Why School Feels Like Management: The Overflow–Reactivity Theory of Schooling

Mike Brown
Sep 7
5 min read

By Michael Aaron Brown, M.A., CBPI, CAMS-I

Why does school feel like management instead of teaching?

If you’ve ever walked into a classroom and thought, “This feels more like crowd control than education,” you’re not alone. Teachers complain about endless paperwork, behavior charts, why school feels like management, and “social-emotional minutes.” Parents wonder why their children spend so much time naming feelings but can’t read or problem-solve.

That tension isn’t an accident. It’s the product of a pattern I call the Overflow–Reactivity Theory of Schooling (ORTS) (Brown, 2025).

Cartoon of a student in a classroom listening to a teacher at the chalkboard, illustrating why school feels like management instead of teaching.

The Core Idea

Public schooling often feels managerial because it is. Here’s the mechanism:

Overflow: When the number of children outpaces the supply of trained teachers.
Government Reactivity: Instead of redesigning environments or lowering ratios, policymakers add new frameworks (SEL, behavior rubrics, diagnostics).
Managerial Schooling: Teachers end up spending more time on compliance and emotional rituals than on competence and mastery.

It’s not that SEL or diagnostics are inherently bad. They are reactive tools — ways to stabilize large groups when teaching capacity is overwhelmed (Tyack & Cuban, 1995).

A Historical Problem

This isn’t new. America has always been prone to overflow.

The Baby Boom (1946–1964): Millions of children entered schools faster than teacher training programs could keep up. Class sizes of 40, 50, even 60 students were not unusual. Instead of radically increasing teacher pipelines, government layered on new standards and programs (Urban & Wagoner, 2009).
Head Start (1965): Launched during the War on Poverty, Head Start tried to give disadvantaged children a “head start” in readiness. But it also marked the beginning of large-scale frameworks and assessments in early childhood — a managerial response to overflow (Zigler & Muenchow, 1992).
Teaching Strategies GOLD (2010): This widely used assessment tool itemized “manages feelings” as an observable skill (Teaching Strategies, 2010). Teachers now had to score children on how they handled emotions — not because emotions are bad, but because measurement is cheaper than lowering ratios.
Early Learning Outcomes Framework (2015): Head Start codified “Social and Emotional Development” as a domain, with subdomains like “emotional functioning.” Overnight, feelings became curriculum (Office of Head Start, 2015).

Step by step, pragmatic group-readiness skills (“share toys, follow routines”) were replaced with feelings-heavy standards (“identify sadness, label frustration”). The shift wasn’t driven by developmental science. It was driven by overflow.

Continuous and Episodic Amplifiers

Some groups have felt overflow more intensely.

Continuous Amplifier: Slavery left behind reproductive residues that ensured African American families carried a legacy of overflow. Enslaved men and women were hypersexualized; reproduction was commodified. After emancipation, these patterns were not “retuned,” and high fertility combined with systemic disinvestment produced chronic overflow in Black schools (Morgan, 2004; White, 1985).
Episodic Amplifiers: Immigration and migration waves repeatedly swelled school populations.
- Indigenous children forced into boarding schools (Adams, 1995).
- European immigrants crowding early 20th-century cities (Tyack, 1974).
- Mexican and Puerto Rican families migrating mid-century (Spring, 2016).
- Asian immigrants after 1965 (Urban & Wagoner, 2009).
- The Great Migration of Black families from the South to the North (Wilkerson, 2010).

Every time, schools faced new children faster than they could prepare new teachers. Every time, the system managed overflow through assimilation, remediation, diagnostics, or discipline.

Why Montessori and Reggio Emilia Look Different

Compare this with competence-first environments like Montessori or Reggio Emilia.

Ratios are low. A Montessori classroom isn’t designed for 30+ students; it’s built for manageable groups (Montessori, 1967/1995).
Competence drives regulation. Children learn to concentrate through meaningful work, not by reciting “I’m mad” in circle time (Edwards, Gandini, & Forman, 1998).
Tuition functions as overflow prevention. High costs aren’t just elitism; they keep ratios sustainable and fund teacher training.

Public schools can’t filter by price. They have to take everyone. And when the overflow hits, they react.

Child in yellow shirt playing with colorful blocks on a green table. Wooden chairs surround. Carpet with swirly patterns. Playful mood.

Compulsory Schooling Does Not Equal Compulsory Overflow

Here’s the crucial distinction.

Compulsory schooling laws mean you must educate your child.
But they do not mean you must put your child in the overflow-reactive system. Parents have options: private schools, homeschooling, microschools, co-ops (Kaestle, 1983).

That’s why I often say:

Public school did not choose your children. You chose your children for public school.

For many families, that choice is about resources. But it is still a choice. And it should be an informed one.

Why This Matters

For teachers: If you feel like a manager instead of an educator, ORTS explains why. You are working inside a system shaped by overflow. It’s not personal failure.
For parents: Compulsory education does not require compulsory overflow. But if you default to the government option without preparation, you are choosing a reactive system.
For equity: True fairness isn’t just about access to schooling. It’s about protection from overflow-reactive environments that substitute compliance for competence.

The Bottom Line

America’s identity as a nation of slavery and immigration virtually guaranteed cycles of overflow. Each wave of children — Baby Boomers, immigrants, migrants — overwhelmed teacher pipelines. The government reacted not by investing in competence-first environments, but by layering managerial frameworks.

The result is the system we live with today: teachers managing, children being managed, and families feeling stuck.

But naming the pattern matters. With ORTS, we can finally see the system for what it is — and begin to imagine something different.

References

Adams, D. W. (1995). Education for extinction: American Indians and the boarding school experience, 1875–1928. University Press of Kansas.
Bowles, S., & Gintis, H. (1976). Schooling in capitalist America: Educational reform and the contradictions of economic life. Basic Books.
Brown, M. A. (2025). Overflow–Reactivity Theory of Schooling (ORTS): A structural and historical framework for understanding managerial schooling. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17072495
Edwards, C., Gandini, L., & Forman, G. (Eds.). (1998). The hundred languages of children: The Reggio Emilia approach—advanced reflections (2nd ed.). Ablex.
Kaestle, C. F. (1983). Pillars of the Republic: Common schools and American society, 1780–1860. Hill and Wang.
Montessori, M. (1995). The absorbent mind. Henry Holt. (Original work published 1949)
Morgan, J. L. (2004). Laboring women: Reproduction and gender in New World slavery. University of Pennsylvania Press.
Office of Head Start. (2015). Head Start early learning outcomes framework: Ages birth to five. U.S. Department of Health & Human Services.
Spring, J. (2016). American education (16th ed.). Routledge.
Teaching Strategies. (2010). Teaching Strategies GOLD objectives for development & learning. Teaching Strategies, LLC.
Tyack, D. (1974). The one best system: A history of American urban education. Harvard University Press.
Tyack, D., & Cuban, L. (1995). Tinkering toward utopia: A century of public school reform. Harvard University Press.
Urban, W. J., & Wagoner, J. L. (2009). American education: A history (4th ed.). Routledge.
White, D. G. (1985). Ar’n’t I a woman? Female slaves in the plantation South. W.W. Norton.
Wilkerson, I. (2010). The warmth of other suns: The epic story of America’s great migration. Random House.
Zigler, E., & Muenchow, S. (1992). Head Start: The inside story of America’s most successful educational experiment. Basic Books.