The Shaky Foundation of School System Structures

The Shaky Foundation of School System Structures

The way that leaders conceptualize the purpose of their enterprise will, in the long run, shape the way their organizations are envisioned and structured. Out of these visions, structures (rules, roles, and relationships) emerge, meanings evolve, and values are realized and made manifest.

In the preceding chapter I suggested that three different, often competing and clearly contradictory, conceptions of the purpose of schools have shaped present thinking about the issues confronting those who would reform and improve our schools. In early days of the republic, most educational leaders assumed that the purpose of schooling was to promote republican/Protestant morality and develop the kind of literacy thought to be essential to fulfilling one’s civic duties. Such a view of the purpose of schooling persists even today, and there are many who subscribe to it. During the period following the Civil War, however, another concept of schooling gained a significant following. In this emerging view, the purpose of schools was thought to be to Americanize the immigrant child and to select, sort, and standardize students according to their ability to fit into the urban factory system.

Partly in reaction to the view that schools should be designed to serve primarily economic and chauvinistic ends, and partly as an outgrowth of the general progressive movement that spread through America during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many educational leaders and some political leaders articulated yet another purpose for schools. These progressives began to look to the schools to serve social reform purposes as well as political, economic, and cultural ends. Rather than selecting and sorting children, schools were to remediate social ills. By the early twentieth century, and perhaps even more so by the 1930s, many thought that the “real” purpose of schools was to serve as an engine of social reform-a means by which the injustices inherent in an urban industrial society might be redressed. This chapter explains how these differing conceptions of the purpose of schools translated into different visions of schools and how these differing visions led to the chaotic, confusing, and internally contradictory structures that typify schooling in America today.

The School as Tribal Center

Implicit in much of the early thinking about the nature and purpose of education in America was a nearly religious reverence for its possibilities. Indeed, much of the mythology of America is tied to the view that education is not only liberating but essential for liberty. Thus the survival of the republic depended on the young coming to understand and respect the traditions upon which the republic was based. And it was also essential that these same young people be literate enough to fulfill their civic duties.

The schools that were created, the so called common schools, had many of the characteristics of a tribal center designed to induct the young into the traditions of the tribe. Citizenship and cultural enlightenment became the basis for the school curriculum. The curriculum became, in effect, a repository of the lore of the republic- the white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant republic. And the school became the center of the tribe or, more accurately, the center of the community that was assumed to exist and which it was assumed the schools were designed to serve.

It is not surprising that the 'study of ancient cultures, especially those in Greece and Rome, was the central feature in the education of the young, for it was to these cultures that educated Americans looked for guidance in the republican experiment. Nor should it be surprising that classics of English literature had an important place in schools, for in this literature one finds set forth the values of Anglo-Saxon culture. Finally, it is not surprising that the early McGuffey’s Readers contained Protestant morality tales, for America was, after all, a Protestant nation, or so it was held.

If the curriculum is viewed as the lore of the tribe, then there is a certain logic to the assumption that teaching is a sacred profession; for those who hold and transmit the traditions of the tribe have a sacred role. And, as if to confirm the sacred image of teaching, many teachers in the nineteenth century were products of women s seminaries. It was, in fact, from these young women that many early teacher training institutions (commonly referred to as normal schools) got their inspiration and direction. The sons of New England may have gone to Harvard and then to the missions of the West and Hawaii, but the daughters went to the seminary and then to the frontier to keep school. Of course, some of the sons took their considerable talents to the schools as well. And many of the sons of affluent families “in the west” went eat to get a university degree and returned to their native states to be schoolmasters, principals, and superintendents. If the teacher was a priestess, the schoolmaster was surely a high priest. Furthermore, like most members of sacred professions, teachers and “schoolmen” were seen as in the community -but not of it -in Willard Waller’s term “friendly strangers”(Waller, 1961).

 Such a view, of course, had implications for the rules, roles, and relationships that would typify schools. Teachers may not literally have had to take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, but teachers were not well paid (concern about pay was viewed by many as a sign of weak commitment to the profession) and female teachers signed contracts that precluded marriage and regulated their courting behavior. As Waller has observed, teachers were viewed as sexless creatures who, if they had offspring at all, had them by some asexual process like budding. Later, as the number of children outstripped the number of women willing to forgo marriage, the rules were changed a bit. Women could marry, but they could not get pregnant - that is, they were not permitted to teach beyond the first trimester.

