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1 – 10 of over 16000Michael R. Ford and Douglas M. Ihrke
The purpose of this paper is to determine the differing ways in which nonprofit charter and traditional public school board members define the concept of accountability in the…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to determine the differing ways in which nonprofit charter and traditional public school board members define the concept of accountability in the school or schools they oversee. The findings speak to the governing consequences of shifting oversight of public education from democratically elected bodies to unelected nonprofit governing boards.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors use originally collected survey data from democratically elected school board members and nonprofit charter school board members in Minnesota to test for differences in how these two populations view accountability. Open-ended survey questions are coded according to a previously used accountability typology.
Findings
The authors find that charter school board members are more likely than traditional public school board members to define accountability through high stakes testing as opposed to staff professionalization and bureaucratic systems.
Originality/value
The results speak to the link between board governance structure and accountability in the public education sector, providing new understanding on the way in which non-elected charter school board members view their accountability function.
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Ibrahim Duyar, Nancy Ras and Carolyn L. Pearson
Teachers constitute one of the largest groups of knowledge workers. The purpose of this paper is to examine the antecedents and outcomes of teachers’ task and extra-role…
Abstract
Purpose
Teachers constitute one of the largest groups of knowledge workers. The purpose of this paper is to examine the antecedents and outcomes of teachers’ task and extra-role performance (ERP) under two different autonomy regimes in charter and regular public schools. A special emphasis was given to the ERP of teachers. Both the predictors and outcomes of teacher work performance were comparatively investigated in these two different school environments.
Design/methodology/approach
By applying a social-cognitive perspective and a causal comparative design, the study comparatively tested the reciprocal relationships among the study variables in public and charter schools. The clustered sample included 812 public school teachers and 112 charter school teachers.
Findings
The findings revealed that the predictors and outcomes of teachers’ task and ERP have differing dynamics in these two distinct types of public schools. The School Type, which represented the differences in school autonomy between public and charter schools, appeared to be the strongest differentiating factor across two groups of schooling. Both types of teacher performance (task and extra role) in charter schools outweighed their counterparts in public schools. Similarities and differences were observed on the predictors and outcomes of teacher work performance.
Originality/value
The current study contributed to the scant literature on the effects of school autonomy on teacher task and ERP. A clear understanding on the predictors and outcomes of teacher work performance under two different school autonomy regimes may guide practitioners and policymakers in their efforts to bring public schools to a more competitive edge.
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The NEA did not begin as a teachers’ organization, as such. Rather, the organization began in 1870 as a federation of four organizations representing distinctly different…
Abstract
The NEA did not begin as a teachers’ organization, as such. Rather, the organization began in 1870 as a federation of four organizations representing distinctly different perspectives: the American Normal School Association, the National Association of School Superintendents, the Central College Association, and the National Teachers Association (Elsbree, 1939, pp. 264–265, 500). Only the last of these groups, the NTA, formed in 1857 from 10 state teachers’ associations, actually represented teachers, and for roughly the first 100 years of its existence, the NEA was controlled by administrators rather than teachers, frequently worked against teachers’ interests (especially when they conflicted with administrative or supervisory priorities), and opposed collective bargaining. Although the NEA lobbied fairly effectively on the state level on issues such as increasing expenditures on education, consolidating and professionalizing administration of school districts, and establishing certification and standards for teachers, its unwillingness or inability to support candidates for federal elections made it relatively less successful on the national level.
Mimi Engel, Marisa Cannata and F. Chris Curran
Over the past decade, policy researchers and advocates have called for the decentralization of teacher hiring decisions from district offices to school principals. The purpose of…
Abstract
Purpose
Over the past decade, policy researchers and advocates have called for the decentralization of teacher hiring decisions from district offices to school principals. The purpose of this paper is to document the trends across two and a half decades in principals’ reported influence over teacher hiring decisions in the USA and explore how and whether principal influence varies systematically across contexts.
Design/methodology/approach
Regression analysis with secondary data using seven waves of nationally representative data from the Schools and Staffing Survey.
Findings
Principals report increased influence over the 25 years that the data span. While principals of urban schools were much more likely to report having less influence over teacher hiring compared to their non-urban counterparts in the late 1980s and early 1990s, their reported influence increased more than that of other principals.
Research limitations/implications
Empowering principals as primary decision-makers assumes that they have the best information on which to make hiring decisions. At the same time, other research suggests that local teacher labor market dynamics contribute to the inequitable sorting of teachers across schools. This study raises questions regarding the implications of the increased influence of principals in teacher hiring on equity of access to quality teachers across schools.
Originality/value
This is the first study to explore whether and how principal influence in teacher hiring decisions has changed over time.
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Joshua L. Glazer, Laura Groth and Blair Beuche
This paper considers the implications of reform efforts that rely on charter management organizations to assume operational control of underperforming neighborhood schools. The…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper considers the implications of reform efforts that rely on charter management organizations to assume operational control of underperforming neighborhood schools. The purpose of this paper is to examine the way in which changes to the education sector place enormous pressure on these organizations to both manage instruction and their social environments.
Design/methodology/approach
The research presents the results from a longitudinal case study of two organizations operating within the Tennessee Achievement School District (ASD). Interviews, observations and document analysis provided insight into the perspectives of school operators, state officials and community leaders. The study design allowed researchers to observe the influence of the environment on school operators over a four-year period.
