Texas Public School Districts Research Articles

Small government takeover: The politics of Public-School Board dissolution and the Impact on Student Achievement

ABSTRACT State takeovers of public-school districts are a controversial method to help fix struggling schools across the United States. This article considers the reasons behind takeovers, their effects on schools and communities, and both the positive and negative aspects of state involvement. We examine various state laws and specific examples from 3 Texas public school districts to understand how takeovers influence school performance, community participation, and district operations. Additionally, we consider the role of factors like socioeconomic conditions and political climate in determining the success of state interventions. Our goal is to contribute to the ongoing conversation about whether state takeovers are an effective solution for the complex challenges facing underperforming schools and school districts. To that end, we conclude by offering recommendations for future policy development and implementation.

A content analysis of memoranda of understanding between Texas Public School Districts and law enforcement agencies

Abstract Little is known collectively about the contents of school-based law enforcement (SBLE) memoranda of understanding (MOUs), despite emerging evidence they may improve program operation. Using Texas as an exploratory case study, where contracted programs are the most common form of SBLE in K-12 schools, this study conducts a content analysis of all known state SBLE MOUs (289), examining them using 40 provision-derived codes grouped in five topical categories (contract logistics, responsible parties, officer logistics, officer duties, and officer roles). Findings show that most MOUs cover a wide breadth of provisions, but could expand enumerating officer duties and programmatic qualities that literature associates with improved SBLE outcomes, as well as spreading awareness of provisions among stakeholders. The goals of the study are to understand how MOUs define SBLE programs in Texas, provide a foundation for further research examining SBLE program structures and outcomes, and make general recommendations for enhancing SBLE MOUs.

The many costs of operating school buses in America

The research seeks to quantify the marginal cost impact of transportation cost drivers on the total operating cost of Texas's public schools and how these costs differ between district type and environment setting. The analysis tests the validity of often cited research findings examining the widely used School Bus Routing Problem (SBRP). We present results from fixed effects regressions with panel data for the total transportation operating cost. Finding the marginal cost of an additional student is 2.5 times greater for a rural district than for an urban district. Additionally, we compare mean average values of school bus transportation metrics between rural, town, suburban, and city districts. Concluding, on average, school bus transportation costs for Rural districts are 40% more per student than a City or Suburban district. The dataset includes eleven years of transportation operating costs from 998 Texas public school districts.

The Advanced Placement Program in Texas — Local Access Offered by Public School Districts is Decreasing While the Breadth of Differentiated Courses Offered is Increasing

This article presents an analysis of the participation of Texas public school districts in the Advanced Placement (AP) program for academic years ending 2013 through 2019. We develop and estimate to a panel of school district data a hurdle count model composed of (1) a first stage fixed effect binomial logistic regression model of the probability that a school district opts-in to locally offer AP program courses in a given academic years and (2) a second stage fixed effect zero truncated Poisson regression model of the number of unique AP courses offered in a given year by opting-in districts. We find that the number of Texas school districts providing local access to AP courses is decreasing through time; however, we also find that districts that do provide local access to AP courses offer increasingly greater numbers of unique AP courses.

Funding, Investment, and Wealth Equalization Across Texas Public School Districts

Funding, Investment, and Wealth Equalization Across Texas Public School Districts

Shocking Performance: The Effects of Anticipated and Unanticipated Shocks on Organizational Performance

Public organizations operate as open-systems. As such, exogenous perturbations in the environment can affect organizational performance. Often, management buffers these shocks to maintain performance through both managerial strategies and organizational structures. To this extent, the literature commonly assumes shocks in the environment are largely unanticipated, resulting in management responding to a precipitation of negative effects to the organization's internal operations and processes. We argue exogenous perturbations can take on two different forms: anticipated and unanticipated shocks. Based on the level of managerial anticipation, we argue public managers will adopt strategies that resemble those of disaster preparedness as opposed to managers focused on the recovery-oriented aspects of management. We test this argument by empirically examining the effects of an anticipated and unanticipated shock on the performance of Texas public school districts.

Entrepreneurial to Impactful Management: Income Inequality in Education

When school districts move more administrators down to school campuses, do they get better at reducing the income-based achievement gap? Data from Texas public school districts between 1994 and 2010 show that such managerial decentralization is positively associated with income-based achievement gap, explained by the tendency of elite capture in heavily decentralized systems. Furthermore, this primary relationship was moderated positively by the level of school district revenue generated locally and moderated negatively by enrollment. Generally beneficial among larger student bodies, more decentralized management, especially in districts with a greater ability to generate their own revenue, made the achievement gap worse.

