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This study focuses on the struggle to integrate St. Andrew’s Episcopal School, a small private school in Austin, Texas. A close examination of the history of this community sheds light on how privileged whites navigated questions of integration, especially in Christian communities. Pro-integration whites in these communities utilized their faith, understanding of community, and a rhetoric of respectability to move the school towards desegregation, forging a “middle way” through Civil Rights that achieved the goal of integration without damaging white interests in the community. Following St. Andrew’s through the 1970’s and 1980’s, this study moves beyond the implementation of official integration policies to trace how the school wrestled with questions of minority enrollment, white flight, and the relationship between private communities and the public sphere. Over the course of three decades, St. Andrew’s increased minority enrollment but adopted a narrower and more inward-focused understanding of community, becoming a more diverse space but not fundamentally questioning the nature of a private school in times of public crisis. / text

This study examines how accountability affects school performance in Legae Academy and Al-Nur School. It scrutinizes the main approaches to accountability held by managers, teachers and students and the assumptions underpinning these. It explores all the formal and informal practices and policies of accountability institutionalized in the schools, by looking at who is accountable to whom, how they are accountable and for what are they accountable. Another issue that is addressed is the lines of accountability within the organizational hierarchy of the schools (schools board, school managers, teachers, students, and where applicable other relevant stakeholders), and the possible relationships that can be established between the accountability system and practice and overall school performance. A sample of 6 administrators, 15 teachers and 16 students was selected in total at both Legae Academy and Al-Nur, to be interviewed using purposeful sampling. While the study has an open-ended approach, the following key propositions are considered as a guiding framework: (i) variables of accountability such as responsibilities and expectations influence an accountability system; (ii) accountability of managers, teachers and students improves their practice and performance; and (iii) effective accountability systems play a central role in overall school performance. The main argument of this study is that, where minimum resources both material and human are available, internal accountability with clearly defined lines of accountability – upward to the relevant governance and management structures within the school hierarchy and downward to the main stakeholders, namely parents and students – plays a critical role in enhancing school performance.

Thesis advisor: Audrey Friedman / This dissertation investigates the discursive practices of elite high schools and the ways these practices create and preclude opportunities for social justice education. To conduct this critical discourse analysis I drew on the theoretical work of Khan (2011) and Howard (2008) to understand the role of language in the production and maintenance of power and privilege in elite private schools. Furthermore, the literature review on the discourse of social justice informed the selection of initial typologies, which shaped the primary reading of the data. Methodologically, I used Norman Fairclough and James Gee’s tools of critical discourse analyses for the data synthesis and analysis. One overarching questions was considered in this dissertation: As revealed through institutional documents, what are the discursive challenges and opportunities for enacting socially just education within elite high schools? A detailed Systemic Functional Linguistic analysis revealed three major findings. First, students are centered in the text samples and over time students become a larger focus of the discourse. Second, the discourse presents ethical values and knowledge as innate within students. Finally, the language among sample texts conforms over time, becoming less linguistically complex in both topic and construction and thus shifts from a traditionally academic tone to a more familiar tone. Using these findings as a focusing lens, a broader reading and analysis of the complete data set revealed that as discourse associated with discussions of diversity becomes more rigid, formalized, and prevalent in the text samples, institutional questioning and direct calls for social action become less frequent. Furthermore, over time, the discourse is less likely to engage in reflexive questioning and is more likely to engage in self-congratulation. Combined, the detailed linguistic analysis and the broader reading of the collected documents, suggest that the “discourse of social justice” is intertwined with counter discourses of privilege, entitlement, and individualism. Although institutions may currently talk more about issues of diversity and justice, this language functions as yet another measure of student privilege. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2015. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Teacher Education, Special Education, Curriculum and Instruction.

Thesis supervisor: Steve McGuire. Includes bibliographic references (p. 141-144).

Thesis--PlanB (M.S.)--University of Wisconsin--Stout, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references.