Similarly, male schoolteachers were looked upon with some suspicion and considerable disdain (mixed with respect and awe). Those who yearn for the good old days when all teachers were competent, committed, and respected would do well to remember that Ichabod Crane is as much a part of American folk stories as is Miss Dove. Indeed, in 1932 Willard Waller characterized the stereo- lyric of the teaching occupation as an occupation comprised of un-marriageable women and unsalable men.

Students, of course, were seen as neophytes to be inducted into the tribe. The respect owed teachers was respect for elders and their presumed wisdom. The concept of in loco parentis had its origins in the tribal images that were held of schools and the schooling process. Likewise, the invention of the lay school board combined a reverence for democratic institutions such as the New England town meeting with an abiding faith in the assumption that those who were elected would themselves be representative of the elders of the tribe. School boards would work, it was held, because those who were on the board would be community leaders. Those who invented lay school boards did not imagine a day when election to the school board was a way of becoming a community leader. For the early designers of America s schools, service on a lay board was a duty community leaders would bear; board membership was not viewed as a political opportunity or a chance to make a statement.

Like all characterizations, the vision of the school as tribal center breaks down when put to empirical tests. Certainly the ideas undergirding the common school, the common curriculum, normal schools, and lay school boards were not born out of tribal instincts. Teachers in many communities never heard of, let alone attended, a female seminary, and many schoolmasters never attended a real university (of which there were none before the Civil War). But teachers did look upon teaching as a calling and a social service, something akin to the ministry. And early boards of education were as much concerned with the moral competence of those they hired as they were with their proficiency in the classroom. There was certainly much in the curriculum in addition to the lore and myths that undergirded a Protestant republican view of the world, but one need only inspect the Original McGuffey s Readers to understand that republican morality and Protestant values-were never far from the classroom.

Certainly there are few responsible leaders in education today who would take America s schools back to the common school days or return to McGuffey s Readers, though some would indeed go that far. Certainly few believe that teachers should take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, though there are many who find teachers’ concerns with salary issues a very disturbing trend. After all, such critics seem to ask, who wants to be ministered to by a priest who is more worried about his paycheck than the souls of his flock?

The common school has disappeared from America except in a few isolated areas. Teachers and principals, superintendents and boards of education, no longer occupy the same position they once held in the life of the typical American community. Yet there is a residue of sentiment shaped by myth folklore, and oral tradition which suggests that if only America’s schools could return to those days of yesteryear when teacher were dedicated and well educated and every parent supported the school, all would be well in America’s schoolhouses.

The School as Factory

The influx of non-English-speaking and non-Protestant people, urbanization, and industrialization all had major impacts on American education. The small New England village with its assumed value consensus simply did not translate into the increasingly multiracial, multiethnic world of urban America. And as schools came to be expected to serve economic as well as cultural and civic purposes, the image that educators came to hold of themselves and their enterprises began to shift as well. While once the common school was viewed as a community center where the young were sent to be socialized as well as educated, the urban high school, junior high school, and, to a lesser extent; the elementary schools came to be viewed as institutions to be managed and a set of educational experiences to be organized. As Callahan (1963) has observed, School leaders, like the industrial leaders they looked to as models and guides, sought the Holy Grail of scientific management. Efficiency became the prime value; differentiation, standardization, control, and rationality became the operating guides.

Schools designed to select and sort begin from the assumption that standards must be established and then maintained. And it must be one standard for all, else standardization is impossible, or so some think. Thus a new concept was introduced to American education: the concept of school failure. The concept of failure was rendered operational in schools by a number of novel devices for example the graded school system and the graded reader. These two devices alone were powerful tools for the introduction of failure into America’s schools. By introducing the notion of school grades (first grade, second grade, and so on), it was almost assured that some would not “make the grade.”  Indeed, educators who insisted that children should not fail were viewed as soft and were later seen as the culprits who caused the supposed erosion of standards in America’s schools. How it was asked, “could schools have standards if- no one failed?”