Findings
Results show that the environment that included a muscular state, market pressures, NGOs and local communities placed an extreme and contradictory set of demands on organizations operating schools, pressing them to develop robust systems of instruction, leadership and teacher development while actively working to ensure social legitimacy in the community. Neither a national network nor a small local startup began with a strategy aligned to these environmental demands, and both needed to make substantial revisions.
Research limitations/implications
Research into contemporary educational reform should account for rapidly evolving environments that feature a complex mix of resources and incentives. Careful examination of the consequences of these environments for educational organizations will further our understanding of how markets, communities and governments are shaping the education sector.
Practical implications
The extraordinary challenges that confront organizations that operate in crowded and contested environments preclude fast or dramatic results. Policymakers and the public should assume an incremental process of organizational learning and improvement. Setting unrealistic expectations and focusing exclusively on impact risks delegitimizing organizations and policy initiatives before they have time to adapt.
Originality/value
This research reported here is among the few studies that have explored the experiences and implications of NGOs that have attempted to assume operational control of underperforming neighborhood schools. The popularity of this approach among a growing number of states highlights the importance of this topic.
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Studies demonstrate the central role of principals in developing and sustaining teacher commitment to their school. Teachers' commitment to their school impacts teaching…
Abstract
Purpose
Studies demonstrate the central role of principals in developing and sustaining teacher commitment to their school. Teachers' commitment to their school impacts teaching, learning, innovation and school climate and manifests job satisfaction. Commitment strongly relates to teacher attrition. Attrition is important in the study of school success and failure given its strong predictive link to student learning.
Design/methodology/approach
This study thus identifies relational practices of principals who successfully develop and maintain high levels of commitment among their teaching staff compared to those principals who fail to maintain high commitment or fail to raise low commitment among their teachers during the school year. To investigate this process, this study uses longitudinal, within-year school network and climate data for teachers and principals in 15 American charter schools. With these data and theories offered by social-psychology and organizational studies, the interpersonal leadership and school climate conditions set forth by the principal link to the fluctuating levels of commitment among teachers.
Findings
Despite the consistently established link between employee commitment and organizational success and failure, this operationalization of changing levels of staff commitment is a novel contribution to the discussion of organizational principal leadership failure. This study clearly tests the questions: Which emotional responses prove volatile to teachers' repeated exchanges with their principals? How do principals' relational practices impact teachers' commitment to teaching? Among the strongest findings is the key practice of principals to maintain trust—interpersonal and schoolwide—to improve commitment among teachers and avoid loss of commitment by the end of the school year.
Practical implications
Relational practices of principals can promote quality relationships that uphold trust and sustain environments conducive to maintaining high organizational commitment. When leaders fail to establish and maintain quality relationships, challenges experienced during a school year become more difficult to overcome.
Originality/value
The opportunity arises to test the time-varying aspect of interpersonal relations in organizations and the subsequent idea about how organizational leaders maintain strong relationships, strengthen poor ones or repair injured relationships. These results evidence teacher commitment is prone to decline at the end of the school year yet the chance and magnitude of the fluctuation directly responds to changes in principals' relational practices. With relational practices, principals can induce affective responses from teachers at the interpersonal and organizational level that improve commitment among teachers and reduce drops in commitment.
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Steve Charters, Marilyn Clark‐Murphy, Nicole Davis, Alan Brown and Elizabeth Walker
The purpose of this paper is to identify the key management skills for running a successful winery business, which in the Australian industry is predominately a small to medium…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to identify the key management skills for running a successful winery business, which in the Australian industry is predominately a small to medium sized business, and explores the existence of such skills within the industry.
Design/methodology/approach
The information was obtained through structured interviews with a range of winery owners and managers in the four main wine regions of Western Australia.
Findings
Whilst a set of universal management skills are identified by the industry participants, these are not universally held. The study examines skills and training issues highlighting the diversity of winery owners and managers.
Research limitations/implications
The study was conducted using qualitative methodology in one state of Australia only.
Practical implications
The findings require further quantitative testing, but strongly imply that managerial skills in the wine industry are limited, and most managers are more focused on technical expertise than financial, strategic, marketing or HR planning and management.
Originality/value
The paper has benefit for the wine industry showing the strengths and weaknesses of its managers, and also for theorists who seek to understand management processes in a specific sector predominantly comprising small and medium sized enterprises.
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Steve Charters, Natalia Velikova, Caroline Ritchie, Joanna Fountain, Liz Thach, Tim H. Dodd, Nicola Fish, Frikkie Herbst and Nic Terblanche
The aim of this study is to investigate and compare the engagement of Generation Y consumers with champagne and sparkling wine across five Anglophone countries.
Abstract
Purpose
The aim of this study is to investigate and compare the engagement of Generation Y consumers with champagne and sparkling wine across five Anglophone countries.
Design/methodology/approach
A qualitative approach was adopted using focus groups with young consumers, including images and wine tasting as projective stimuli.
Findings
There were significant trans‐cultural similarities between consumption behaviour (sparkling wine is a women's drink, and a separate category from still wine, and that they will “grow into” drinking it) but also noticeable differences (responses to images and colours varied substantially, as did attitudes to price and the particular status of champagne).
Research limitations/implications
Research into the behaviour of Generation Y as a cohort needs to take account of cultural as much as generational context. However, as a qualitative study the findings need further quantitative validation.
Practical implications
Marketers cannot view Generation Y as a single group; even within countries marketing strategies may need to be refined depending on where a product is being sold.
Originality/value
No trans‐cultural study on Generation Y has been carried out to date, nor has their engagement with sparkling wine been specifically explored.
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