The dissertation empirically examines the efficacy of internal control mechanisms by analyzing 94 forced turnovers of chief executive officers (CEOs). It seeks to answer two primary questions: One, do governance-related characteristics influence the promptness with which poorly-performing CEOs are removed from office; and two, are removals of CEOs followed by changes in internal control mechanisms? The results suggest that poorly performing managers are removed more quickly in firms that have a larger percentage of independent outside directors on their board, that have higher equity ownership by the non-CEO directors and lower equity ownership by the CEO, and that separate the positions of CEO and chairperson. The results also suggest that the removal of the CEO provides both the opportunity and the incentive to alter internal governance systems. There is significant turnover of board members and the new boards generally have a higher fraction of independent outside directors and are more likely to separate the positions of CEO and chairperson. In addition, the sensitivity of CEO compensation to firm performance increases significantly following turnover. These post-turnover improvements in monitoring and incentive schemes are more significant in those firms that require a crisis in the product and/or capital market before they remove their CEOs. However, there is no evidence of short-term improvement in operating performance following changes in CEOs and governance systems. Overall, the results suggest that board and ownership characteristics do influence the effectiveness of internal monitoring systems and that CEO turnover is associated with broad changes in monitoring and incentive systems. / Ph. D.

"No Child Left Behind" (NCLB) has generated considerable attention within the education world. The purpose of this thesis is to question how local governments, i.e., local Boards of Education, have reacted to the current involvement and demands of the federal government. NCLB has only started to have an impact on local schools in the last few years as they have begun to fall into various categories of being "in need of improvement" based on failing to meet established goals. School boards are put in a position to rethink their programs and reevaluate their own efforts as they attempt to insure students are meeting the benchmarks established by the federal and state governments and that Highly Qualified Teachers are in every child's classroom. This thesis looks at the actions of six districts in southern New Jersey that are not meeting these mandates and the actions of the Boards of Education towards student achievement and hiring teachers. Demands and requirements of federal and state legislation and policies are narrowing the areas in which school boards can take action. Those actions that are being taken appear to be led by the district Superintendent. This lack of leadership by the elected officials may eventually lead to school boards that are more and more community advisory boards and less and less governing bodies. / Master of Arts

The purpose of this quantitative study was to provide insight to the perspectives of leaders and individuals in authority within the Archdiocese of Los Angeles system of Catholic parochial schools regarding current models of governance, levels of authority, and decision-making processes. There is a lack of clearly-defined levels of decision-making authority from the bishops to the Archdiocesan Department of Catholic Schools down to the individual schools. The pastors, principals, and Department of Catholic Schools personnel shared their perspectives of current governance structures and elements of three emerging alternative governance models. Data were analyzed through a factor analysis of the survey items to explore the strength of the three categories of the governance models represented by the three groups of questions. Next, the descriptive statistics of the specific questions relating to each of the three governance models and community voice were compiled. A Cronbach’s alpha was calculated for each group of questions to measure internal consistency. In order to explore relationships between perceptions among the three independent variable groups (pastors, principals, and Department of Catholic Schools personnel), a Chisquare analysis was run for each of the questions on an ordinal scale. The study showed significant differences in participant responses between the three groups surveyed. However, there was agreement that community voice must be incorporated into governance, but only in a consultative manner. There was also agreement that a strong governing presence at the central office would be beneficial.

Local school boards and their presidents provide Americans with the grass roots leadership for public education. Both have been ignored by policy makers and authors. The purpose of the study was to solicit school board members', school board presidents', and past presidents' perceptions of the role as well as the real and ideal leadership attributes of their school board presidents. A survey method was utilized to address the questions inherent in the purpose. The population for this study included the members of local public boards of education in the U.S. The sampling frame consisted of local school board members holding membership in the National School Boards Association. A random stratified sample was selected. Descriptive procedures were used to summarize the data. Additionally, the relationships between school board presidents', past presidents', and board members perceptions and selected demographic variables (i.e. geographic region, gender, community type, school system enrollment, age, number of terms served, education attainment, race, method president is chosen) was explored using cross-tabulation procedures. The response rate was about 27%. School board members perceive their school board presidents to be most active in the board room. Ideally, school board members perceive an expanded role for their president that includes services to board members and superintendent relations. School board presidents perceive a greater role for the school board presidents than do school board members that includes the highly visible board room roles as well as board member services and superintendent relations activities. Past school board presidents' views differ widely from those of school board presidents and slightly from board members, and in most cases tend to give a lower rating of the board president. School board members, school board presidents, and past presidents perceive their school board presidents as displaying few of the leadership attributes of traditional leaders. They agree that ideally these leadership attributes are critical or important. Differences concerning the board president's real and ideal role and real and ideal leadership attributes were found among board presidents by gender and school system enrollment; among past presidents by school system enrollment, and method president is chosen; and among school board members by geographic region, gender, age, school system enrollment, and education attainment. Results should assist school superintendents and professional educators, school board presidents, school board members, and the general citizenry as they work to clarify their respective roles. / Ed. D.

