Systems Do Not Exist in a Vacuum: Understanding the Role of Structural Relationships in Schools

If you’ve ever worked in a school, you’ve likely faced the same frustrating puzzle:

Why do issues of burnout, disengagement, and inequity seem to repeat no matter how much effort is poured into solving them?

You work hard. Your staff works hard. Your students work hard. But the answer may not lie in how hard people are working, but in how roles, power, and responsibilities are structured.

One of the most overlooked yet powerful elements of culture in a school is its Structural Relationships. This is about how authority flows; roles distributed; responsibilities assigned. The visuals in this article are meant to illustrate how the structure of school relationships can support -- or sabotage -- a school’s success.

Let’s walk through them.

1. Systems Don’t Operate in a Vacuum -- neither do obstacles.

[Image 1: Internal Systems – Top-Down Hierarchies]

Traditional schools are designed so decision-making flows from top to bottom:

• Admin decides,

• teachers implement,

• students comply.

This hierarchical setup is a defining feature of a school’s Decision-Making Structure (i.e. Government as an element of culture). It sends the message that some roles are decision-makers; others are task-doers. For many groups or organizations, this structure is highly effective and allows for the efficient production of a desired end product.

Imagine A district mandates a new literacy initiative. Teachers are told during a staff meeting what the plan is and are expected to execute it without input or tailoring to their particular needs as teachers interacting with their community of familes. Students are then expected to comply with a rigid format that may not meet them where they are at developmentally. Teachers are equipped with knowledge and skills for differentiation, but have no say in the decision to assess grade-level specific competency according to that intitative's program.

This dynamic reveals a breakdown in the structural relationships within the school system. Teachers burn out from carrying the full weight of implementation, despite having little say in instructional design and limited flexibility to adapt the initiative to the developmental needs of their students or the lived realities of their school community. Students disengage because learning is framed as a top-down mechanism—something done to them rather than with them—leaving them with no ownership or decision-making power. District leadership, seeing poor outcomes, becomes frustrated, yet the structural pattern continues: new initiatives are cycled through the same system without the ability to redesign the larger decision-making structure is influencing the relationships responsible for how internal decisions are made and responsibilities are shared.

🔁 When structural relationships favor authority over collaboration, pressure accumulates where it shouldn’t—and the system cracks.

2. Systems Within Systems

[Image 2: External Systems Experience Pressure]

Every school exists inside a larger web of overlapping systems: districts, boards, state governments, parent organizations. These external systems are dealing with pressure from performance metrics, attendance rates, and compliance audits that actively shape the internal relationships among the internal systems in schools.

Imagine A school's leadership adjusts its grading policy to meet district-wide “rigor” mandates. Teachers are now expected to assign more summative assessments, resulting in fewer opportunities for reflection or revision. Students, especially those with inconsistent support at home, struggle to keep up with the pressure of an increased assessment schedule. The grading policy was not crafted with students' lived experiences in mind.

Here, structural relationships are distorted by pressures from above, without accountability to the real humans affected within the school. Decision-making authority bypasses those closest to the work of teaching and learning—teachers and students—and instead prioritizes compliance with a distant definition of “rigor.” Teachers are left to manage increased workloads with reduced flexibility, while students are held to expectations that ignore their home circumstances and developmental readiness. The result is a school culture where policies are enforced without relational accountability, and the people most impacted by the policy are given the least voice in shaping it. This disconnection erodes trust, amplifies inequity, and reinforces a system where outcomes are blamed on individuals rather than interrogating the structural relationships that shaped them in the first place.

⚖️ When external expectations define internal roles, local relationships lose flexibility—and students pay the price.

3. Communities Can Shift Systemic Impact

[Image 3: Community Mediates External Pressure]

While state or district policy might dictate large-scale testing schedules or curricular mandates, the community surrounding a school—families, mentors, and neighborhood stakeholders—holds cultural and moral authority that can, in theory, shape how those mandates are interpreted and applied.

However, the strength of that influence is not always evenly distributed. Communities with higher socioeconomic status often wield greater structural leverage: they have more time, political access, and institutional familiarity to advocate for student-centered adaptations. In contrast, lower-SES communities may be systematically excluded from meaningful participation, with their priorities dismissed or tokenized in the face of “non-negotiable” policies.

As a result, the ability to resist or reshape systemic pressure is itself shaped by structural inequality.

Imagine a school in a historically under-resourced neighborhood, where many families juggle multiple jobs and face systemic barriers to civic participation. Formal engagement is low, and past experiences with education systems have left many skeptical. Yet, within this school, a small group of caregivers, connected through their local community center and united by a deep concern for their children's futures, begins to meet informally. They share frustrations about over-testing, a lack of meaningful learning experiences, and concerning behaviors of their children as a result. Through relationships built on trust and lived experience, this small group articulates a vision for an education that nurtures their children's emotional well-being, cultural identity, and agency as life-long learners.

Their advocacy isn't loud or large-scale, but it is persistent and relational. They build credibility with the principal, who listens and responds; not because they bring political clout, but because they speak for their community who cannot be present and bring authentic moral authority grounded in the community's lived realities.

