Rather than trying to establish a
shared definition of GT, or to bring it up for discussion at all, teachers
simply went ahead and used the label, implying that everybody already
knew what it meant. And because no students ever raised the issue in class,
my colleague and I could easily have assumed that GT was in fact a settled
term, one that everybody understood the same way.
However, when we interviewed students outside of the classroom, we found
that the students actually held shifting and sometimes contradictory
understandings of the GT label. Their views often conflicted not only with
how the label was used in their social studies classroom but also with much
of the research literature in this area. For example, the research on giftedness
views giftedness either as a trait (something intrinsic within students) or in
terms of academic performance (implying a volitional choice by students)
(e.g., Kerr, Colangelo, & Gaeth, 1988). Additionally, giftedness researchers
claim that GT students either accept or reject the GT label (e.g., Coleman &
Cross, 1988; Robinson, 1990). Our study, in contrast, showed that GT
students think of giftedness as both a trait and in terms of performance (in
other words, as something both intrinsic and volitional), as well as both
accept and reject aspects of the GT label.
Administrators, teachers, and students all have the capacity to
exert power.
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In short, the power to define the GT label was not a “thing” that was owned
by the school district and denied to the students. Rather, the school district,
the teachers, and the students were all able to exercise power in different
ways over the meaning of the label. Why does this informal power matter?
In this case, it led us to wonder how trustworthy research findings about
students’ perceptions of the GT label could be if students were not able to
express those complicated thoughts. It was essential for us to understand
that power over others’ perception of the GT label was not something any
one entity could possess.
Power comes from everywhere
Another misconception about power is that it operates linearly — and
usually hierarchically. Teachers, for example, often feel that powerful
people and interests are imposing upon them, especially with regards to
standardized testing or school district scope-and-sequence plans. However,
as we saw in the definition of the GT label, administrators, teachers, and
students all have the capacity to exert power. As Foucault (1978) explains,
“power is everywhere, not because it embraces everything, but because it
comes from everywhere” (p. 93).
Of course, the nature of the power each person exerts varies, since the
relationships between and among administrators, teachers, and students
vary, and power is enacted and contained within those relationships. But no
one is all-powerful and no one is entirely powerless. As Carrie Freie and
Karen Eppley (2014) put it, “Power is not concentrated among decision
makers, [and] resistance is not concentrated among rabble-rousers” (p.
656).
For example, school districts often give teachers a scope-and-sequence plan
that outlines their teaching for a school year, and thus, the school appears to
exercise power over teachers’ work. Yet teachers also have power over their
teaching. Sometimes they exert it in small ways, such as through the
selection of materials, and other times they exercise more power, such as by
revising the scope and sequence, as did Mary Watson, a 6th-grade social
studies teacher at Connors (Neumann, 2016). The district’s scope and
sequence for Mary’s World Cultures course prescribed separate two-week
units on North America and government, followed by one week on Central
America and then two more weeks on South America, but Mary felt strongly
that this plan did not benefit her students’ learning. She told me that the
district scope and sequence was giving teachers “a million two-week units”
arranged in an order that didn’t make sense:
All of that, can you imagine for 6th graders? Going from North America,
and they barely remember that we have 50 states — you saw today how
much they remember about the three branches of government. So I’m
supposed to go from that and please have them compare at a higher level of
thinking [softly laughs] our government with other forms of government?
Instead, Mary combined the North America and government units into one
larger unit and combined the Central and South America units into a unit on
Latin America. In each of these new units, she changed the scope of the
content to first present a historical context through which students could
then examine current conditions.
In this example, power acted on Mary’s teaching from multiple directions.
The state of Texas influenced it by prescribing the overall subject matter for
6th-grade social studies. The school district influenced it by forming a scope
and sequence for that content. And Mary shaped it by revising and fine-
tuning that curriculum plan.
Power operates like a web
So we know that power is not a single, fixed thing that only certain people
can possess, and we know that it moves in multiple directions at once and
not just in linear fashion. Thus, instead of describing it as something that
flows, like a river, it’s more helpful to think of power relations as forming a
web. And as various people within a social, professional, or other kind of
network exert power on each other, they all help to spin that web, making
the connections more “dense,” as Foucault (1978) observed, noting that
power relations are “produced from one moment to the next, at every point,
or rather in every relation from one point to another” (p. 93).
This image of a web helps us better understand the factors that influence
teachers’ work. Many researchers have studied how various phenomena —
such as standardized testing (Faulkner & Cook, 2006; Smith, 1991; Vogler
& Virtue, 2007), teachers’ milieu (Ballet & Kelchtermans, 2009; Easthope
& Easthope, 2000; Valli & Buese, 2007), and teachers’ knowledge and
beliefs (Cimbricz, 2002; Grant, 2001) — influence teachers’ work. While
these isolated studies have contributed important insights into teachers’
work, they have also offered incomplete conclusions.
For instance, some researchers have claimed that standardized testing
creates “multiple-choice” (Smith, 1991) and “just the facts, ma’am” (Vogler
& Virtue, 2007) approaches to teaching social studies. However, such
claims do not account for the combined influence of multiple factors that
appear on the “web of influence.” That became evident, for example, when I
examined the factors that influenced four social studies teachers’ work over
a span of six years (Neumann, 2016).
Instead of describing power as something that flows, like a
river, it’s more helpful to think of power relations as forming a
web.
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Connors had long enjoyed a reputation of success in the city and school
district. Then, in 2011-12, the state of Texas changed the passing
