Revisiting "The Culture of the School and the Problem of Change"

Sarason's central concept from the original 1971 text is that schools are constituted by regularities—recurring patterns of how things are done and how people interact. Programmatic regularities include scheduling, curriculum sequencing, and grouping practices. Behavioral regularities include patterns like who asks questions in class and how long teachers wait for answers [citation:1]. These regularities are not incidental; they are the school's culture, and any proposed change must engage them. Reformers typically introduce new programs without understanding that implementation involves altering existing regularities, which generates resistance Sarason found predictable. The New Math example in the book illustrates this: an innovative curriculum was rendered dull by the same classroom regularities that made old math dull [citation:8].

A revisit is not a revision but a return to a landscape to see how it looks after a quarter century. Sarason explains that when he wrote the original in 1971, he did not regard schools as in crisis—they were in deep trouble, but their basic character and existence seemed secure. His book implied, however, that if reform proceeded as it was, a crisis would come. By 1996 he was convinced it had arrived [citation:18]. The revisit is therefore an assessment of his earlier diagnosis in light of developments he anticipated but did not witness. He frames the crisis as a turning point where conflicting forces of unusual intensity will determine the future of public education, with some actors indifferent or hostile to its survival [citation:2][citation:3].

The New York Times review of the 1971 edition acknowledged the book's insight about ecological systems but found it 'maddeningly pedantic' in style, with its repetitive 'We will demonstrate' formulations [citation:8]. The reviewer also faulted Sarason for not going far enough in questioning systems—specifically, for not seeming to consider that schools reflect society [citation:8]. This limitation is significant because it suggests the original analysis located the problem too exclusively within school culture rather than in the broader social and economic forces that shape it. The 1996 revisit partially addresses this by focusing on external forces manipulating the reform arena, but the tension between internal cultural analysis and external political critique remains [citation:3].

The original was a diagnostic study written with the detachment of a researcher describing a problem. The revisit is animated by a sense of urgency that Sarason explicitly acknowledges. In the Preface to the Revisit, he writes that 'this is no time to be reticent or circumspect or indirect,' and that 'the stakes are too high' [citation:18]. Where the original argued that reform efforts were generally failing, the revisit argues that the reform arena itself is being manipulated by forces that would not be sorry to see the public school system dismantled [citation:3][citation:9]. The tone shifts from scholarly diagnosis to what Sarason calls a 'prophet of doom and gloom' who nonetheless sees some signs of hope [citation:18].

The two-part structure makes an argument through juxtaposition. Part I reproduces the second edition of the 1971 text, allowing readers to encounter the original diagnosis without editorial interference. Part II presents Sarason's 1996 reflections, organized around questions like 'Why Revisit?,' 'Are Schools Unique Organizations?,' 'What Constitutes a Change?,' and 'The Culture of the School and the Problem of Social Change' [citation:3][citation:4]. This structure allows readers to compare the diagnosis with the retrospective assessment directly, without relying on Sarason's summary of his own earlier argument. It also means the volume functions as both a historical document and a contemporary intervention, though the 1996 electronic edition is now itself dated.

Sarason argues that even the system's defenders fail to focus on what he calls the root problems—'those few issues or problems which, if they do not become recognized, accepted, and a goal for action, rule out hope for improving our schools' [citation:18]. He does not enumerate them in a simple list, but the revisit's chapters suggest they include the power relationships within schools, the purposes of schooling, and the culture of the school as it interacts with social change [citation:3]. The root problems are structural and cultural, not technical. This is consistent with his career-long argument that reform fails when it treats symptoms rather than the underlying regularities and power arrangements that sustain them.