INTRODUCTION
A school
is an organization that has the primary function of presenting formal
instruction, normally maintains a regular faculty and curriculum, normally has
a regularly enrolled student body, and has a place where its educational
activities are carried on. If you are organized to conduct a school, you must
submit full information regarding your tuition charges, number of faculty
members, number of full-time and part-time students enrolled, courses of study
and degrees conferred, together with a copy of your school catalog (Agarwal,
2012:4).
(Mabelebele, 2013:7) the term school is
generally corresponds to the definition of an “educational organization”, thus,
the term includes primary, secondary, preparatory and high schools, and
colleges and universities. The term does not include organizations engaged in
both educational and non-educational activities unless the latter are merely
incidental to the educational activities. A school for handicapped children is
included within the term, but an organization merely providing handicapped
children with custodial care is not. “Sunday schools” that are conducted by a
church are not included in the term “schools,” but separately organized schools
(such as parochial schools, universities, and similar institutions) are included
in the term.
CHARACTERISTICS
OF A SCHOOL
Among
of the characteristics of any school includes the following things;
Be
a Safe and Organized Place, An effective school must first be a
place where students can feel safe, physically and emotionally. It must be a
supportive community where kids—and teachers—of all backgrounds can focus on
learning. To create a climate of safety, halls and classrooms must be free of
behavior like fighting, bullying, and harassment. That said, a safe environment
is not created merely through punishment.
Attitude of the Office Staff, This
might seem an odd first choice. However, the first thing that greets you when
you enter a school is the office staff. Their actions set the tone for the rest
of the school. ( Szarowicz, 2004 :122) if the front office is inviting for
teachers, parents, and students, then the school leadership values customer
service. However, if the office staff is unhappy and rude, you must question
whether the school as a whole including its Principal has the correct attitude
towards customer service and teamwork. Be wary of schools where the staff is
just not approachable. You as a teacher will probably find that if the staff
has a pervasive unhelpful attitude they will not provide you with the support you
need throughout the year.
Set
High Expectations for Students, Effective schools expect
students to succeed. Because of that, students at these schools learn more.
Psychology researcher Robert Rosenthal conducted an experiment in the 1960s
where teachers were given a class of randomly selected students, and were told
that these students’ IQ test scores indicated that they had a high potential
for growth that school year. When they took the IQ test again at the end of the
year, the results showed that “the kids actually got smarter when they were
expected to get smarter by their teachers,”
Attitude of the leader,
just as with the office staff, you will probably have the ability to meet with
the leader of your school before you actually begin working there. His or her
attitude is extremely important for you and the school as a whole. An effective
Principal should be open, encouraging, and innovative. They should be
student-centered in their decisions. They should also empower teachers while
providing with the necessary support and training to grow each year. Principals
who are never present, who have horrible customer service, or who are not open
to innovation will be difficult to work for and will probably result in many
disgruntled employees (Joseph and Mansfield, 2010:45).
Mixing of New and Veteran Teachers, the
new teachers come into a school fired up to teach and innovate. Many of them
truly believe that they can make a difference. At the same time, they often
have a lot to learn about classroom management and the inner workings of the
school system. On the other hand, veteran teachers provide years of experience
and understanding of how to effectively manage their classrooms and get things
done in the school. At the same time, they are also sometimes stuck in their
way of teaching a subject and might be wary of innovation. Only through a mix
of the new and old can both learn and grow ( Keneth et al, 2006:53-54)
Student-Centered Attitude with Core
Values, (Mckenzie et al, (2012:51) to be truly effective,
a Manager must create a system of core values which the entire staff shares. To
do this, the Manager must involve the teachers and staff each step of the way.
A common theme to each of the core values must be a student-centered view of
education. When a decision is made in the school, the first thought should
always be "What's best for the students?" When everyone shares this
belief infighting will lessen and the school can focus on the business of
teaching. If a conflict occurs between staff members, then they should first
meet and together decide what is best for the students. With this focus there
is no doubt that the final decision will be more effective and much easier to
accept by all parties (Radcliffe,
2014:17).