The intention of this dissertation is to understand how federal advisory boards are operationalizing Congressional intent of transparency, financial efficiency and balanced board membership. When Congress passed the Federal Advisory Commission Act (FACA) in 1972, these three values were intended to help add legitimacy to the operation advisory boards. Advisory boards have been in use on the federal level since the first term of President George Washington, and they provide valuable expertise on a wide variety of subjects for the government. Currently, over 1,000 advisory boards are operating across the federal government with nearly 25,000 people participating. Collectively, annual operations of these boards approaches a half billion dollars. In the years leading up to the passage of FACA, Congressional hearings revealed deficiencies across federal departments with transparency of advisory board operations, spending practices, and appointment processes which threatened the legitimacy of their use. The FACA law was intended to bring legitimacy back to boards' operation by requiring more transparency, financial efficiency and balance in viewpoints on board appointments. With the law more than 40 years old, this dissertation explores how advisory boards today are operating is relation to the values Congress laid out in legislation. A quantitative exploration was conducted to assess the fidelity to the Congressional values by using publicly available data points. A sample of the 1,000 operating advisory boards was used to conduct the research. Using the results of the quantitative exploration, six case studies were selected for additional examination. Three cases were selected by a systematic method based on the quantitative data, and three additional cases were selected by the unique results from the data. A dozen policy changes were suggested as a result of the quantitative and qualitative examinations to better align present day operation of advisory boards with the Congressional intent. This study may be useful to policymakers who have oversight on advisory board operations. / Doctor of Philosophy / American citizens provide input to the federal government in several ways. Voting for President and Members of Congress is the most visible way. However, serving on one of the approximately one thousand existing federal advisory boards is another way. These are boards and commissions made up of citizens who have expertise in various subjects for which the government needs ideas to help fix problems affecting our country. The focus of these boards ranges greatly. For example, some boards focus on highly specialized medical issues, and others focus on how citizens use the land around national forests. In 1972, Congress passed a law that set some basic guidelines on how these boards should operate. Congress said that boards need to be transparent in how they work so the public can monitor them easily. Congress also noted that the boards need to use the tax money given to them to operate efficiently and try to save money whenever they can. Finally, Congress wanted boards to have people with different points of views represented, so recommendations are not one-sided. Now that the law is over 40 years old, this dissertation examines how closely advisory boards today are following those guidelines Congress wrote in 1972. This dissertation suggests some ways to measure how close they are following the directions, and it looks in-depth to several of them to see how they operate. Finally, the dissertation gives some new suggestions on how all boards can operate to better reflect the ideas Congress wanted.

The purpose of this study was to examine demographic characteristics, management concerns and opinions on critical issues in education of public school board members throughout the nation. An historical review of social composition, concerns and issues was conducted from studies of school board members and school boards. Recommendations as to suggested future directions in school board research were made based upon the review of studies over a 65-year period and findings from the 1977 National Survey of Local School Boards. Participants in the 1977 survey were all subscribers to the American School Board Journal, and distribution of a questionnaire to these participants was sponsored by the National School Boards Association. Respondents numbered 1,268, and the survey response rate was 39.5%. All states were represented in the survey as were all types and all sizes of school districts. Demographic profiles were determined; the rank priority of school board member management concerns was established; and level of agreement or disagreement to 3 statements in each of 5 critical education issue areas; discipline, curriculum, Federal involvement, quality of instruction and financial support of public education; was analyzed. Study findings suggested that region, district type and district size were the most influential board characteristics in relation to other characteristics, management concerns and opinions on educational issues. The personal characteristics of educational attainment, occupation and age were the most influential with respect to other characteristics, concerns and issues. With a critical eye toward supplementing the foundation for the further study of school boards, recommendations included: the suggested study of boards as collectives; the initiation of a focal center for the study of school boards on a concentrated and comparative basis; the need to assure representativeness, generalizability and utility in school board research; and several criticisms and suggestions posed to help focus future research more clearly, and aid the researcher and practitioner in making the study of school boards more utilitarian. / Ed. D.