Today’s contemporary challenges of educating students place responsibility on school principals that may be unmatched by any other generation. Principals in their early years of the portfolio face an even greater task as they become comfortable with the portfolio and the school community which they lead. Drawing from the leadership literature that emphasized the importance of trust for effective school leadership and improvement, this qualitative study examines the formal and informal leadership practices of seven principals/ headmasters with less than eight years of experience in private high schools in Ontario. The study focuses on the practices that these leaders identify as being crucial to building trust. Their responses reveal that trust building includes personal and professional honesty, transparency and clear communication and a sharing of decision-making powers which all help to minimize the micropolitics that arise in a school, engenders better relationships with faculty members, increases capacity of faculty members more effectively, and ultimately provides support for the principal and decreases personal stress. This study contributes to the Canadian literature on school leadership and the literature on private school leadership and concludes with recommendations for both research and practice.

Today’s contemporary challenges of educating students place responsibility on school principals that may be unmatched by any other generation. Principals in their early years of the portfolio face an even greater task as they become comfortable with the portfolio and the school community which they lead. Drawing from the leadership literature that emphasized the importance of trust for effective school leadership and improvement, this qualitative study examines the formal and informal leadership practices of seven principals/ headmasters with less than eight years of experience in private high schools in Ontario. The study focuses on the practices that these leaders identify as being crucial to building trust. Their responses reveal that trust building includes personal and professional honesty, transparency and clear communication and a sharing of decision-making powers which all help to minimize the micropolitics that arise in a school, engenders better relationships with faculty members, increases capacity of faculty members more effectively, and ultimately provides support for the principal and decreases personal stress. This study contributes to the Canadian literature on school leadership and the literature on private school leadership and concludes with recommendations for both research and practice.

Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2004.

This study is a multi-level analysis of the pervasive phenomenon of what is termed here as low-fee private (LFP) schooling in India focusing on Lucknow District, Uttar Pradesh. The significance of the study is its focus on a private sector uniquely characterised as one targeted to a clientele traditionally excluded from private education. The study follows a single-case embedded case study research design of the type explained by Yin (1994). Its guiding framework comprises theoretical levels of analysis which are the individual, organisational, and institutional, corresponding to the case sub-units of household, school, and state respectively. The research design is structured through a new institutional paradigm which is also used to analyse results at the institutional level. Data were collected through interviews, observations, documents, and field notes. Direct household data sources were 60 parents/close family members at two focus schools (one urban and one rural); school sources were owners/principals of 10 case study schools (five urban and five rural); and state sources were 10 government officials. Analysis of the 100 formal interviews, informal interviews, observation events, and field notes followed a qualitative approach through an inductively derived analytic framework. Structured portions of household and school interviews were analysed through descriptive statistics providing data on household and school background characteristics. Documents were analysed using a modified content analysis approach. Implications of individual-level results lie in highlighting the schooling choices and patterns of a group that is otherwise regarded as homogenous, i.e. children are not sent to school because parents are uninterested in schooling and fail to see its relevance. In fact, results indicate that disadvantaged groups accessing the LFP sector in the study are active choosers who made deeply considered and systematic choices about their children's education. A model to explain their school choice processes is empirically derived. Data suggest that households employed the strategies of staying, fee-bargaining, exit, and fee-jumping to engage with LFP case study schools. Organisational-level results focus on case study school profiles, their organisational structures, and the strategies they employed to operate in the new schooling market. Results also focus on a qualitative understanding of the challenges case study schools faced as LFP schools, both by the institutional context and household demands. Finally, data point to the mechanisms instituted within the schools to deal with household needs and demands and the changing household-school relationship. The implications of institutional-level analysis He in exposing inconsistencies in the application of the formal institutional framework (FIF) for schooling to case study and other LFP schools by institutional actors. Differences in the FIF in principle and in practice are linked to perverse incentives embedded within it. The results strongly indicate the existence of what is termed here as, the shadow institutional framework (SIF), employed by case study schools to mediate the FIF to their institutional advantage. The SIF comprises internal institutions common across the set of case study schools, allowing them to form linkages with other LFP schools and exchange institutional information; and external institutions or higher order institutions governing how case study schools interacted with the FIF for basic and/or secondary education and private schooling. The SIF tied together an otherwise independent set of LFP schools as a de-facto sub-sector of the greater private sector. The study's main contributions are its analysis of an emerging local model of formal private schooling for disadvantaged groups; extending new institutional theory's application to education; and the methodological contribution of mediating the researcher's positionality through currencies.