Purpose: This qualitative case study examined the ways in which a closing urban high school worked with its students receiving special education services and their families to help them to transition to new schools.

Methods: An ethnographic and grounded theory approach was used to obtain observational data as well as the perceptions of the seven students, their parents (seven mothers and one father), and school personnel from the closing school (5; total N = 20). A semi-structured interview, heuristically modified during data collection, focused on the actions taken by teachers, administrators, and school guidance counselors with these students and their families regarding the closing of the school and the process of placing them in new schools. Interviews were audiotaped and transcribed, and were coded using Strauss and Corbin's (1998) analytic method and axial coding structure to produce a theoretical explanatory description of processes and their key elements.

Results: Though the rhetoric of the school and the school district initially after the announcement of the school closing emphasized the intention of the school and district to work closely with parents and students regarding their transitions to new schools, in many cases the partnership never materialized and many students and their families were not involved in placement decision making. Second, most of the parents we interviewed had limited knowledge of their children's schooling and had limited interactions with schools. Some parents struggled to understand communications from the school. These issues did not appear to be factored into the school's efforts to work productively with these parents. Finally, the decision making processes that were used to place these students appeared to be primarily a function of the school system's normative bureaucratic system, emphasizing centralization, control, and convenience to the organizations involved. In this highly stressful environment, organizational personnel managed the impossibility of their tasks by doing “good” practice, which served the majority of their clientele but failed with those clients needing more complex or intensive services. This school, as with other overburdened human service organizations, achieved “reasonably good” practice, some measure of “psychological success” (Argyris, 1990), and manageable workloads by unconsciously but systematically excluding clients who require extraordinary care and services (see Lipsky, 1980).

Implications for Practice: Social workers and other human service practitioners must be conscious that “good” practice may fail to reach and be effective with clients with complex problems. To avoid defensive disengagement from challenging clients, practitioners must be helped to acknowledge the challenges and impossibilities in their work (see Argyris, 1990). Additionally, social workers working in schools and other agency settings must maintain a keen sense of and assess for organizational factors which underlie problematic and ineffective programs and practices and may be linked with the failure of clients to engage with those agencies.

References

Argyris, C. (1990). Overcoming organizational defenses: Facilitating organizational learning. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Lipsky, M. (1980). Street-level bureaucracy. NY: Russell Sage Foundation.

Strauss, A., & Corbin, J. (1998). Basics of qualitative research: Techniques and procedures for developing grounded theory. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.