Abstract:
There is broad consensus that the United States education system needs improvement. Yet, efforts to understand the best ways to improve the system are disjoint. On one hand, social scientists have studied issues such as leadership, equality, school-community trust, neighborhood effects, political power, and other social factors that influence processes and outcomes in education systems. On the other hand, operations scholars have looked at particular problems in education systems around resources, such as school bus routing, school districting, and school system logistics. This disciplinary approach, where social scientists focus on social issues and operations scholars focus on technical issues, does not give full attention to the possibility that social and technical issues interact. This talk will focus on the interplay between social and technical issues in education systems through the lens of better understanding the important operational problems faced by teachers, school principals, and other educational stakeholders. A field study of nine urban elementary schools, involving over 90 interviews and 250 surveys, will be discussed. Four socio-technical operational problems around resources in education systems will be illustrated by the field data, exemplifying some of the ways interdisciplinary research can contribute to broader efforts to improve the United States education system.