Yes / Data envelopment analysis (DEA) is a technique for identifying the best practices of a given set of decision-making units (DMUs) whose performance is categorized by multiple performance metrics that are classified as inputs and outputs. Although DEA is regarded as non-parametric, the sample size can be an issue of great importance in determining the efficiency scores for the evaluated units, empirically, when the use of too many inputs and outputs may result in a significant number of DMUs being rated as efficient. In the DEA literature, empirical rules have been established to avoid too many DMUs being rated as efficient. These empirical thresholds relate the number of variables with the number of observations. When the number of DMUs is below the empirical threshold levels, the discriminatory power among the DMUs may weaken, which leads to the data set not being suitable to apply traditional DEA models. In the literature, the lack of discrimination is often referred to as the “curse of dimensionality”. To overcome this drawback, we provide a simple approach to increase the discriminatory power between efficient and inefficient DMUs using the well-known pure DEA model, which considers either inputs only or outputs only. Three real cases, namely printed circuit boards, Greek banks, and quality of life in Fortune’s best cities, have been discussed to illustrate the proposed approach. / panish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness (Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad), the State Research Agency (Agencia Estatal de Investigación) and the European Regional Development Fund (Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional) under grant MTM2016-79765-P (AEI/FEDER, UE).

Thesis (MBA.) -- University of Limpopo, 2016 / This research examined whether an improved participation of women in the board of Socially Responsible Investing (SRI) firms has any relationship with sustainability disclosure. Accordingly, the objective of this research was to examine the relationship between the number of women on the board and environmental, social and gender-employment disclosure in South African firms. The research applied a purposive sampling design to study the nine best socially responsible investing firms on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange and secondary data were collected from the sustainability reports of the firms. Using a quantitative approach, the panel-data regression analysis was used to analyse the relationship between women on the board of directors, environmental, social and gender employment disclosure. Energy consumption disclosure, social investment and the number of women employment in the firms were the proxy for environmental disclosure, social investment and gender employment disclosures respectively. Findings show a positive relationship between the number of women on the board of directors and firm disclosure on energy consumption, disclosure on women employment and social investment disclosure. However, the number of women employed in the corporate is still very low in comparison with the male counterparts. The research recommends that, given the unique social and environmental sensitivity of women, the corporate should recruit more women onto the boards to enhance accelerated corporate sustainability performance and disclosures. Key words: sustainability disclosure, women in the board, sustainability performance, energy disclosure, sustainable development

The purpose of this study was to identify and describe the strategies Texas superintendents use to both prevent and resolve conflicts between the school board-superintendent leadership team and to examine the effects of gender, age, ethnicity, level of education, experience in education, tenure as a superintendent, leadership style, and type and size of school districts on the strategies used by superintendents in Texas to prevent and resolve conflicts with school boards. This study was limited to superintendents in the state of Texas during the 2007-08 school year (approximately 1,050). The survey methodology involved an electronic questionnaire that allowed this researcher to survey the entire population of public school superintendents in Texas. The data was analyzed using the Social Sciences (SPSS, 2007) Statistical Package descriptive statistics. In order to validate the data, three superintendents from the largest districts in Texas were interviewed using a semi-structured approach to questioning using the results of the electronic survey. Based on the demographic data provided by the respondents, the typical superintendent in Texas is a married, White, non-Hispanic male, age 50 – 54 who serves a rural school district with a student enrollment of 1 – 499. He has a base salary of $85,000 to $99,999 and serves under a three-year contract and holds a master’s degree and majored in education at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. The typical superintendent has five to nine years of both teaching experience and site-based administrative experience and one to four years of central office administrative experience. More than 70% of the responding superintendents who held more than one superintendency reported that they left their last superintendency because of an opportunity to move to a larger district or for a higher salary. The majority of Texas school superintendents described their leadership/management style as collaborative and that human resources management was their greatest area of conflict with their school board. The factor that they report most inhibits their effectiveness was inadequate financing of schools. The strategy that the of majority Texas superintendents used to prevent and resolve conflict was to discuss the policy role of the school board with board members, participate in annual team-building activities and provide leadership training for board members. There was very little correlation between the demographic factors and strategies used by superintendents to prevent and resolve conflict. Follow-up interviews with large city superintendents provided additional information regarding specific strategies superintendents use to prevent and respond to conflict. Recommendations were made for further research regarding the role of the superintendent versus the role of the school board using qualitative research methods to further explicate the relationship between leadership/management style and strategies superintendents use to prevent and resolve conflict with school boards. / text