Together, staff and the community work to adapt school practices: incorporating student voice projects, creating space for reflection alongside assessment, and providing school to home connections that promote learning strategies and effective communication strategies that both teachers and parents can align for consistency with the children. In this case, the structural relationships between the school and its community act not as a buffer of privilege, but as a bridge of mutual trust and purpose.

🛡 Structural relationships are not just internal—they extend into the community and can be leveraged for equity.

4. What Happens When Students Aren’t Asked to Own Their Learning?

[Image 4: Student Agency and System Goals]

This brings us to a critical point in this conversation:

Imagine a school where students have little to no say over what, when, how, or why they learn. Their schedules are dictated to them. Assignments follow a rigid format. Mastery is defined by compliance: completing tasks correctly and on time. Reflection, choice, and inquiry are minimized to prioritize efficiency and standardization.

In the immediate term, this structural decision redistributes internal pressure within the school.Teachers and parents bear the burden of maintaining engagement, adapting instruction, and motivating students whose intrinsic ownership of learning has been systematically suppressed. Students become passive participants, and adults scramble to fill the motivational and developmental gaps that naturally arise when agency is stripped away.

But the long-term consequences extend beyond the walls of the school. Over time, students internalize a core belief: "Authority and compliance are the primary pathways to success." This belief is infused into the culture, even as lived adult experiences often contradict it when authority structures fail; when rigid compliance no longer guarantees security or fulfillment; when creative, critical thinking is demanded in real-world contexts.

As these students become adults, the wider society experiences the erosion of adaptive capacities that healthy systems require such as initiative, problem-solving, and civic participation. In response, external systems like districts, states, and national governments increasingly step in to "correct" the outcomes: implementing more prescriptive standards, expanding bureaucratic oversight, and attempting to legislate creativity, resilience, and problem-solving after the fact.

Ironically, by training generations for compliance rather than agency, the system deepens its own need for external control—and the cycle of dependency and top-down intervention continues.

5. Clarify the Purpose of Every Role

[Image 5: Redefining Role Expectations]

This leads us to consider two essential truths:

1. The problem is not a lack of training for educators to wear multiple hats—it’s a systemic refusal to publicly acknowledge, fund, or challenge the unrealistic concentration of responsibilities on one role.

2. Schools are microsystems of society; if we expect them to mirror the complexity of the outside world, they must be resourced and structured accordingly—or they’ll only simulate it poorly, ultimately failing the very people they aim to prepare.

Over the years, teachers and staff have been asked to take on more than just instructional roles. They step in as counselors, social workers, nurses, behavioral interventionists, mentors, and family liaisons. But here’s the deeper truth:

The answer is not more training. The answer is a public reckoning with the structural design that keeps placing so many roles on a single position in the first place.

Calls for additional professional development are often used as a system’s way of avoiding structural redesign. Yet no amount of trauma-informed training, mental health workshops, or curriculum adaptation seminars can compensate for a model that structurally concentrates too much responsibility in one role—while ignoring the broader web of social and economic conditions that shape both staff and student needs within the very system they are expected to serve.

Imagine a teacher who notices a student repeatedly coming to school hungry, tired, and emotionally unregulated. The teacher, already stretched thin, starts checking in daily, providing snacks, and coordinating with family support services outside their contracted planning and instructional time, perhaps falling under "other duties as needed". Despite having no formal training in case management or youth counseling, they become the student’s primary emotional and logistical anchor.

This is not an outlier. This is routine in many schools.

When a system centralizes decision-making at the top, while asking the people at the ground level to fill all the cracks, it creates not only unsustainable pressure—it also renders the system incapable of reform from within.Teachers are not asking to be equipped with more roles.They are asking the system to stop pretending that those roles can be absorbed by sheer willpower and professional development alone.

And this brings us to a harder truth:

Schools are not just institutions of learning—they are microsystems of society.

Schools contain every major social dynamic:

• Healthcare,

• justice,

• mental health,

• economic inequality,

• intergenerational trauma,

• civic development,

• cultural expression,

• identity formation.

If schools are expected to prepare young people for life in society, then they must be designed and funded to reflect the complexity of that society and not just to simulate it poorly with overworked staff and under-resourced programs.

Some argue, however, that schools should remain insulated from broader societal realities; instead, they should focus narrowly on academic instruction, shielding students from the "distractions" of social, emotional, and civic complexity. An opponent may suggest a kindergartener has no businesses with a social media account—a ridiculous argument meant to dismiss the reality that social media in the hands of a young adult can (and has!) change the world.

• Nicholas Lowinger used social media to launch and promote a non-profit to provide shoes to homeless children.

• Mari Copeny, known as "Little Miss Flint," used social media to raise funds for water filters and school supplies in Flint, Michigan.

• Jazz Jennings and Xiuhtezcatl Martinez have used social media to advocate for LGBTQ rights and environmental justice, respectively

To oppose the idea that schools are microcosms of society and must be treated as such is to misunderstand the fundamental purpose of education: to equip students NOT for an idealized, isolated world, but FOR the very real, messy, interdependent, and dynamic realities they will inevitably face. Schools are not separate from society. They are, and must be, living microcosms of it—preparing students to navigate, shape, and improve the world they will inherit.

