One of the surprising lessons we have learned is that the issues of organizational structure and culture have an enormous impact not only on the types of programs a school offers, but the quality of those offerings as well.
Schools are under enormous pressure to satisfy a variety of difficult and often conflicting demands.
Add to this the constant stream of initiatives, reform and otherwise, emanating from the federal and state departments of education and the increasingly difficult directives from local boards of education and you have what appears to be a virtually impossible task. Organizational behavior is driven both by a formal set of rules, regulations, and policy and an informal set of beliefs, values, and preferences. The problem with this approach is that personal behavior, which collectively results in organizational behavior, is not driven by compliance but by the alignment of goals between an organization and an individual. Thus, you can mandate until you are blue in the face, so to speak, but in the absence of the ability to inflict physical harm, mandating will not, to any significant degree, influence organizational behavior. Shared vision counts, as does modeling of desired behaviors.