Remember the Titans

Kellae Daniels

Remember the Titans

MSA 601

Midterm

September 19, 2012

In the last 50 years, educational organizations have turned to the judicial system to reform and endorse equal educational opportunities. In areas such as desegregation and school finance reform, the courts have been the leader in protecting the rights of underrepresented student groups and ruling in favor of educational transformation (Plank & Boyd, 1994 as cited in Superfine 2010, p. 108). However, specifically in the area of equal educational opportunity, the courts cannot carry these changes out alone. A mixture of organizations including legislatures, school districts, schools and teachers, are commonly drawn in by the court’s judgment and are called to lead. The film Remember the Titans depicts the effects of one the major court ruling in modern history, Brown vs. The Board of Education. In the film, one white and all the black high schools were shutdown and those students were sent to T.C. Williams High School under federal mandate to integrate. The story was told through the perceptions of the football team. Based on factual events, the team grows to be the unifying representation for the community as the boys and the adults learn to depend on and have confidence in each other. The films focuses on the leadership of Herman Boone. The movie highlights matters of diversity, organizational socialization, and self-efficacy and enacted and espoused values. These concepts are reviewed in the Kreitner and Kinicki text Organizational Behavior (8th edition) and examples in the film that represent these concepts will be discussed.

Espoused values are unobservable (Rousseau, 1990), however documents are observable and the content within those documents can provide some insight of what an organization's espoused values entails. In the film, the order of the court to integrate would be considered the document which defines the espoused values the school district and schools within...