The vision of the school that began to emerge in the late nineteenth century came to full flower 1n the early twentieth centu1y with the invention of the American public high school, the tracked curriculum, and the emergence of vocational schools: the school as factory. In this image, the curriculum is an assembly line for students: a fast curriculum for fast students, a modified curriculum for the not so fast, and a vocational curriculum for others. In some schools, these curriculum differences were referred to as the college preparatory curriculum the general curriculum, and the vocational curriculun1.Frorn among the redbirds, bluebirds, and buzzards of the first grade reading groups would come the “wood chippers” of industrial arts and the “grinds” of the gifted programs.

In this vision, students are viewed as products to be molded tested against common standa1ds, and inspected ca1efully before being passed on to the next workbench for further processing. And because students were (and sometimes still are) viewed as products of schooling, they were viewed as bringing the basic raw material to schools. The quality of this raw material - the student’s aptitude for succeeding in the college preparatory curriculum - is, of course, determined primarily by family background, euphemistically referred to in education circles and among social scientists as socioeconomic status (SES). Children from poor families simply are no; good raw material for the educational enterprise. On the Other hand, the children of the affluent do quite nicely in school. And thus the variance in school products from slums and suburbs can be explained - or so some would argue.

If students are products and a student’s background determines the quality of the raw material, who then are teachers and principals and what is the role of the superintendent and board of education? There are at least two conceptions of teachers that are consistent with the factory image of schooling. First there is the view that teachers are, or should be, highly skilled technocrats: professionals in the sense that engineers, accountants, and architects are professionals. A second view is that teachers, in general, are not very skilled, not very insightful, and within the context of "real" professions such as law and medicine not very bright.

In schools where the first view of teaching prevails, emphasis is placed on technique and technical training. Curriculum design and curriculum supervision become centerpieces in the control structure of schools. In such schools it is assumed that the technical skills of teachers are sufficient to do things right, but it is up to others to judge what teachers ought to do. Hence the quest for the one right method of instruction. Where the second conception of teachers is operative, the control structures of the school are the control structures of the factory: tight supervision and product inspection. Curriculum design and the quest for teacher-proof materials dominate the thinking of many central office functionaries, but the curriculum guides must be made simple for teachers as well as students. Above all, the curriculum must be articulated with the tests that will be used to inspect the students who are the products of this controlled and rational process.

The role of the principal in the school as factory shifts from chief priest of the tribal center to manager of the industrial center. Skill in supervision becomes a highly valued commodity, as does the ability to manage time effectively. The ability to coordinate complex schedules for others to follow becomes the quintessential skill that a principal, especially a high school principal, must possess and display.

The superintendent becomes the plant manager working for a board that sometimes views itself as the executive board of the company. Indeed, some school districts go so far as to pay board members a salary so they can be fairly compensated for their management and executive responsibilities. The board collectively operates as the chief executive for the school system; the superintendent, like the plant manager, is employed to do what the “boss”  assigns.

            Like the tribal image, the factory image does not describe the empirical reality of school life. In even the most factory-like schools, some teachers continue to function as moral and intellectual leaders rather than as technocrats. And certainly some teachers are not very effective technocrats in spite of efforts to make them so. Similarly, there are principals who function as leaders rather than managers and as coaches rather than supervisors. The factory image, however, makes it mo1e difficult for all of these things to happen. Indeed, when they do happen and are discovered they are causes of celebration in the press and among researchers. Researchers have made much of the fact, for example, that there are schools in large bureaucratic school systems that do work - if by work one simply means that such schools do produce higher test scores, especially in the early grades and with poor children. These schools are sometimes referred to as effective schools.  Generally speaking, though, researchers find that the principals and teachers in these schools find ways to get around the existing bureaucracy and impose a different structure.

There are any number of boards of education who do not endeavor to manage schools and who approach their jobs as moral and intellectual leaders in the community. But far too many school board members see their position as an opportunity to run something an opportunity that some may never have experienced prior to serving on the board.

There are superintendents who are visionary leaders, who cause trouble by insisting on confronting problems and changing schools to deal with the problems. There are superintendents who view their job as creating conditions in which others make good decisions rather than reserving all decision making to themselves. But such superintendents are all too rare. Most try to run a tight ship, make sure that problems are concealed if not solved, and keep the assembly line running with minimum downtime.

The School as Hospital

A third vision of the school, the school as hospital, grows out of the perception that the legitimate purpose of schools is to redress the pain and suffering imposed on children by the urban industrial society. In this view, injustice and inequity" in society place some children at a disadvantage or at risk. It is the school s obligation to ensure that these children receive an even break in life. And education is the great equalizer.