Mentoring Program,
Most school districts provide new teachers with a mentor during their first
year. Some have very formal mentoring programs and others are more relaxed.
However, each school should provide new teachers with an internal mentor. This
should happen whether the teacher is fresh out of college or coming from
another school district. Effective schools have strong core values that each
teacher knows. Only by pairing a new teacher with a mentor who truly believes
these core values will the school's mission be fulfilled. On a more practical
side, a mentor can help a new teacher learn the ropes. They will introduce them
to key office staff and help them navigate the bureaucracy involved with items
such as field trips and purchasing classroom items (Furman, 2002:244).
Departmental
Politics Kept to a Minimum, (The World Bank,1999:88), almost every
department in a school will have its share of politics and drama. For example,
a Mathematics Department might have teachers who want more power or who try and
get a larger share of the department's resources. There will probably be some
sort of seniority system set up for picking courses for the following year or
determining who gets to go to specific conferences. However, a quality school
will not allow this type of behavior to undermine the quality of teaching
students. Again, this starts with quality leadership from the Principal on
down. The school leadership should be clear on its goals for each department
and work with the department heads to create a collaborative environment where
politics are kept to a minimum.
Faculty
is Empowered and Involved, when the faculty is empowered to make decisions
backed up by the administration, a level of trust grows which allows for
greater innovation and more effective teaching. An individual who feels
empowered and involved in the decision-making process will not only have
greater job satisfaction but will also be better able to accept decisions with
which they might not agree. A school where teacher opinions are not valued and
they feel powerless will result in disgruntled teachers who do not have the
desire to put as much into their teaching. You can tell this type of school if
you hear phrases such as "Why bother?" (Tassoni, 2004:297)
Team
work amongst the Faculty, Even in the best of schools there will be
teachers who do not want to share with others. They will be the ones who get to
school in the morning, close themselves in their room, and don't come out
except for mandatory meetings. If the majority of the teachers at your school do
this, then the school has a problem. Instead, a quality school will create an
atmosphere where teachers want to share with each other. This should be
something which the school and department leadership should model. Schools
which reward intra- and inter-departmental sharing will see a huge increase in
the quality of classroom teaching. It is a proven fact that an integrated
curriculum is more effective for the student than learning each topic in
isolation (Garcia and Rajkumar, 2008:77).
Communication is honest and frequent,
(Levin and Lockheed, 2012:7) the school leadership in a quality school provides
teachers, staff, students, and parents with frequent communication about what
is happening. Rumors and gossip are rampant in many schools. Many of these rumors
can lead to disgruntled employees. If the school is not communicating the
reasons for decisions or upcoming changes as soon as they can, then rumor mills
will take effect the results can be devastating. Therefore, it is important
that the school leadership models frequent communication and has an open door
policy so that teachers and staff can come forward with questions and concerns
as they arise.
Parental Involvement,
Many middle and especially high schools do not stress parental involvement in
their child's education. It is the school's job to pull parents in and help
them understand what they can do. Some teachers do not want to bother. However,
the more you as a teacher involve the parents, the better the children will
behave and perform in your class. Many parents want to know what's going on in
class but have no way of figuring out how to do this. A school which stresses
parental contact for both positive and negative reasons is one which will only
grow more effective over time. Thankfully, this is something that each teacher
can institute even if the school as a whole does not stress this involvement
(Cheng, 1996:9).
THE CONTRIBUTIONS OF A SCHOOL
WITHIN A COMMUNITY
School has a great social importance especially
in the modern, complex industrialized societies and communities. Philosophers
of all periods, beginning with ancient stages, devoted to it a great deal of
attention. Accordingly, various theories
regarding its nature and objective have come into being. Let us now examine
some of the significant functions of education.
