Principal's Principles: How School Leaders Struggle in Charter Networks

• In Event: Charter School Leadership and Governance

Abstract

Market-based reform spurred the creation of the charter schools: publicly-funded, privately-run alternatives to traditional public schools. Their proponents believe that competition will spur educational innovation, but extensive research literature evaluating the assumption has been mixed, at best. This study is a qualitative examination of how the organizational form affects school leadership. Methods include in-depth interviews of charter management organization (CMO) school leaders as well as ethnographic observation of public board meetings and document analysis of public facing materials. Initial findings indicate that school principals and their staff-whose educational focus is their students-are often undermined by upper management whose focus is organizational survival in a market.
keywords: bureaucracy, privatization, charter management organization (CMO), innovation

Author

• Juddson R Taube, Stanford University