The Micropolitics of the School: The Everyday Political Orientation of Teachers Toward Open School Principals

Abstract

This article describes a study of teachers' perceptions of "everyday" politics in schools. No a priori theoretical ideas controlled data collection. Rather, I used an open-ended instrument to collect data from 770 teachers taking graduate-level courses at two major universities, one in the Southeast and the other in the Northwest. Of these, 404 teachers described the political strategies they used with principals they described as "open " and "effective." This article discusses these strategies, teachers' reasons/purposes for using them, teachers' feelings associated with their use, and how effective they found these strategies. More broadly, the data suggest that exchange processes are central to understanding the range of individual political strategies used with open school principals.