The Impact of Job Satisfaction on the Turnover Intent of Executive Level Central Office Administrators in Texas Public School Districts: A Quantitative Study of Work Related Constructs

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between job satisfaction and turnover intent of executive level central office administrators in Texas public school districts. For the intent of this study, executive level central office administrators were defined as staff members who serve in one of the following roles in a school district: assistant, associate, area, or deputy superintendent. The data were collected from a random sample of 234 participants in which survey instruments of job satisfaction and turnover intent were used. Each instrument was created on a five-point Likert scale. Based on the results of the study, it was concluded that a moderate inverse relationship exists between job satisfaction and turnover intent and job satisfaction explained 41.3% of an executive level central office administrator’s intent for turnover. Research related to this employee group is lacking. Therefore, not much is known regarding how it relates to their attitude towards work-related factors. Learning more about job satisfaction and turnover intention of these individuals could have long term implications since it relates to mitigating the shortage of superintendent candidates available to fill the growing number of vacancies as well as recruitment, retention, and increased work productivity of these staff.

Fiscal slack, budget shocks, and performance in public organizations: evidence from public schools

ABSTRACTSome scholars equate fiscal slack with organizational inefficiency, while others argue that it is a useful environmental buffer. This study takes the first step in reconciling these opposing views, by classifying fiscal slack as absorbed and unabsorbed slack in public organizations. In a sample of 1,000 Texas public school districts over 17 years, fund balance (unabsorbed fiscal slack) does not seem to affect student performance, unless there is a major downward budget shock. In the absence of a negative budget shock, non-instructional spending per pupil (absorbed fiscal slack) has a negative impact on performance change in an average school district, but no meaningful impact on student performance during a major budget shock.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Management Effects: A Substantively Motivated Approach to Panel Data Estimation

In recent years, the field of public management has begun to make use of panel data sets in quantitative research about governance and public policy. While panel data permit researchers to undertake more advanced and nuanced analyses than cross-sectional data, these benefits are not realized if methods designed for cross-sectional data are used instead. This article outlines different approaches to panel data estimation, illustrating differences in the estimates produced by each approach using data from 1,000 Texas public school districts drawn across 11 years. Our findings suggest that researchers should be cautious in differentiating between relationships that occur “between” organizations and those that occur “within” an organization.

Organizational History and Budgetary Punctuation

The basic dynamics of punctuated policy change have been found to be present in a wide variety of political institutions from a range of countries. The presence—even commonality— of punctuated change has been clearly and persuasively demonstrated. A key challenge in the literature is now to identify the conditions and institutional arrangements that make punctuated change more likely. This article investigates the role of organizational history in punctuated budgetary change. An error-accumulation model of punctuation suggested by the institutional friction framework contends that budgetary punctuation results from a built-up need for budgetary change that had been prevented by slow-moving institutions. The need builds up until the institutions give way in the form of a budgetary punctuation. This explanation suggests that the probability of a punctuation in a given year is negatively related to having experienced such a punctuation in previous years. An alternative model—which we will call the institutional model—contends that the propensity for budgetary punctuation is endemic to specific organizations. These organizations possess inherent characteristics that predispose them to punctuated change. The institutional model suggests that the probability of a punctuation occurring in a given year is positively related to the organization having experienced such a punctuation in previous years. The article uses data from Texas public school districts during an 18-year period to test these competing models of policy punctuation. The results indicate that recent punctuated changes raise the probability of additional punctuated changes, supporting the institutional hypothesis.

Organizational History and Budgetary Punctuation

The basic dynamics of punctuated policy change have been found to be present in a wide variety of political institutions from a range of countries. The presence -- even commonality -- of punctuated change has been clearly and persuasively demonstrated. A key challenge in the literature is now to identify the conditions and institutional arrangements that make punctuated change more likely.This article investigates the role of organizational history in punctuated budgetary change. An error correction model of punctuation suggested by the institutional friction frameworks contends that budgetary punctuation results from built up need for budgetary change that had been prevented by slow-moving institutions. The need builds up until the institutions give way in the form of a budgetary punctuation. This explanation suggests that the probability of a punctuation in a given year is negatively related to having experienced such a punctuation in previous years. An alternative model -- which we will call the institutionalist model -- contends that the propensity for budgetary punctuation is endemic to specific organizations. These organizations possess inherent characteristics that predispose them to punctuated change. The institutionalist model suggests that the probability of experiencing a punctuation in a given year is positively related to having experienced such a punctuation in previous years.The paper uses data from Texas public school districts over a 14 year period to see test these competing models of policy punctuation. The results indicate that recent non-incremental changes raise the probability of additional non-incremental changes -- supporting the institutional hypothesis.