Poor children do not bring to school the resources that the more affluent bring, but poor children are entitled to the same education. To achieve this end, schools must concentrate on the needs of the children. Indeed the purpose of school is to meet the needs of children, however those need are manifest. If children are hungry, feed them; if they are ill- clothed, clothe them. Personal hygiene should be taught, sex education is a necessity, and teachers must carefully study each child so that every student receives precisely the treatment he or she needs.

On the surface, few would argue with this view of the schools. Yet anyone who has been around the school business knows that the hospital view of schooling is, nowadays, more the property of professional educators than of the lay public at large. Indeed, many critics believe that the real problem is that schools have gotten away from their purpose - to educate children - and have taken on services that should be provided by other agencies. Many educators, on the other hand, are adamant in their view that equity goals require a commitment to children beyond that which the factory-oriented schools would provide, as well as an awareness of cultural diversity that is seldom reflected in the programs of those who view the schools as tribal centers. So many educators are committed to this view, in fact, that they frequently launch campaigns to advance their cause among their peers and with other groups as well. The recent concern with “at-risk youth,” for example, gets much of its energy from educators and the organizations that represent them (such as the National Education Association).

What would the school look like if it were organized to treat every child and meet his or her needs regardless of cost? First, it is clear that the teaching occupation would have to be professionalized. Teachers would view themselves as service-delivery professionals, much as physicians and lawyers are service-delivery professionals. The primary obligation of such professionals is to meet the needs of clients. Clients place trust in service-delivery professionals because they assume that the professional is a member of a self-policing occupational group that has command of a body of skills and knowledge over which the group exercises a relative monopoly. Such professionals need a great deal of decision-making autonomy, because only their peers are in a position to judge the quality of their performance or so it is sometimes argued.

Students in this model are clients to be served. Theoretically, at least, the hospital model elevates the importance of a student from that of product though it keeps the student in a dependent role that is, the role of client dependent on the expert. The curriculum becomes a prescription, and the ideal prescription is highly individualized. Heavy emphasis is given to diagnostic testing and the use of scientific instruments. Indeed, schools oriented toward the hospital model would favor intervention strategies (treatments) based on research and derived from clinical trials.

The role of principals, superintendents, and board members in the hospital model becomes more problematic. In some instances, principals are seen as chiefs of staff; in other cases, they are viewed as functionaries who manage the necessary bureaucracy. The role of the superintendent and the board varies as well. In some instances, those who take the hospital image seriously reject the idea that lay boards have any real role in the governance of a truly professionally run school. More typically, a governance structure made up of professionals and laypersons is advocated.

One reason for the ambiguity regarding the top-level governance of schools is that hyper-professionalized teaching is further from empirical reality than either the tribal image or the factory image. Put differently, educators have sufficient daily experience with the image of the school as tribal center and the school as factory to suggest what the image would mean in practice. They have less experience with teaching as a fully developed service delivery profession.

The idea of teaching as a service-delivery profession with students as clients and schools as hospitals is not, however, totally alien to educational thought and practice. The argument underlying the Holmes Group recommendations on reform in teacher education and the role of major research institutions in the preparation of teachers is based, in large part, on the idea that teaching is, .or should be, in many ways parallel to professions like law and medicine. Indeed, the idea of the professional development school (an ideal I helped to formulate) is based on the concept of the teaching hospital.

Much of the literature written by special educators, and much of the policy surrounding the education of the handicapped, uses language strikingly reminiscent of medicine; words like diagnosis and prescription are used often, and the term instrument seems ever present. Nowhere,  in fact, is pretentious clinical language, the language of the laboratory and the hospital, more in use than in special education and remedial programs the two places 1n school where one is most likely to find academic “casualties.”

 Those who are critical of the idea that teachers should be afforded professional status frequently use three arguments. First they argue that teachers do not have command of a special body of knowledge (as do physicians and lawyers) and that there is in fact no special body of knowledge available to teaching. Pretensions in the field of educational research are precisely that. Even if there is something worth knowing, the nature of teacher education is such that few teachers would have learned it.

