The purpose of this research is to investigate and describe parents’ perceptions of the private community school at Hareeng Enghs/i Medium Community School in Leribe district. The study uses the conceptual framework of parental choice of school. This is done with a view that parents’ choice of schooling is related to the assumption that the private community school has a good learning environment. Because the parents assume that the school is good, the study shifted to explore the question of what makes a good learning environment. In order to obtain an exhaustive examination, data was derived from three sets of questionnaire. Data was obtained using openended questionnaires from a sample of Hareeng English medium Community school parents and teachers, andPhelane public school teachers. The results show that the parents’ choice in this study is not informed by the idea that the school is either public or private. Instead the study found that parents’ choice is influenced by the idea that the school has a good learning environment. When analysis of parents’ understanding of a good learning environment is done, the study discovered that parents’ understanding though educational, is not consistent with the literature on school quality.

O presente estudo situa-se no âmbito da História da Educação e tem como objetivo central demonstrar como se desenvolveu o ensino secundário na cidade do Rio Grande/RS a partir da segunda metade do século XIX, de forma a abarcar outras demandas para além da formação para o ingresso no ensino superior. Desse modo, utilizamos como corpus documental os anúncios dos colégios e aulas particulares publicados na imprensa local, sobretudo, no jornal Diario do Rio Grande de 1848 a 1890, juntamente com Relatórios, Ofícios, Mapas, Estatutos, Catálogos, Anuários e Almanaques da Província, entre outros documentos. O intuito desta tese é comprovar que o ensino secundário rio-grandino estabeleceu um novo paradigma para a educação formal, consolidando-se como uma alternativa viável para a formação intelectual de outros grupos sociais que não almejavam o ingresso no ensino superior. O ensino secundário nesta cidade diferenciava-se justamente por redimensionar a sua finalidade neste período, possibilitando que outros públicos ascendessem socialmente por meio da instrução secundária Para corroborar com a presente tese analisamos a significativa oferta de instituições de ensino secundário presentes na cidade, ao longo do período analisado, sinalizando a existência de uma demanda local oriunda de determinados grupos sociais que tinham como objetivo manter certa situação de classe que seria responsável por consolidar e sustentar os interesses das gerações anteriores e, que também estavam voltados à ascensão social através da educação formal. Identificamos que esta formação intelectual, proporcionada pelo ensino secundário, não estava somente voltada ao ingresso no ensino superior, mas, sobretudo, a uma formação cultural e profissional que o ensino primário não contemplava e que precisava ser amparada através de novas ofertas de ensino que o setor público não conseguiu abarcar, e nem mesmo, rivalizar. Desse modo, conseguimos identificar, através de diferentes indícios, que a instrução secundária, de caráter laico e particular que se desenvolveu ao longo do período imperial, consolidou-se em função de diferentes necessidades da sociedade rio-grandina que não incluía apenas a preparação para os exames de preparatórios, mas também, a formação para atuar no comércio, na política e na docência. / The present study lies within the History of Education scope and aims to show how secondary education was developed in the city of Rio Grande / Rio Grande do Sul State from the second half of the nineteenth century so as to cover other demands beyond training towards higher education entrance. For that purpose, school and private class announcements published by the local press, especially in the Diario do Rio Grande newspaper from 1848 to 1890, together with Provincial Reports, Official letters, Maps, Statutes, Catalogs, Yearbooks and Almanacs, among others, were consulted. This thesis aims to prove that the Rio Grande high school system established a new paradigm for formal education, consolidating itself as a viable alternative for the intellectual formation of other social groups that did not intend to follow higher education studies. Secondary education in this city was differentiated precisely by reshaping its purpose in this period, allowing public at large to ascend socially through high school In order to support this thesis, a significant supply of secondary education institutions in the city during the aforementioned period was analyzed, signaling the existence of a local demand by some groups that sought to maintain their social status, which served the purpose of consolidating and maintaining the interests of previous generations and which were also aimed at social ascent through formal education. This identified intellectual formation provided by secondary education was not only directed towards entering higher education, but provided, above all, cultural and professional formation that primary education did not contemplate and needed to be supported by new educational offers that the public system could not and did not rival. In this way, and through different indicators, secondary education of secular and particular character that was consolidated during the imperial period due to different needs of the Rio Grande society, including not only preparation for preparatory exams but also training in trade, politics and teaching, was identified.