AN EXPLORATION OF WHY PUBLIC ORGANIZATIONS ‘INGEST’ INNOVATIONS

Organizational change sometimes occurs as organizations ‘ingest’ innovations from without. This process represents a vital form of organizational learning and adaptation to the external environment. This study seeks to understand the factors that predict the adoption of Foreign Professional Specialty Occupation Visas, or H-1B visas, by Texas public school districts. The use of H-1B visas to hire foreign skilled workers is a staffing innovation that is growing in use among public and private organizations. Three sets of factors frequently used in studies of organizational innovation are considered: organizational size and slack; attitudes and dispositions of organizational leaders; and environmental influences. The findings contribute to our understanding of ingested innovations, indicating that slack resources, influences from the task and institutional environments, and the organizational leader's disposition and behaviour relating to change influence the probability of adopting this staffing innovation.

The Role of Management and Representation in Improving Performance of Disadvantaged Students: An Application of Bum Phillips's “Don Shula Rule”1

AbstractScholars and practitioners within the U.S. education system have focused considerable attention on developing new programs aimed at raising educational achievement for disadvantaged students. New programs are only one way to improve student performance, however; recent work in public administration suggests that public management and implementation practices might also have a large impact on student performance. Existing research shows that managerial networking, managerial quality, and effective personnel management can significantly improve the quality of the education received by disadvantaged students. Additional work highlights the contribution of representative bureaucracy. Because these research agendas have targeted the public administration literature rather than the education policy literature, this article seeks to bring this research back to education policy. Using data from several hundred Texas public school districts, spanning 1995 to 2002, and focusing on disadvantaged student performance (Latinos, blacks, and low‐income students), this article illustrates how both management and processes to enhance the representativeness of teaching faculty produce benefits for disadvantaged students.

Diversity, Representation, and Performance: Evidence about Race and Ethnicity in Public Organizations

Diversity, Representation, and Performance: Evidence about Race and Ethnicity in Public Organizations

Analysis of trends in technical and allocative efficiency: An application to Texas public school districts

We present a new DEA based method to analyze efficiency trends over time and differences across subgroups in a panel data setting. We employ a result that the aggregate technical and allocative inefficiency score equals the technical inefficiency when input quantities are aggregated into a single total input cost variable, and develop test procedures to evaluate the presence of allocative inefficiency. We apply these methods to test for the presence of allocative inefficiency in Texas school districts over 1993–99, and analyze shifts and trends in both technical and allocative inefficiencies over time for different regions. Our empirical results indicate the existence of statistically significant allocative inefficiencies. While technical inefficiency increased over the six year sample period, allocative inefficiency remained relatively stable during this period. These results for the full sample obtain also when we repeat the analysis for different regions.

Span of Control and Public Organizations: Implementing Luther Gulick’s Research Design

In Luther Gulick’s classic essay “Notes on the Theory of Organization,” he argued that span of control structures relationships between leaders and subordinates in organizations. Commenting on the state of knowledge about span of control, Gulick lamented the lack of systematic research on what he viewed as three key determinants of span of control: diversification of function, time, and space. This study adopts Gulick’s approach to studying span of control by examining the effects of diversity of function, time, and space in structuring relationships among personnel in a sample of 678 Texas public school districts. We then investigate Joan Woodward’s link between span of control and organizational performance. Our results reveal that although Gulick was correct in asserting that diversity of function, time, and space play a role in determining how spans of control are structured, these variables have different meanings that depend on the level of organizational hierarchy analyzed.

Child sexual abuse prevention programs in Texas public elementary schools.

This survey determined if selected Texas public school districts provided an established child sexual abuse prevention program for elementary schools. The survey examined the type of program being implemented, training available for faculty and staff type of evaluation used, involvement of local agencies, and type of funding sources. Survey data were obtained from a nonrandomized sample of 89 largest public school districts in Texas, all recording an average daily attendance over 5,000. Fifty-eight of the 89 districts addressed child sexual abuse as a formal prevention program or as an awareness program. Training for child sexual abuse prevention program presenters was offered in 89% of districts. Consistent, effective evaluation was minimal. Funding for prevention programs was limited or unknown. Results confirmed the need for consistent, effective child sexual abuse prevention programs in elementary schools.

Occupational knowledge and career development in adolescence

In an effort to extend our knowledge of career development, two indices of career maturity were investigated in a sample of 6029 high school seniors sampled from 57 Texas public school districts. The study investigated both the degree to which late adolescents choose occupations whose educational requirements match their stated educational goals and the degree to which students' vocational interests are compatible with their occupational choices. The correlations between educational plans and educational requirements of the chosen occupations were .41 or less. Of the subjects who claimed to have at least considerable understanding of their first choice career, only about half planned to achieve the amount of education appropriate to enter that occupation. Subjects' perceptions of how well they understood their occupational choices were also negligibly related to the compatibility of their vocational interests and their career choices. Although educational understanding and interest compatibility both contribute to realism of occupational choices, the correlation between these two indices of career maturity accounted for less than 1% of the variance.