Rethinking the management of secondary schools in a chaotic external environment

Abstract

Secondary schools as part of the totality of the open social system organizations depend largely on society for their inputs like students, teachers, finance and information as well as material resources to enable them produce outputs for the benefit of the wider society. Unfortunately, sometimes, the external environment becomes unstable, turbulent or chaotic as a result of economic, political, legal, demographic, technological, religious and or cultural factors which if not properly managed, may undermine the schools’ internal operations leading to poor output. It is to the interest of this paper therefore, to justify the school as an open social system, the school external environment and the ways in which factors of the external environment compel secondary schools to complex or chaotic management imbalance. At the same time, the paper recommends that the school managers should seek to adopt both internal and external coping strategies so as to remedy the situation for the production of highly meaningful outputs.