Public School Reform Research Articles

Employee readiness for change: examining the combined effects of individual and organizational demands in public school reform

PurposeThe paper aims to clarify how work-specific characteristics at both the individual and organizational level influence professional civil servants’ readiness for change during the implementation of reforms in public administration. We examine the influence of work characteristics at the individual and organizational levels, such as reform-related strains, organizational climate, and organizational professionalism, on the employees’ response to change. In addition, we also consider the interaction between these specific work characteristics.Design/methodology/approachThis article employs a quantitative multi-level analysis to examine the influence of individual and collective predictors of employees' readiness for change. For our analysis, we used data from the evaluation of a school reform in Switzerland aimed at aligning teachers' working conditions with those of other administrative employees. The survey conducted for the evaluation includes responses from 2,162 teachers.FindingsOur study expands the understanding in public management research of work characteristics that either promote or reduce employees’ readiness for change in the public sector. Our findings suggest that the organizational level, in our case the school level, influences the individual’s response to change. Furthermore, the role of organizational professionalism in terms of a reform-related transformation of the identities, structures, and practices of the actors concerned is highlighted as a potential stressor and catalyst that reinforces the negative correlation between reform-related stress and willingness to change.Practical implicationsThis paper offers insights into how public managers can effectively overcome challenges in the implementation process of public school reforms. This also includes the awareness among change agents that positively associated changes at the organizational level may have negative consequences at the individual level, due to the fact that they affect professional understanding, for example, which may cause the affected actors to respond with resistance.Originality/valueThis paper contributes to the small number of multi-level research studies on the responses to change in public administration and answers the call for research to investigate the hurdles that may arise when implementing change. Further, the paper contributes to the literature on the impact of new public management (NPM) on the identity of professional civil servants.

Intrinsic Teacher Practice to Holistic Public School Reform – SDGs Project 1 Report

This article is a report on the development of a model for public school organization and curriculum as a foundation for Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) practice, undertaken as part of the “Project to Promote ESD” commissioned by the National Commission for UNESCO of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT). The project, led by Shizuoka University, is carried out by the ESD Hooripu, a framework study group that links public schools to holistic reform through intrinsic teacher practice for ESD. The project aims to construct a theoretical framework to support educational and school reform in local authorities from an ESD perspective, using Social Impact Management/Logic Model as a perspective for change. It also focuses on developing teachers’ Ecological Teacher Agency (ETA) through workshops, training sessions, and evaluation support. The outcomes of these efforts are validated through a comprehensive evaluation. Overall, this article highlights the importance of intervention in the project, aiming to empower teachers to enhance their expertise and actively engage in educational reforms. The utilization of a logic model approach is crucial for sharing and aligning visions and aspirations for education in schools and communities, transcending mere outcome evaluation and leveraging it as a tool for educational policy.

Citizen perceptions of public school efficiency: evidence from the U.S.

ABSTRACT Improving efficiency is the basis for important public school reforms. While there has been substantial scholarship examining the relationship between actual and perceived performance, there has been very little research examining this relationship for efficiency. We use a large and representative sample of U.S. residents and data on student achievement and public school spending to examine the relationship between actual and perceived efficiency. We find a strong positive relationship between actual efficiency and our measure of perceived efficiency. Our research supports the normative tendency of public managers towards increased transparency and suggests that citizens will respond appropriately to information.

P01-08 Implementing school-based physical activity - putting Policy into Practice

Close to ten years ago, at the beginning of December 2012, the Danish government, announced its intention to implement comprehensive reforms of the public school system. Six months later, in June 2013, a broad-based political alliance agreed on extensive alterations in the legislation guiding Danish public schools.The discussions of the most recent major reform of Danish public schools, established a next to unequivocal consensus among the parties in the Danish Parliament, school employers and employees as well as voluntary sports organizations that children and young people should be more physically active during the school day. Thus, the updated Danish Education Act of 2013 made it compulsory for public schools to offer an average of 45 minutes of physical activity (PA) per school day.It is, however, painfully clear that the subsequent implementation of the primary policy goal to incorporate a minimum of 45 minutes of school-based PA for all pupils per day has been far from complete. According to some of the more exhaustive monitoring reports, in 2019 only six out of 10 schools fulfilled the basic PA-criterion. This was at the same level as in 2016. In spite of much political goodwill at both national, regional and local levels, significant investments of time and other resources by school authorities, professional organizations, a number of private and public foundations, individual employees and work teams, school managers and boards the number of schools actually adhering to current legislative goals related to physical activity has not changed in any substantial way from the adoption of the updated legislative framework in mid-2013 till present time.Based on this state of affairs the presentation explores the question: What factors have influenced the translation of an overall policy ambition, related to school-based physical activity, into practice? The presentation builds on the Integrated Implementation Model, as presented by Winter and Nilsen and Cairney's introduction to Policy implementation research, and covers phases two and three of a total of four into which a given political decision-making process is typically divided: 1) agenda-setting, 2) policy generation, 3) implementation, and 4) evaluation.