Second, they argue that the concept of lay control is central to education in America, and the professionalization of teaching, especially if it proceeded along the lines pursued by law and medicine, would be a threat to lay control.

Third, they argue that professionalization of teaching would lead to anarchy, since teachers would be in a position to prescribe whatever they think the student needs, regardless of the directives of administrators or the commandments of the school board. Indeed, administrators would be working for the teachers, rather than the teachers for them.

At this point I will not consider the merits of the school as hospital, nor will I consider the merits of the arguments against professionalizing teaching. I will observe, however, that of all the issues in the restructuring argument likely to raise debate, the concept of teaching as a profession like law and the concept of teacher empowerment are certain to produce strong reactions, both pro and con.

The Problem Defined

America’s educators have had considerable success in running schools where there is value consensus. The school as tribal center has a long tradition in America, and where the assumptions upon which such schools are based are reflected in the community, such schools still work - if by work one means satisfies parents and keeps community leaders relatively happy. Many private schools and some magnet schools achieve such homogeneity of view by the simple expedient of accepting only children whose parents value education as the school defines it.

American educators also know how to make schools work to achieve effective selecting and sorting. The solution, if one wants to call it that, is to establish high (or at least rigorous) standards for performance and deportment and then to reward those who comply and punish those who do not. From time to time, principals  turn inner city schools around  by asserting the tight control of a shop foreman, setting clear standards, and inspecting; inspecting, inspecting. These principals are usually willing to accept casualties in the form of dropouts, expulsions, and discipline referrals. So long as the community agrees that the school’s purpose is to establish standards and determine who meets them, factory like schools work as well as tribal centers - at least these schools work for the children who survive them.

There are, of course, schools organized on principles strikingly similar to those governing hospitals. Some of the university based laboratory schools had features something like hospitals, as did a number of schools represented in the celebrated Eight Year Study (Aiken, 1942). Students in these experimental schools generally did as well as or better in academic areas than students in other schools. Students in the experimental schools were generally superior to students from traditional schools in creativity, the ability to make independent judgments, and the ability to work in groups. Despite these successes, these schools eventually abandoned their experimental programs. Why? Largely because they found the norms and procedures used to support the selecting and sorting function almost impossible to resist. For example, many of the schools in the Eight Year Study did not report letter grades for students, a practice that caused concern on college and university campuses. Initially some leading colleges 'provided special waivers to students from these experimental schools, but eventually the schools began to be pressured to indicate "what grade they would give the student if the school were to give grades.

The problem, of course, is that in the real world of public schools, circumstances contrive to make such clear pursuit of historic purposes difficult. The value consensus assumed by the tribal center image seldom exists even in neighborhood, to say nothing of an entire urban school district. In many of America’s urban communities, teachers are not even viewed as “friendly strangers,” for they are unknown to everyone except their immediate peers and a few involved parents. Urban America permits anonymity for teachers as well as for parents and children, Anonymity is not, however, a foundation for building the kind of moral base that will sustain a sacred profession.

Schools that become too effective at selecting and sorting eventually become known as sources of high dropout rates, a major problem in the politics of American education. As it becomes clear that those who do not meet the standard, whatever the standard is, are most likely to come from families that are poor and of particular ethnic extraction, community pressure will mount to ensure equal access to educational opportunities. And, over time, measures to restructure the old factory to serve the selecting and sorting function while meeting social service needs will lead to friction, conflict, and increasing inefficiency. It is to deal with these frictions that tracking arose, and it is in response to these frictions that much of the present-day special education enterprise has developed.

The Public Reaction

Policymakers have recognized the problems described here. The response has been of several varieties. The first, and most specious, response is to argue that teachers have become lazier or more incompetent than teachers in the good old days, and what is needed is a good dose of accountability coupled with merit pay. The assumption here is that, in the past, American educators knew how to teach the children of the poor, as well as children without strong family support, to read, write, and cipher. Some poor children did succeed in school, just as some now succeed. Indeed, a significant proportion of today s teachers themselves come from among the respectable poor in rural America and blue-collar families in urban America.

What many critics overlook, though, is that for good or ill many more students are sticking with school than in the past.. One can argue that they are not, learning what they should learn: but those who did not attend school in the past certainly learned less. In 1920, some 22 percent of the twenty- -five to' twenty- nine- year-olds in America had completed four years of high school. By 1940 the number had increased to 41 percent. By 1960 the figure was 64 percent. By 1985, some 87 percent of all twenty-five to twenty-nine-year-old Americans had completed four years of high school.