This ethnography takes place at four of northern India’s most renowned, all-girls’ private boarding schools, established in reference to the British Public Schooling model mainly during the tail ends of colonialism by Indian queens and British memsahibs on the sub-continent. It is a story told from the points of view of founders, administrators, and teachers, but primarily from that of students, based on fieldwork conducted from July 2013 through June 2014. Schools heralded as historic venues of purported upper-caste girls’ emancipation, this study interrogates the legacies of this colonial-nationalist moment by examining how these institutions and their female students engage in newer processes and discourses of class formation and gendered empowerment through schooling. For one, it considers the dichotomous (re)constructions of gendered and classed personhoods enacted through exclusionary modernities, particularly in terms of who gains access to these schools, both physically and through symbolic forms of belonging. It then examines the reclamation of these constructs within (inter)national development discourses of girls’ empowerment and the role of neoliberal privatization in reconstituting elite schooling experiences with gender as its globalizing force. Here, seemingly paradoxical relationships between such concepts as discipline and freedom, duties and rights, collective responsibility and individual competition are explored, arguing that the pressures of academic success, tensions over the future, and role of high stakes examinations and privatized tutoring are contributing to student experiences of performative or fatiguing kinds of empowerment. Through such frames, extreme binary constructions of empowerment are complicated, demonstrating how female Public School students exist more within middling spaces of “betweenness,” of practiced mediation. Empowerment in this sense is not an achievable status, nor unidirectional process, but a set of learned tools or skills deployed in recurring moments of contradiction or in difficult deliberations, whereby students variously buy in, (re)create, opt-out of, or reject proposed models of “successful” or “legitimate,” female personhood. Overall, this ethnography problematizes assumed relationships between empowerment and privilege, questions the alignments between school and the (upper-)middle class home, and suggests that as the reproductive capabilities of elite schooling are challenged in the face of newer venues of capital, these all-girls’ Public Schools and their students are finding unique ways to remain or become the elite of consideration.

The problem with which this investigation is concerned is that of describing the secondary school principalship as perceived by selected principals and teachers in Bangkok, Thailand. The purposes of this study are (1) to collect selected demographic data about the secondary school principals and teachers in government and private schools, and (2) to measure and determine the relative effectiveness of principals of government and private secondary schools in Bangkok, Thailand, as perceived by secondary school principals and teachers. The conclusions of this study are as follows: (1) principals in government and private secondary schools appear equivalent in professional preparation as measured by highest degree held, (2) principals in government and private secondary schools earn equivalent salaries, (3) teachers in private secondary schools have less professional preparation than teachers in government secondary schools, (4) teachers in government schools are better paid than teachers in private schools, (5) principals in both government and private secondary schools perceived their effectiveness as higher than did the teachers in those schools.