To complete the socialization
process, the main
social objective of the school is to complete the socialization process. The
family gets the child, but the modern family tends to leave much undone in the socialization
process. The school and other institutions have come into being in place of
family to complete the socialization process.
Now, the people fell that it is “the
school’s business to train the whole child even to the extent of teaching him
honesty, fair play, consideration for others and a sense of right and wrong”. The school devotes much of its time and energy to the matter
such as co-operation, good citizenship, doing one's duty and upholding the law.
Directly through text books and indirectly through celebration of programs
patriotic sentiments are intimates and instilled. The nation's past is
glorified, its legendary heroes respected, and its military ventures justified (www.community
schools.org)
Also,
the school helps to transmit the central heritage; All societies maintain themselves,
by exploitation of a culture. Culture here refers to a set of beliefs and
skills, art, literature, philosophy, religion, and music that are not carried
through the mechanism of heredity. They must be learned. This social
heritage (culture) must be transmitted through social organizations. Education
has this function of cultural transmission in all societies. It is only at the
under leaves of the school that any serious attempt has been, or now is, made
to deal with this area (Kelly, 2014).
However, the school is
used for the
formation of social personality, Individual must have personalities shaped or fashioned in
ways that fit into the culture, schools everywhere has the function of the
formation of social personalities. Also,
schools helps in transmitting culture through proper molding of
social personalities. In this way, it contributes to the integration, to
survive and to reproduce themselves (People
for education, 2014 available in www.people
for education.com).
Reformation of Attitudes, Schools aims at the reformation of attitudes wrongly
developed by children already. For various reasons the child may have absorbed
a host of attitudes, beliefs and disbeliefs, loyalties and prejudices,
jealously and hatred etc. these are to be reformed. It is the function
of education to see that unfounded beliefs, illogical prejudices and unreasoned
loyalties are removed from the child's mind, though the school has its own
limitations in this regard, it is expected to continue its efforts in reforming
the attitudes of the child (Shannon, 2013:39).
Schools for occupational placement, school has a practical and also it
should help the adolescent for earning his livelihood. Education has come to be
today as nothing more than an Instrument of livelihood. It should enable the
student to take out his livelihood. This is only because, the school prepares
the student for future occupational positions, the youth should be enabled to
play a productive role in society. Accordingly, great emphasis has been placed
on vocational training (Ratcliffe, 2014:97).
However, schools are used for
Conferring of Status, Conferring
of status is one of the most important functions of school. The amount of
education one has is correlated with his class position. This is four in
U.S.A., U.S.S.R., Japan, Germany and some other societies.
Education
is related to one's position in the stratification structure in two ways. (1)
An evaluation of one's status is partially decided by what kind of education
one has received and (2) Many of the other important criteria of class position
such as occupation, income and style of life are partially the result of the
type and amount of education one has had. Men who finish college, for example,
earn two and a half times as much as those who have a grammar school education (www.iisite.org).
Schools
encourages the spirit of competition, the school instills co-operative values through civic and
patriotic exhortation or advice. Yet the school’s main emphasis is upon
personal competition. For each subject studied the child is compared with the
companies by percentage of marks or rankings. The teacher admires and
praises those who d well and frowns upon those who fail to do well. The
school’s ranking system serves to prepare for a later ranking system. Many of
those who are emotionally disappointed by low ranking in the school are thereby
prepared to accept limited achievement in the larger world outside the school.
Schools
trains in skills that are required by the economy, the
relation between the economy and education can be an exact one. For example the
number and productive capacity of engineering firms are limited by the number of
engineers produced by education. In planned economy, normally it is
planned years in advance to produce a definite number of doctors, engineers,
teachers, technicians, and scientists. to meet the social and economic needs of
the society (Levin and Lockheed, 2012:7).
Fosters
Participant Democracy, Schools fosters participant democracy.
Participant democracy in any large and complex society depends on literacy.
Literacy allows full participation of the people in democratic processes and effective
voting. Literacy is a product of education. Educational system has this
economic as well as political significance. Through various activities a school
imparts values such as co-operation or atmospheric, obedience, fair play.