Without that investment, the product of the system will remain misaligned with the demands of the world outside it. The pressures of misaligned systems will continue to miss the mark on measuring education in schools because it will continue to assess only the strict, isolated measures of academic learning. We will continue producing students conditioned for obedience in a society that demands adaptability. We will continue exhausting teachers by expecting them to serve as a substitute for the full network of societal supports that district and state leaders refuse to invest for the sake of developing the very people who must understand how to lead the future of our world.

A microsystem cannot function at the level of the macrosystem it mirrors unless it is empowered, resourced, and structurally realigned to do so.

6. Schools Are Systems of Gears

[Image 6: Metaphor – Distribution of Pressure]

Every role in a school system is a gear in that system. When one gear is overloaded or misaligned, others inevitably feel the strain as a result. Over time, the entire machine slows, grinds unevenly, or even breaks apart in places, not necessarily because individuals are themselves faulty (to focus on this as the only issue is pedantic and misguided), but because the system was never structured for balanced pressure or shared responsibility to begin with.

This metaphor captures the heart of Structural Relationships in schools:

• Who is connected to whom?

• Where does pressure accumulate?

• How is authority for learning (versus health and safety) distributed—or withheld?

• And when one gear inevitably falters, how does the system as a whole respond?

In any school system, when roles are misaligned, when responsibilities are concentrated without adequate authority, or when relational trust is displaced by top-down mandates, strain will accumulate on that specific role. It may appear first as a student's needs going unmet, or a teacher improvising without systemic support, or a peer group disengaging, or an administrator focusing on surface-level performance metrics. But these are not isolated problems to be patched individually. They are visible symptoms of invisible design flaws.

It can sometimes take just one small misalignment in instructional support, relational communication among stakeholders, or clear role expectations; they ripple outward, straining every relationship connected to it. When structural neglect is mistaken for isolated error, efforts to "fix" the system inevitably collapse back into reactive solutions that treat symptoms without ever healing the source.

🧩 Every obstacle we see in schools is not simply a crisis of individuals or programs. It is the visible manifestation of invisible structural relationships that must be reexamined, realigned, and reimagined for the complexity of the world students are being prepared to enter.

Understanding these structural patterns is only the beginning. True redesign requires realigning elements of culture such as decision-making structures, which influence structural relationships, which influences norms, which impacts how resources reflect priorities, that bring us back to decision-making structures, and so on. To reflect the complexity of society, schools must be treated as what they are meant to prepare students for, and it is not the isolated, efficient, standardized system currently designed to "achieve".

Closing Thought: Redesigning Relationships for Equity

We must stop blaming individual people—students, teachers, or parents—as the primary explanation for the persistent struggles in education.Yes, individuals may sometimes be placed into roles that do not suit them, or promoted beyond their competency (as described by the Peter Principle). But focusing blame solely on individuals ignores a deeper truth:

Structural Relationships, rooted in broader cultural and systemic causes, shape how pressure, authority, and responsibility flow through schools.

Instead of asking "Who failed?" we should be asking:

• Who holds power, for what purpose, and through what justification?

  Power in a school system is never neutral—it is distributed, withheld, or legitimized to serve particular cultural, political, or organizational ends. Understanding who benefits from current arrangements, whose voices are privileged or ignored, and what rationales are used to justify that distribution reveals whether the system genuinely serves students and communities—or merely preserves its own control.

  
  

• Are roles and responsibilities clearly defined, appropriately distributed, and collectively supported?

  When responsibilities accumulate without corresponding authority, or when flexibility is stripped from those closest to the work of teaching and learning, the system shifts pressure downward while maintaining decision-making upward. We might see this with students having no authority and high responsibility for learning, or teachers having no authority and high responsibility for curricula implementation.

  
  

• Is the system designed to adapt to the lived needs of its people, or merely to enforce compliance with external expectations?

  A truly responsive system evolves alongside its students, families, and staff, adapting to emerging needs and lived realities. A rigid system, by contrast, sacrifices responsiveness in favor of streamlining efforts for the system’s convenience—focusing narrowly on students nearest to proficiency thresholds to produce measurable short-term gains. In doing so, it confuses efficiency (doing more with less) for efficacy (meeting the full range of human needs), playing a numbers game that leaves the most vulnerable learners behind.

Structural Relationships can equitable, adaptive, and student-centered when decision-making structures allow for these relationships to develop (you can't mandate effective relationships). This leads to the idea that obstacles are no longer signs of failure but rather catalysts for collective growth and renewal. With this perspective, we can stop only asking “Who messed up?” and start also asking “What is our system not doing well and may need to be redesigned or better supported?”

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P.S. -- Meaningful systemic restructuring will require not only a shift in mindset, but also a willingness from district and state leaders to invest in a reality they may not yet fully recognize: that redesigning relationships is the foundation for restructuring, not a mandated afterthought, for success in improving our education system.

Greg Mullen

April 25, 2025

General Consult

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