Secondary Education Managers/Executives/Administrators
OBJECTIVE To determine whether significant differences in leadership practices exist between school-based and centralized-management administrators and teachers.
METHODOLOGY The sample was comprised of 118 school-based and 114 centralized-managed administrators and teachers from 457 public elementary and secondary schools in four randomly selected states (South Carolina, Mississippi, Wisconsin, and Michigan) across the United States. An administrator, along with the fifth teacher on his/her teacher index, participated. The overall survey response rate was 29 percent; 44 percent of the responses were from administrators. The LPI was modified so that respondents marked the frequency with which they believed that each of the leadership behaviors “were being practiced o their campus”.
KEY FINDINGS Overall, there were significant differences in the leadership practices associated with school-based and centralized-management districts. There were significant differences in all five leadership practices between the perceptions of teachers and administrators. Significant differences were also found between teachers and administrators within school-based and especially centralized-management districts (where teachers perceptions were consistently lower than the views of administrators). Perceptions about the frequency of leadership actions and behaviors were consistently higher in school-based districts than in centralized-management districts.
Differences were not found between school-based and centralized-management respondents based upon interactions between (1) kind of school (elementary or secondary), (2) kind of school and type of program (school-based vs. centralizedmanagement), (3) kind of school and position (administrator or teacher), or (4) kind of school, type of program, and position. Neither respondent state or school district size significantly affected the results.