Curriculum workers, supervisors, and others in leadership roles are frequently daunted by essentially political forces and pressures that call for compromise of professional standards or ethics or the diversion of energies intended to benefit children to other and less legitimate activities. In some cases, the pressures take the form of mandates or their equivalent from state governments, state agencies, or other powerful entities seeking to accomplish certain broad social or political goals through the instrument of public education. In other cases, the pressures are more localized and originate with parents, both individually and collectively, with boards of education, or with the administrative officers of the local school district. On occasion the pressures come from prestigious persons, organizations, or other opinion-influencing entities such as the media. Whatever their origins or their merit, such pressures sometimes pose enormous problems for supervisors and eventually dilute, alter, or imperil the overall quality of educational services. In this chapter we examine these pressures and consider how curriculum workers are affected by and deal with them.

Although there has been a lot more smoke than fire and much more rhetoric than action, the last two decades have been enlivened nevertheless by the search for more appropriate and effective ways of organizing and staffing elementary schools. Previously, virtually the only organizational arrangement was the graded classroom serving one age group of children presumed to be at roughly the same stage of academic development and taught by one teacher in a self-contained classroom. Occasionally, other teachers worked with separate classes of children—especially in physical education, art, music, and library. School architecture honored and entrenched this arrangement by providing rows of box-like classrooms each effectively separated from the others. In addition to the classroom teachers and any specialist teachers, other adult personnel in the school usually included a principal, school secretary, part-time nurse, custodian(s), and perhaps cafeteria workers.

The impact of ECE on the elementary school should be studied novo. There are at least six reasons why programs involving early learning should be examined with respect to their possible influence on elementary schools.

Nystrand and Bertolaet acknowledged a trend toward recognizing the interrelationship of pupil needs, staffing patterns, and housing arrangements and expressed the hope that the many ambiguities in our present understanding of these relationships can soon be clarified. In a sense the present chapter represents an effort in that direction.

Although much has already been said about horizontal school organization in terms of pupil characteristics, it remains to summarize parts of the historical background of grouping practices, to consider the various grouping alternatives now in general or exploratory use, and to examine their relationship to the goal of individualized instruction.