Teacher Blame as the Grammar of Public School Reform

AbstractHistorical policy stories that situate teachers as the root cause of problems in public schools have long accompanied educational reforms, including No Child Left Behind. This article portrays the history of teacher blame as a defining component of the grammar of American educational reform. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century reformers identified teacher quality—a later trademark of NCLB—as a panacea for school improvement, but it remained an amorphous idea bound up in gendered and racialized assumptions. The historical results were a swirl of policies that increased standardization across the schools. This article concludes that teacher blame was a critical driver for federal intervention in local public education, and that the roots of that intervention extend far deeper than historians have allowed.

Individual Agency in Street-Level Bureaucrats’ Implementation of Policy Reforms: The Role of Their Policy Evaluation and Self-efficacy

Abstract This paper develops and tests a parsimonious micro-theory of street-level bureaucrats’ individual implementation behavior. By systemizing and synthesizing theoretical insights from Ajzen’s theory of planned behavior, from Bandura’s theory of perceived self-efficacy, and from implementation literature, we claim that street-level bureaucrats’ policy implementation behavior is a function of their individual evaluation of the efficacy of the policy and of their own ability to implement the policy measures in terms of their perceived self-efficacy. We test our theory on a panel data set capturing teachers’ implementation of the wide-scale Danish public school reform of 2014. We use administrative data and a five-wave panel survey (2014–18) of 2,055 teachers in approx. 200 schools as well as their school leaders. Our results confirm the importance of teachers’ perceived policy efficacy and of their perceived self-efficacy for their implementation behavior. When, as shown in this study, street-level bureaucrats’ individual evaluations of a policy and their own perceived abilities shape their implementation behaviors, street-level bureaucrats become even more important individual policymakers than depicted in most research on street-level bureaucrats that mainly focuses on structural determinants of their behaviors rather than individual factors.

Impact of the Synchronous Enrolment Reform of Public and Private Schools on Housing Price: Empirical Evidence from Shanghai, China

Impact of the Synchronous Enrolment Reform of Public and Private Schools on Housing Price: Empirical Evidence from Shanghai, China

Bookshelf: Kappan authors on their favorite reads

In this monthly column, Kappan authors discuss books and articles that have informed their views on education. Robert Kim recommends Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning by Cathy Park Hong, Sarah Pazer recommends the multi-author Manifesto for Teaching Online, and Thomas Hatch recommends Tinkering Toward Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform by David Tyack and Larry Cuban.

Barriers to Implementation of Physical Activity in Danish Public Schools

Purpose: In 2014, the Danish Government introduced a new public school reform, which included implementation of 45 min of daily physical activity (PA) within the academic classroom curriculum. The purpose of the present study was to explore school staff’s perceived barriers to implementation of a national PA policy. Method: A mixed-methods approach using a questionnaire and semistructured interviews was conducted. A total of 198 teachers and 26 school management team members (principals, deputy principals, and leading teachers) from 31 schools completed a questionnaire, and 11 school management team members were interviewed. The socioecological model was used as a theoretical framework to examine the results. Results: A total of 15 different barriers were identified and reflected within all levels of the socioecological model. Facilities, motivation, and time were the most prominent barriers identified. Conclusion: Development and deployment of a national PA policy needs to be done in cooperation with consumers from all levels within the socioecological model to ensure successful implementation.

Unionization, public school reform, and teacher professionalism

Effective schooling requires teachers to have professional discretion; yet in the twentieth century, bureaucratization enhanced administrative control of teaching. Teacher unionization offered one response to bureaucratization, intended in part to protect teacher professional discretion. More recently, the charter school movement offered a second means to protect teacher professionalism, though some scholars argue that charters fail to empower teachers since few charter teachers have union representation. We describe the conceptual links between unionization, charter schooling, and teacher professionalism. We then use the nationally-representative 2011–2012 School and Staffing Survey data to empirically examine the extent to which unionization and charter schooling influences teacher professionalism, measured as teachers’ perceptions of control over school policies and aspects of teaching and learning. OLS regressions indicate that unionized teachers report lower levels of control, while charter teachers report somewhat greater levels of control over school policies and curricula than other public school teachers.

