How Traditional Public Schools Respond to Competition: The Mitigating Role of Organizational Culture

Abstract

We assess whether the organizational culture of traditional public schools shapes their response to competition from charter schools in Arizona, which has a high level of charter school competition. We focus on traditional public elementary schools from 1995 to 1998, when charter schools were introduced in this state. We explore this topic by segmenting a sample of 81 traditional public elementary schools into two groups: those with high levels of principal–teacher collaboration just prior to charter competition, and a second group with low prior collaboration levels. We find that threatened entry increased teacher curriculum control for district schools with high principal–teacher collaboration but had no impact for schools with low collaboration. In contrast, actual charter entry did not influence teacher curriculum control for either high or low collaboration schools. These results suggest that organizational culture can modulate the impact of threatened entry on traditional public schools, although the statistical impacts are modest.