Whether schools are doing more for children today than in the past may be debatable, but schools are surely doing no less. At least they are keeping more children in contact with the school where something worthwhile might happen. (Unfortunately, it can be argued that bad things might happen as well.)

 A second policy initiative is to increase choice for parents through such devices as vouchers and tuition tax credits. The idea is that parents will choose schools that best suit the needs of their children or are consistent with the parents’ values. In effect, some, policymakers and reformers believe that vouchers and tuition tax credits might create artificial communities of interest and value, much like the communities that many private schools now create through selective admission standards. In such cases, assumptions about the way schools should be organized and managed could be quite consistent with the assumptions upon which the common school was based updated to take into account modem technology. More likely, tuition tax credits and vouchers will lead to self-selection into schools that are themselves organized to select and sort. The self- selection would be on the basis of decisions regarding which schools had standards appropriate to the child, that is, schools where the child could make the grade.

On the surface, permitting parents to select schools where their children can make the grade sounds like a noble notion, and in some circumstances it could be. So long as the dominant mode of school organization is aimed toward selecting and sorting, though, the poor and uninformed will choose schools with low standards and the Well-to-do will choose schools with high standards. What we need are schools that have high standards but are designed to ensure that every child, or nearly every child, will be able to meet those standards.

Concluding Remarks

If public education is to survive as a vital force in American1ife,there must be a reformulation of the school’s purpose That reformulation must contain elements of all three of the prior formulations - tribal center, factory, and hospital - for each of these statements of purpose still has meaning in American society.

Those who would deny that schools must promote a common culture do not understand that schools are not only designed to develop individuals; schools are also established as the means by which societies, especially democratic societies, perpetuate the conditions of their existence.

Those who would deny that schools should serve the purpose of civic literacy overlook one of the most basic understandings upon which the American republic is based - that liberty and ignorance cannot long abide each other Either ignorance will be overcome or liberty will be eroded. And literacy is essential to ensure the defeat of ignorance.

Those who would deny that schools are places of work and that schools do serve economic as well as cultural and civic ends must overlook the fact that, for the first time in the history of humankind, in America at least, education is essential to livelihood. There was a time, not so long ago, when 'an illiterate person could find productive employment. This is less true today than in the past. Even relatively low-status positions in the service sector require a level of literacy not required of the short-order cook at Ptomaine Tommy s Diner (21 place where I worked and ate). To use technologically based consumer products and to assemble children s toys at Christmas, one needs more ability to work with symbols and ideas than our grandfathers needed to carve wooden dolls and our grandmothers needed to knit socks.

Women and men who do not work easily with ideas, symbols, and abstractions, who cannot solve problems in a self-conscious way, and who have no categories into which .they can place information will find themselves in difficulty – not only in the workplace, but in the kitchen, the nursery, and even a bass boat. In this age of fact: as C. Wright Mills (1959) has indicated, it is not more facts that people needs. Citizens need ideas, concepts, and refined sensibilities to make sense out the facts that bombard them daily and overwhelm their instincts as well as their understanding.

Finally, anyone who fails to appreciate the demand for equity in the pursuit of excellence and anyone who believes that academic success is simply a matter of hard work and individual initiative must also believe that the poor deserve to be poor. There are people who believe such things, but this book is not for them. Certainly academic success, or any other kind of success, demands commitment, discipline, and initiative. Schools cannot make children successful, but schools can create an opportunity structure where children will succeed. Schools cannot, for example, provide students with supportive parents. But schools can be organized to provide significant adult support to children who do not have supportive parents.

 In sum, what we need is a formulation of schools that honors the cultural and civic purposes suggested by the tribal center image of schools, 'the purposeful activity and economic link suggested by the factory metaphor, and the nurturing and child-centered emphasis suggested by the concept of the school as hospital. Above all, we need a formulation of purpose that will lead to a vision which will enhance and empower students as well as honor and reward those to whom society turns to educate the youth: teachers, principals, superintendents, and all who work in and about school.

In the next chapter I formulate a version of such a purpose and describe the image of school that would flow from this formulation. Subsequently, I will explain how such a vision might be translated into reality.