The top leader of an organization influences the organizational culture, and the organizational culture influences the leader. Strategic thinking on the part of the leader is a result of organizational culture and/or will impact organizational culture. This qualitative study is a comparative multiple-case study that examines the relationship between leaders and organizational culture and what the leader’s strategic decision-making and organizational changes indicate about the relationship between leadership and organizational culture. The organizational context of private schools is used to better understand the dynamics between leadership and organizational culture. This study uses an interview protocol with CEOs of private schools, a macroculture in the United States, to solicit the leaders’ perspectives on their school’s organizational culture and their perspectives on the specific strategic decisions made by those leaders in the context of that organizational culture. This study focuses on six different schools in Virginia, all approved through accrediting procedures by the Virginia Council for Private Education -- a shared organizational context. Individual focal points for data collection and analysis include individual school websites, published school documents, and required accreditation documents as well as structured interviews with the CEOs of each school. This study examines the cycle of influence that the leader has on the organization through strategic thinking and the influence that the organizational culture has on the leader. Three findings expressed how the leader influences the organizational culture. There were also three findings on how the organizational culture influences the leaders. Two additional findings are on what change indicates about the relationship between the leader and the organizational culture. These findings reveal that a focus on relationships in the school, a willingness to target specific growth for the individual school, and goals that were expressed spiritually as well as academically are key to the leaders. The study also found that the school cultures identified strongly and positively with that of being a family, spiritual focus operationally distinguishes the school cultures, and spiritual identity is also expressed as the relationship the school has to church. Two findings were identified relating to strategic decisions and change; these findings were that evidence of change should be visible and explicit within the organization and organizational change relates directly to focus for growth from the leader. These findings from this study support the conclusions that 1) Christian school leaders have a direct influence on the values and direction of the school’s organizational culture; 2) the Christian school’s organizational identity has a direct influence on the focus of the leader, and 3) changes targeted in Christian schools reflect the focus of the leader on growth. Findings from this research suggest that organizational culture is highly contextualized and as a result strategic thinking and decision-making on the part of the leader are also highly contextualized. Contextualization increases as the leader seeks to grow the organization or to change the organization. Understanding contextualization that exists, and how organizational culture changes as strategic decisions are made by the leader, has implications for further research in effective leadership, effective change, strategic thinking, and growing effective organizational cultures including private and public institutions of higher education and public and private corporate institution.

The aims of this study were to define an Australian boarding school, provide a summary of international and Australian boarding school literature, and complete a small-scale qualitative investigation of students' views in a co-educational boarding school. At first glance, it appeared that contemporary Australian boarding schools were a reproduction of the influential public boys' schools of Great Britain. Although there have been a number of histories of Australian independent schools, the boarding element has often been portrayed as Dickensian and remains an overlooked area of educational research. In particular, the literature available about Australian residential schooling over the past 20 years has been limited to a handful of significant studies by Cree and Trimingham Jack. In this study 45 Australian and overseas students were asked to write memoirs of 4-5,000 words about their boarding experience emphasising their thoughts, feelings and aspirations. The limitation was that all respondents were full-time boarders for at least one year when the questionnaire-survey was completed. The memoir-based humanistic approach of the Polish- American sociologist Florian Znaniecki, as developed for the analysis of personal and group social systems in the culturally diverse context of Australia by J. J. Smolicz, was employed to interpret the memoir data. The memoir method has been well documented in Australia, as a means of collecting and analysing concrete and cultural facts, mainly in relation to the study of minority ethnic groups and their cultural actions. The humanistic approach emphasized that the researcher must accept cultural phenomena from the viewpoint of its participants and not from that of an outside observer. In the present study, this approach permitted the researcher to understand the experiences and attitudes of individual students towards an Australian co-educational boarding education through their own eyes. The memoirs analysed were generated from 26 concrete questions, which revealed place-of-birth, ethnic identity, and languages spoken at home. This provided the researcher with verifiable information about the everyday lives of the respondents. The second half of the memoirs required response to 23 questions - these yielded cultural data. These questions required students to reflect on their situation, attitudes and experiences of boarding as a system of education. This information could only have been provided by the participants themselves and gave the researcher direct access to the memoir writers' individual and group consciousness. The study discovered that a number of the students were in the process of re-evaluating and re-interpreting the advantages and disadvantages of boarding school as a social system transmitted to them by parents, friends, family, and teachers. The respondent's personal statements revealed that the relationships among students and among students and staff in the boarding House tended to be primary in nature, in that they were personal, informal, and involved the entire human personality. From these data, it appeared that the success of a boarding school was determined by the personal atmosphere, support, and comfort of the boarding House. Consideration of the empirical data found that 43 of the 45 respondents' memoirs believed that their overall experiences at the research boarding school were positive. Negative observations stressed the pressures of homesickness, tedium of school life and a lack of freedom thereby supporting Goffman's view of a "total institution". The majority of students' memoirs were ambivalent towards religion at the research school. Nevertheless, 11 stressed its significant implication in their day-to-day lives. The memoirs suggested that an education at the research boarding school was a crucible that forged students through a variety of experiences, positive and negative, individual and collective, for life. Overall, the memoirs support the observation that boarding school acts as a social system for the acceptance of new cultural values, such as the cultural diversity respondents' experienced in their lives at boarding school. The study revealed an attitudinal shift in the group that welcomed the cultural pluralism of the school and recognised the cultural monism of the home. These memoirs revealed that boarding school was a significant factor in fostering independence and embracing cultural diversity as experienced in the crucible of the boarding school. These findings challenged the popular maxim that an Australian residential education was an anachronistic, inflexible, colonial-British model and suggested that it has the potential to act as a system of education that prepares its students for the challenges of life. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--School of Education, 2004.