requirements for English language arts (ELA) and mathematics, and
Connors did not achieve Adequate Yearly Progress in those two areas. In
response, the school district implemented a variety of changes in the hopes
of increasing the test scores. Administrators increased the pace of the district
scope and sequence for all subjects, not just ELA and math, so that the
social studies teachers had to move more quickly through their course
content. Administrators then held teachers accountable to that new pace
through benchmark exams that aligned with the new scope and sequence.
Teachers who fell behind usually scored badly on the benchmarks. Those
benchmark exams, combined with the practice tests the school district gave
the students, as well as the real accountability exams, substantially shrunk
teachers’ instructional time with students. Margaret Rhodes, a 35-year
teaching veteran, explained the effect those changes had on her teaching:
“The test doesn’t impact what I teach, but it does impact how I teach it. I
have a wealth of training and materials, and sometimes I’ll think, can’t do
that this year, not enough time.”
School administrators also implemented a homework initiative, which
required teachers to perform intensive monitoring and remediation for
students who consistently did not turn in homework, and instructional
rounds, which required teachers to observe their colleagues teach and
complete paperwork documenting the experiences. Mary Watson, who had
been teaching for 25 years, lamented the effect that rounds had on her work:
I just feel stretched and pulled. That and go evaluate my peers? I work with
great people and I see some neat teaching techniques. But then [I have to] do
paperwork on that, too, and turn it in? I feel like all of our new technology
and all of our new ideas are not time-saving, and I don’t know how much
they’re improving my instruction for the kids.
These weren’t the only changes to the teachers’ milieu: Connors also
became an International Baccalaureate (IB) school, which meant teachers
had to alter lesson plans to fit with IB protocols, coordinate between the
district scope and sequence and the IB curriculum plan, and reconcile the
district grading policy with IB grading requirements. In addition, the school
district gave iPads to all students and teachers and mandated that teachers
use those iPads in their teaching, meaning that teachers had to spend time
learning how to use the iPads and incorporate them into their instruction.
Not all influences on the teachers’ working lives were external. Their own
knowledge and beliefs also played a role, as was the case for Bill Trammel.
Throughout his first eight years of teaching, most of Bill’s teaching
practices would have been considered teacher-centered, such as lecturing,
having students read the textbook in class, and answering review questions.
However, during the study, Bill began shifting toward more student-
centered methods, such as projects and cooperative learning, that had
previously been a smaller part of his practice. This new emphasis, based on
his beliefs about how to promote deeper thinking, changed how he
approached his planning:
I didn’t do CSCOPE [the district scope and sequence]. I looked at the
exemplary lessons; I looked at the year at a glance; and I said these are the
objectives I need to teach, but I’ll do it my own way. I wrote all new
lessons. I wrote all new objectives.
All of these various influences — standardized testing, the teachers’ milieu,
and the teachers’ knowledge and beliefs — operated on the teachers’ work
simultaneously. The image of a web helps us to visualize how these
different influences tugged at the teachers and at each other. The web also
helps us to see how difficult — and I believe inaccurate — it is to separate
out the effects that any one point on the web had on the teachers’ work.
Implications
Some practical implications follow from the understanding that power is not
a fixed substance, that it is multidirectional, and that it is caught up in a web
of relations. For one, it suggests that students and teachers are never
powerless, no matter how powerful other forces seem to be. Students always
exert power, whether directly or tacitly, in ways that shape their learning
environments and even distort the findings of researchers. And teachers
exert power over their teaching even in the face of intense testing demands
or burdensome school initiatives.
Further, if school administrators recognize that everybody in the school
community is bound together in a web of power relations, then it should
become obvious to them that no initiative or program ever gets to start with
a blank slate. As soon as a program has been introduced, it has already
begun pulling on the countless invisible threads that connect all of the
people in and around the building. Thus, administrators should think very
carefully about the many and often surprising ways in which an initiative
meant to change one part of the organization can affect, and be affected by,
another part. Actions always have unforeseen consequences, but at least
administrators can try to assess how their decisions might ripple across the
school’s network of personal and professional relationships, potentially
creating as many problems as they solve.
Finally, the more education researchers do to understand the complex ways
in which power operates in classrooms, schools, and districts, the more
success they will have in capturing the nuances of educational practice. As
we investigate power in schools, let’s not focus so intently on particulars
that we lose sight of the bigger picture. A richer understanding of power and
influence gives us clearer insights into teaching, learning, and life in
schools.

As an academic discipline the study of politics in education has two main roots: The
first root is based on theories from political science while the second root is footed
in organizational theory.[1] Political science attempts to explain how societies and social
organizations use power to establish regulations and allocate resources. Organizational
theory uses scientific theories of management to develop deeper understandings
regarding the function of organizations.
Researchers have drawn a distinction between two types of politics in schools. The
term micro-politics refers to the use of formal and informal power by individuals and
groups to achieve their goals in organizations. Cooperative and conflictive processes are
integral components of micro-politics. Macro-politics refers to how power is used and
decision making is conducted at district, state, and federal levels. Macro-politics is
generally considered to exist outside the school, but researchers have noted that micro-
and macro-politics may exist at any level of school systems depending on circumstance.
[2]

There exist significant difference between "Politics of Education" and "Politics in

Education". More debates on the prevailing differences are solicited from academia of
the world to define politics educationally.