Ripples of hope: leading educational change for equity in Egypt’s public schools

ABSTRACT Globally, economically disadvantaged and minority students are especially negatively impacted by less-qualified teachers, yet less-qualified teachers are disproportionately found in low-income, minority communities. Many countries struggle with the need for highly qualified teachers, in low-performing schools. This case study investigated how a private-public-international partnership fostered large-scale educational change in Egypt to improve teacher quality through teacher-of-teacher professional development. Employing interviews, surveys and document analysis, including evaluations of 720 experimental public schools in 27 governorates, with a sample of 90 educators, the study spotlights large-scale educational change. Change was initiated at the school level by leaders seeking educational change for equity, demonstrating qualities of transformative leadership. Preliminary findings of educators changing their mindset about pedagogy, accompanied by modifying practices and beliefs. Findings illuminate how the leaders’ utilized the existing centralized, hierarchical system, incorporating both upper and middle management to support change. We conclude that large-scale educational change can be initiated at the school level by courageous transformative leaders and that interconnectedness at all levels is essential for sustainability. The international partnership exemplified global interconnectedness and was advantageous to public-school reform. Finally, professional learning is a bedrock of school-reform and could be the place where knowledge frameworks are deconstructed and reconstructed.

QUESTIONING THE RHETORIC OF BRITISH BORSTAL REFORM IN THE 1930s

AbstractIn 1938, the Reverend Digby Bliss Kittermaster, who became chaplain at Rochester Borstal after retiring as a housemaster at Harrow public school, started a diary in which he recorded everyday interactions with inmates and staff. The reputation of the borstal system was at its height in the 1930s owing to Alexander Paterson's reforms, based on the structures and character-building ethos of British public schools. Young people's voices were rarely heard in this progressive discourse of borstal reform and Kittermaster is unusual for articulating them, recording what he heard, teasing out the contradictions of Paterson's reforming aspirations and the reality of humiliation and intimidation that borstal boys often experienced. Kittermaster's public school background made him well placed to question the rhetoric of the public school reform model. His complex personal perspective suggests how humane emphasis on individual potential was subverted at Rochester by coercive structures of traditional prison improvement. Kittermaster's growing frustration at his own powerlessness supports a more nuanced interpretation of how the borstal system has usually been depicted in the Paterson era of reform, especially in relation to damaging mental and emotional costs to inmates and staff, which have been largely neglected in the scholarship of borstal in the 1930s.

Secondary education reform in the independent Ukraine (1991–2017): concepts, programmes, doctrines and strategies

The article covers the content of the main regulatory documents (concepts, programmes, doctrines, and strategies) regarding secondary education reform in the independent Ukraine (1991 – 2017) in order to gain historical and educational knowledge about the mentioned phenomenon and enrich pedagogical source study. The analysed sources reveal the history of the national public education policy, school reforms and counter-reforms, and scientific and pedagogical works by Ukrainian educators. They may be helpful for conducting historical and pedagogical research on the history of secondary education reform in the independent Ukraine.

Catholic women educators’ discourse and educational measurement in the early twentieth century in the United States

ABSTRACTIn the early twentieth century in the United States, Roman Catholic schools grew in number and became increasingly regulated by state departments of education. This led to the increased influence of public school reform movements in Catholic schools. Some Catholic educators questioned these movements, while others embraced them. Educational measurement strategies, such as IQ and standardised testing, gained support from women religious orders and congregations, who made up the majority of the Catholic teaching force. For pragmatic reasons, they saw some value in the promises of modern educational science for teaching and learning. This practice, however, put them at odds with some of the beliefs and values of their Church. This study demonstrates how Catholic sister teachers attempted to shape the debate on the introduction and use of reform strategies like IQ and standardised testing. It also examines how Catholic sister teachers made use of Catholic beliefs and values to make arguments in favour of IQ and standardised testing in Catholic schools. Using agreed upon Catholic religious tenets and working within their gendered reality, Catholic sister teachers demonstrated how they tried to convince their colleagues, male and female, to come to an understanding around the use of educational measurement.

The Respectable Brotherhood: Young Black Men in an All-boys Charter High School

Neoliberal public school reform has revitalized efforts to open unique all-male schools for black boys. Existing research stresses how these black male academies nurture resilience but has failed to examine what makes these schools distinctive. Drawing on one year of ethnographic research, this article demonstrates how Northside Academy, an all-male charter high school, built a respectable brotherhood. Modeled after elite all-male institutions, Northside’s classics curriculum and professional uniform marked its young men as having disciplined minds and bodies, destined for college and a middle-class future. Yet to maintain legitimacy within a competitive environment, the school community drew moral boundaries between its exceptional young men and those delinquent boys most in crisis. This engaged a respectability politics where upwardly mobile black men reject their more marginalized peers for failing to reform their character. This study’s findings extend knowledge of single-sex public schools and of the impact of increased competition under neoliberalism.