Orientador: Newton Antonio Paciulli Bryan / Tese (doutorado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Faculdade de Educação / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-24T03:52:11Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Silva_GeneMariaVieiraLyra_D.pdf: 1913556 bytes, checksum: 16f29419f301e17a4986273d9b633829 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2013 / Resumo: Esta tese investiga o funcionamento estrutural dos Conselhos Estaduais de Acompanhamento e Controle Social do Fundo de Manutenção e Desenvolvimento da Educação Básica e de Valorização dos Profissionais da Educação (CACS/Fundeb) dos estados do Amazonas, de Sergipe, de São Paulo, do Rio Grande do Sul e de Goiás. Para tanto, é feita uma análise comparativa entre eles, considerando as atividades desenvolvidas no período de 2008 a 2011. O objetivo inicial é verificar como são tomadas as decisões nesses espaços democráticos e participativos, aqui denominados conselhos gestores, assim como identificar os fatores que determinam as suas efetividades institucionais. Toma como base o contexto da redemocratização do Estado brasileiro e do advento da participação social e reflete sobre as dimensões políticas e históricas do financiamento da educação pública, por meio da implementação da política de fundos e da institucionalização do controle social. Revisita o conceito de controle social da função administrativa do Estado, fundamentado nas categorias conceituais de representação e participação, no interior de instituições nas quais a tomada de decisão é compartilhada entre representantes do poder público e da sociedade. Com foco no empoderamento da cidadania política dos membros constituintes desses colegiados, também analisa as ações institucionais que buscam o fortalecimento do controle social, em especial do financiamento da educação pública. O estudo contribui com o desenvolvimento do conceito de controlabilidade social, aqui entendido como a capacidade da instituição controladora, constituída pela sociedade civil organizada, de manter-se adequada ao exercício pleno do controle social. A tese conclui que as diferenças capturadas entre os conselhos estaduais, principalmente as relacionadas com as estruturas de funcionamento e as proposições de procedimentos e ações, possibilitam a ampliação da efetividade institucional, contribuindo em escala variável para a fiscalização da política de financiamento da educação pública. / Abstract: This thesis investigates the structural functioning of the States Boards of Monitoring and Social Control Fund of Maintenance and Development of Basic Education and Enhancement of Education Professionals (CACS / Fundeb) of the Amazonas, Sergipe, São Paulo, Rio Grande do Sul and Goiás states, in Brazil. Therefore, a comparison is made between them, considering the activities done during the period of 2008-2011. The initial purpose is to see how decisions are made in these democratic and participatory spaces, here called management councils, as well as to identify the factors that determine their institutional effectiveness. This study uses as a basis the context of the democratization of the Brazilian State and the advent of social participation and it reflects on the historical and political dimensions of financing in public education through the implementation of the policy fund and the institutionalization of social control. It revisits the concept of social control in the administrative functions of the State, based on the conceptual categories of representation and participation within institutions where decision making is shared between representatives of the government and the society. Focusing on the empowerment of political citizenship, constituent members of these states boards also analyze the institutional actions that seek to improve social control, especially the funding of public education. The study contributes to the development of the concept of social controllability, defined here as the ability of the controlling institution, composed by the organized civil society, of maintaing itself adequate in the full exercise of social control. The thesis concludes that the captured differences between the states boards, especially those related to the structures and operating procedures of the propositions and actions, enable the expansion of institutional effectiveness, contributing, in a varying scale, to checking the political financing of public education. / Doutorado / Politicas, Administração e Sistemas Educacionais / Doutora em Educação