The Life cycle of an Educational Organization: An Empirical Approach

Abstract

The head of the school, as well as the business owner, it is important to understand the dynamics of the organization’s development. The current formal assessment procedures for schools and various ratings fix the current state of the organization, but do not allow to define at what stage of the development it is. Analysis of existing approaches to determining the stages of the life cycle of organizations has shown that existing methodologies are business-oriented and is not able to be used for educational organizations. The paper describes the school lifecycle model, proposed the methodology of a determining the stage of the school lifecycle using quantitative and qualitative parameters. Assessment the stages of the life cycle of four schools that are identical in their characteristics (status, age, size, location) and providing practical solutions are important result of the research. At first, the authors examined the position of the schools in the model of the lifecycle by quantitative indicators using three criteria: education quality, educational process resource supply, competitiveness of educational services. School reports based on self-examination provided the empirical evidence for indicators’ calculation. All the indicators are analyzed in a five-year dynamics, their averages for sample schools are defined over two time periods and percentile changes over a given period are calculated. The life cycle stage of a school is determined based on an aggregate indicator (final school evaluation), which is calculated considering weight coefficients. At second, we determined a dominant organizational culture type, which based on the robert E. Quinn and Kim S. Cameron’s OCAI method, for verification the primary quantitative diagnostics results. Qualitative data was obtained from a teachers and school managers’ poll. The life cycle determination method that has been proposed in this study can be used in management practice by the school principal.