Thesis (M.Ed.)--University of Hong Kong, 1990. / Includes bibliographical references (leaf 160-163). Also available in print.

<p><p><p>Swedish school system is today victim of facing competition. Today sees the school leadership the students like customers whom they depend to operate their school. But I have asked myself, what will be the new students see and how much this spectacle in both money and time that project will cost for the municipality and school teachers. The question is if whether the school will be better when the competition becomes school or just better marketed? I'm interested in how clearly ideologies emerge in schools brochures if we study them at critically and analytically way.<strong> </strong>I will study how the independent schools present themselves and what ideas they describe. Can we see the ideological arguments that Reagan and Thatcher had in the 80s who proved their controlled Swedish politicians argued in the 90s in the published material from the Swedish Independent schools today? Independent schools can be seen as vanguards in the Swedish school policy. The Neoliberal winds blowing can probably be best reflected by the private sector in pursuit of the student base. At the same time, the independent schools on the side of the ideologies that best describe the Neoliberal doctrine.</p><p>I'm interested in how and how societal change is implemented and how clear ideologies reflected in school materials in their struggle to become winners in the Swedish context of market adjustment. I will be studying the brochures from an ideology critical approach that highlights the ideological formulations that can be traced back to the basic ideology.</p></p></p>

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 is designed to help create a national minimum standard in the United States‘ public education system by requiring states to implement accountability systems. I examine the effect of No Child Left Behind on private school enrollment using a difference in differences model. Using data from the Private School Universe Survey, conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics, which is a survey conducted every two years and is mandatory for each American private school‘s administration to complete, I can evaluate the movement between public and private schools during the period when the requirements of No Child Left Behind were being implemented. I hypothesize that public schools have moved resources away from high achieving students toward the marginal students causing the high achieving students to enroll in private schools. Hence, private school enrollment will have increased due to No Child Left Behind. I find through my regressions that this hypothesis is true; the percentage of school-aged children in private schools increases after the signing of the No Child Left Behind Act.

The purpose of this master's thesis is to examine and compare the process of starting a school library at schools which haven't had a school library before, and to examine and compare the experience of this process according to the principals and the persons responsible for the school library. I have examined two Swedish independent primary schools (age 6-15 years). I have made qualitative interviews with the principals and the persons responsible for the new school library. In all, I have made seven interviews. As requested by the new Swedish Educational Act, both schools had recently started creating school libraries. One of the schools had recruited a half-time teacher-librarian and the other had no staffing at all. In the interviews, I have examined the attitudes of the informants towards school libraries, if this attitude has changed during the process of starting the school library, the informants' experiences during this process and the informants' views on the school library as an agent for student achievement. I have used David V. Loertscher's taxonomies for the principal, the school librarian and the student, to analyze the statements of the informants. The result of the study shows that at the school without library staff, the person responsible for the library had a hard time starting it as there were no time allocated. The work was easier and quicker done at the school with the part-time teacher-librarian. The views of the school library and of its possibilities for student achievement, that the informants expressed, were positive at the school with the staffed library,as well as their experiences. At the other school, the attitudes and experiences were more negative. The conclusion of the study is that staffing is an important factor for a successful school library, and that starting a school library requires a great amount of planning, knowledge, time and resources. This is a two years master's thesis in Archive, Library and Museum studies.