A principals' principles : tangled hierarchies in charter management organizations
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- The study of schools as institutions has been central to the fields of sociology of education and organizational sociology long before charter schools started to spread across the US in the 1990s. Since then, business thinking and its related practices have enjoyed unprecedented influence on K-12 schools. Despite thirty years of operations and nearly as much robust research on academic outcomes and community effects, there remains little study of how charter schools are led. I attend to this gap through participant and ethnographic observation across several charter schools and their respective networks, as well as in-depth interviews of charter school teachers and principals, the two most critical positions in schools for student learning. I find tangled hierarchies are endemic to leadership of networked charter schools, where governing boards depend heavily on principals for expertise but rarely grant them autonomy to meaningfully lead, preferring instead they adopt a role akin to that of a middle manager. Principals in a network then are forced to contend, resist, or acquiesce to innumerable decisions of a central office executive staff and their governing board of directors, a process known as managing up. This research has implications for the study of institutions, furthering the notion that they are "inhabited" by agentic actors, but also noting the continuing influence of institutions on organizational behavior. This research also has implications for school leadership and preservice training and education policy, particularly charter schools in noting how the institutional environment of accountability that charter schools bring to K-12 education invariably hamstrings talented leadership.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2023; ©2023 |
| Publication date | 2023; 2023 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Taube, Juddson Rudolf |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Carnoy, Martin |
| Thesis advisor | Carnoy, Martin |
| Thesis advisor | Powell, Walter W |
| Thesis advisor | Valdés, Guadalupe |
| Degree committee member | Powell, Walter W |
| Degree committee member | Valdés, Guadalupe |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Graduate School of Education |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Juddson R. Taube. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Graduate School of Education. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2023. |
| Location | https://purl.stanford.edu/zf650vq4990 |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2023 by Juddson Rudolf Taube
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