Who Is Behind the Assault on Public Schools?

While the political conflicts and social ramifications of public school reform are well known, basic questions about the movement remain underexamined. Who really leads it? What are their motives? We need a deeper understanding of this movement, its drivers, and its underlying aims.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Fighting for social democracy: R.H. Tawney and educational reconstruction in the Second World War

R.H. Tawney (1880–1962), a leading English economic historian and prominent socialist, was vigorously involved in educational reconstruction during the Second World War. For Tawney, the war was a war for social democracy. His ideals of social democracy formed a basis for his case for Public (independent) School reform and free secondary education for all. Despite this, the connection between Tawney’s ideals and his perspectives on educational issues has not been addressed fully by historians and thus there has been a lack of a proper explanation for his often criticised sympathy for the public schools and his indifference towards the multilateral school. Hence, this paper aims to re-examine the link between them in greater depth. It concludes that, according to Tawney’s ideals of social democracy, the abolition of the public schools was not necessary for the establishment of a democratic educational system. Moreover, Tawney did not launch an attack on the tripartite system proposed by the Norwood Report of 1943 since it was not against his ideal of equality as long as different secondary schools were equal in quality and status. Equality, he believed, must be advanced through the raising of the school leaving age to 16 and the abolition of fees in all secondary schools. Thus, he laid more emphasis on the school leaving age and tuition fees than on the multilateral school. In brief, on various issues pertaining to secondary education, Tawney’s opinions and actions were deeply grounded in his distinctive ideals of social democracy.

Public School Reform Issues and Presidential Elections in America

Public School Reform Issues and Presidential Elections in America

The Economic Benefits of New York City's Public School Reforms, 2002-2013

This study examines some of the economic consequences associated with the public school reforms introduced in New York City (NYC) by Mayor Michael Bloomberg, including their impact on housing values. The reforms focused primarily on increasing the autonomy and accountability of a school’s principal and teachers, and expanding school choice and charter schools. We found that those reforms have been followed by substantial improvements in a number of key measures of student performance, including Math and English test scores, high school graduation rates, and college enrollment rates. From 2006 to 2009, for example, the four-year graduation rate of NYC high school students increased from 49.1 percent to 60.4 percent, improvements driven mainly by the progress of African-American and Hispanic students. We estimate that from 2008 to 2012, 41,000 more NYC public high school students earned diplomas than would have occurred assuming the graduation rates for NYC students in 2006; and the net present value of the additional income that these additional high school graduates should earn over their lifetimes is $8.9 billion. Similarly, from 2008 to 2012, 30,900 more NYC public high school students enrolled in institutions of higher learning than would have occurred assuming the college enrollment rates of NYC students in 2006; and the net present value of the additional income that these additional NYC college attendees should earn over their lifetimes is $6.4 billion. Our analysis further found that rising high school graduation rates increase housing demand in the neighborhoods where those graduation rates rose, which in turn has led to increased residential property values. We estimate that increasing NYC graduation rates by 1 percentage point in a zip code leads to an increase in residential property prices of 0.54 percent in that zip code. On this basis, we estimate that NYC’s rising graduation rates added as much as $37.1 billion to NYC residential housing prices or values. Finally, the number of NYC charter schools climbed from 14 in 2001 to 183 in 2013, an average increase of 0.96 charter schools per zip code. We found that adding one new NYC charter school in a zip code increased residential property prices there by an estimated 3.69 percent. On this basis, the expansion of charter schools in NYC may have added as much as $22.45 billion to NYC residential property prices or values.

Placing math reform: locating Latino English learners in math classrooms and communities

This article explores how place matters in public school reform efforts intended to promote more equitable opportunities and outcomes. Qualitative case studies of three California middle schools’ eighth grade math reforms and the resulting opportunities for Latino English learners are presented, using the conceptual frameworks of critical human geography to situate math reform processes within local and regional social, political, economic, institutional and spatial dynamics. The cases reveal relationships between local efforts to transform or maintain racially and ethnically segregated housing and school attendance patterns, decision-making about math programmes and resource allocation, and resulting student learning opportunities. Together they suggest that (1) efforts to foster more equitable student outcomes must account for the mutually constitutive nature of schools and their localities; (2) mobilization, and educational leaders’ responses to it, matter; and (3) place-sensitive education research demands place-sensitive conceptual frameworks and interdisciplinary, qualitative research methods.