Schools
acts as an integrative force, schools acts as integrative force in society
by communicating value that unites different sections of society. The family
may fail to provide the child the essential knowledge of the social skills and
values of the wider society. The school or the educational institutions
can help the child to learn new skills and learn to interact with people of
different social backgrounds.
Also,
schools used in Knowledge production, it is generally accepted that the first purpose of schools is
the production of knowledge, in its broadest sense. Universities operate on a
complex set of mutually sustaining fronts –they research into the most
theoretical and intractable uncertainties of knowledge and yet also seek the
practical application of discovery; they test, reinvigorate and carry forward
the inherited knowledge of earlier generations; they seek to establish sound
principles of reasoning and action which they teach to generations of students.
Thus, universities operate on both the short and the long horizon.
School is a place for the battle of ideas is that it has historically played
a major role as ideological apparatuses, expressing the ideological struggles
present in all societies. Higher Education is in itself a site of ideological
struggles, and a place where society’s ideological contradictions are either
reproduced or reasserted.
It used as a place for Selection and
socialization,
although this might not be morally defensible, it is my view that a university
which is a product of elitism, should not shy away from advancing the interests
of elites, as long as those interests are inherently progressive, and are in
the interest of broader national development. Stripped of all ideologies and
persuasions, universities must and should pride themselves as protectors and
promoters of elitist thoughts, because without an appropriate home for these
thoughts, human civilization as we know it will stifle, stumble
and later fall.
CONCLUSION
Schools seem to have been called on to play a rather more
active and interventionist role, related to the delivery of wider social goals
and even to the transformation of society. Advancement of citizenship and
social justice schools is a place where values of good citizenship should be molded
and transmitted to students who are poised to be graduated into society and the
professions. When school learners do not get school textbooks on time, the
quality of democracy is weakened, in the sense that these learners will
directly or indirectly be denied opportunities to study at universities or
other post-school institutions.
REFERENCES
BOOKS
Kenneth,
L et al (2006). Making school smarter Leading with Evidence 3rd
Edition. UK: Corwin
Press
Mckenzie,
J et al (2012). An Introduction to Community Health 7th Edition.
Canada: Jones &
Bortleft Learning, LLC
Furman,
G. (2002). School as a Community: From promise to practice. New York:
University of
New York Press.
The
World Bank (1999). Tanzania Social Sector Review. Washington , DC: The World
Bank
Tassoni,
P. (2004). Diploma in Pre-school Practice. Britain: Heinemann Educational
Publishers
Garcia,
M and Rajkumar, A. (2008). Achieving Better Service Delivery Through
Decentralization in
Ethiopia. Washington, DC: The World Bank
Levin
, H and Lockheed, M. (2012). Effective
Schools in Developing Countries. USA:
Routledge
Cheng,
Y. (1999). School Effectiveness and School Based Management: A Mechanism for
Development. Hong Kong:
Falmer Press
INTERNET
Mabelebele,
J (September 2013). The contributions of the school in the Society development.
South Africa; Available in, www.
hesa.org.za
Szarowicz, R . (January 2004). The role
of ducation to the todays Society.
Available in
www.markedbyteachers.com
Joseph,
G and Mansfield, R. (November, 2010). The contributions of the school in a
Community.
Availabe in aida.wss.yale.educ/2010.pdf
schools.org/aspx
JOURNALS
Agarwal,
A (July 2012). Essay on the role of education in Society. Referred Academic
Journal:
US A, Torsion and Sons Inc.
Kelly,
M. (2014). Top Ten Characteristics of a Quality school. USA
Reffered
Academic Journal (April, 2014). The Contributions of the School in the Community
Shannan,
S. (November, 2013). Nine Characteristics of Resource List 2nd
Edition. USA,
Resource List
Radcliffe,
M. ( April, 2014). What are the Seven Characteristics of Effective Schools?
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