School, both as a physical and a social space, has been built, constructed, and shaped by adults to serve students since its origin. Traditionally, all rules of the schooling game, curriculum, routines and rituals as well as trivial decisions like the colors of the walls or the lunch menu are determined by adults at all school levels. Within this role distribution students, on the other hand, have been assigned a passive role which extends to “consumers,” “products,” “raw materials to be processed,” or “blank slates” (Cook-Sather, 2002; Flutter & Rudduck, 2004; Lansdown, 2001; Levin, 1998; Rudduck & McIntyre, 2007). They are expected to fulfill the expectations of the adults and obliged to follow the orders told by them without questioning. Even though they are the “crowd” (Jackson, 2004) in the schools, they are not visible and have limited or no space regarding the decisions that affect their life directly.  Jackson (2004) accentuates the clear power distribution between the weak (students) and the powerful (teachers) within schools and classrooms and he depicts how students come to accept it:

      starting from the first day of schooling, student has given up much of their autonomy … and he learns   to be passive and to acquiesce to the network of rules, regulations, and routines in which he is embedded. He learns to tolerate petty frustrations and accept the plans and policies of higher authorities, even when their rationale is unexplained and their meaning unclear (Jackson, 2004: 99).

Students spend a considerable amount of time in their lives under this power structure embedded in the daily life of the schools. While they keep the status quo by complying with the power structure, they accumulate experiences and develop perceptions and attitudes that help them survive the “daily grind” (Jackson, 2004) at school. Jackson (1997) describes schools and classrooms as fairly stable places with minimum change in physical, social, and educational contexts as they reproduce the existing routines and rituals as well as the physical structure. Even the physical structure of schools and classrooms are models of order and reflect the hierarchical role distinction between students and teachers (Lambert, 2009). Thus, aforementioned traditional structure still haunts the current school systems despite the efforts to give students a “voice” (Blossing, 2005; Cook-Sather, 2002; Feichter, 2013; Levin, 1998; Lodge, 2005; Lansdown, 2001; Mager & Nowak, 2012). Even today, when child-centered educational reforms are on the front burner globally, children experience rare opportunities to make their voices heard, or to become involved in the decision-making process that concerns their lives, despite the widely emphasized concept of the “active role” attributed to students in modern education systems. It is obvious that currently a wide gap exists between the discourse/policies and the implications at the school level.

Within this framework, this paper aims at providing a closer look at the power structure embedded in the routines and daily grind of the New Middle Schools (NMS-Neue Mittle Schule) in Lower Austria by investigating student participation in school decision making and the influence of this participation through the perception of the students. Two main questions drive this chapter: What is the level of student participation at the school/classroom level in NMS and how much influence do students have in the school decision making?

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