School Autonomy Policies Lead to Increases in Principal Autonomy and Job Satisfaction

We explore whether decentralization of decision-making influences school principals’ subjective experience of autonomy, job demands, burnout, and job satisfaction. Using six-years of longitudinal data, we used two Australian education reforms as a natural experiment of the effect of decentralization. Exploiting state-to-state variation in the policies, we used difference-in-differences models, finding that the decentralization policies had a small influence on increasing self-perceptions of autonomy without increasing job demands. We also found that the policies had a small positive effect on job satisfaction.

Urban Principal Autonomy and the Goldilocks Dilemma: Considering the Nature and Limits of Principal Power in New York City

Some contemporary urban educational reformers believe that empowering principals with increased school-based autonomy will help them lead educational improvement more effectively. We consider this popular reform idea by examining how principals experienced and exerted autonomy in different forms in two distinct eras in New York City. Our findings suggest that principal autonomy as a centrally planned reform strategy for urban education encounters a Goldilocks dilemma: principal power is almost inevitably too hot or too cold, but never just right. However, principals can and do assert self-sourced autonomy in which they recognize and exercise whatever power they may have within prevailing organizational constraints, conditions, and restrictions. We conclude by examining implications.

Keep Safe, Keep Learning: Principals' Role in Creating Psychological Safety and Organizational Learning During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Utilizing a sample of 54 interviews from a larger study of traditional public school principals' responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, we examined the degree to which principals in 19 states and representing both urban (e.g., intensive, emergent or characteristic; n = 37) and suburban settings (n = 17) and across all student levels (i.e., elementary, middle, and high), experienced and engaged in behaviors to create psychological safety during the COVID-19 pandemic. We also sought to understand how various environmental and organizational features may have influenced these conditions and thus the likelihood of learning taking place. We find principals reported varied levels of psychological safety in their schools with associated differing levels of organizational learning and responsiveness to the crisis. However, rather being grounded in environmental conditions (e.g., urbanicity, demographics, etc.), organizational factors and specifically, differences in accountability, principal autonomy, professional culture and teacher decision-making were all key in the degree of psychological safety exhibited. Together, these findings serve to expand understanding of leadership as creating conditions for learning and give insight into the degree our pre-COVID-19 system may have facilitated or stymied the ability or capacity of school leaders in different settings to support transformational learning. In this way, this research may have real and important implications for the types of support leaders and teachers require as we collectively transition into the next phase of uncertainty as many schools continue to try and re-open safely and all that lays ahead.

Demystification of the Idea Of Transcendent God or is it Possible to Unite Religion and Science?

The article considers the historically determined relation of two essential forms of social consciousness, science and religion. The condition for the productivity of its disclosure is going beyond the limits of a simple and non-reflective preference for a state of faith or scientific knowledge. It gives the opportunity of formation of veracious cognitive discursive-conceptual practice. First of all, it presupposes philosophic formulation that is a non-idealized approach to comparative-analytical view on the existence of science and religion as social life phenomena. Secondly, it needs a valid socio-culturally determined essential basis for this or that view on a given relation. Thirdly, it reaches its determinacy in the desired transformation of socially determined types and ways of perception. Preliminarily, religion and science are to be determined in their principal autonomy. In sociohistoric regard, religion is the basis and vital condition for the appearance of the archaic patrimonial form of the social. Science, starting from the era of Greek natural philosophy, asserts such a cognitive dialectic of concepts, where there is no place for external compulsion, but the sphere of freedom of the thinking individual is formed. In both cases, we observe the output into limiting statement of sensually-material or conceptual-ideal regards. Their further existence requires well-known separation of the spheres of the essential presence of science and religion. Also, it is necessary to preserve the religious sense of the cosmically-generic significance of man with the retention of humanity as its immanent quality, but without the Old Testament cosmologically-oriented traditions. Natural science, on the other hand, establishes a monopoly on true knowledge of nature, society, history, and thought, without, accordingly, the positivist limitations of its own premises. The result of these differentiations will be the procedure of dearchaization of theological thought, its establishment in the perspective of the predominant moralethical and subject-rationalistic orientation.

Dyrektor szkoły w roli pracodawcy – przegląd wybranych zagadnień funkcjonowania szkoły jako zakładu pracy

One of the basic tasks that the provisions of the educational law entrust to the headteacher is to be inban employment relationship with the teachers as employees. This role is determined by the status of the educational institution as a workplace, to which the sources of universally and internally binding labor law apply. They impose a number of obligations on the employer, i.e. the headteacher, which should be interpreted in the light of the unique educational, teaching and tutoring tasks implemented within the units of the education system. Principal autonomy is also influenced by the imperative of implication in the educational reality the clause of the child’s good. It is done by application of specific legal provisions, in particular making decisions that create the internal policy of the school staff.

The courtier’s empire: a case study of providers and provision

In this chapter, I draw on Bourdieu’s concepts of symbolic violence, social capital and misrecognition to theorise three effects of a few elite multi-academy trust principals’ positioning on other local headteachers’ and principals’ agency and identities — I typologise these as the “follower”, the “acquired” and the “excluded”. The chapter reports on primary research which shows how newly privileged system-leading principals, or courtiers at the court of the Secretary of State for Education, have won regional empires through expanding their academy chains to occupy the spaces opened up by the dismantling of local authorities. Public-sector and school-leader identities and histories permit the promotion of their activities as “school led” and downplay their close relationship with private-sector networks and central-state policy-makers. What this analysis reveals is the hierarchisation of school leadership and the illusion of headteacher or principal autonomy.

Markets & Myths: Autonomy in Public & Private Schools

School choice is the most controversial education policy issue of the 1990s. John Chubb and Terry Moe's Politics, Markets and America's Schools stimulated this investigation. They concluded that teacher and administrator autonomy was the most important influence on student achievement. They assumed that the organization of private schools offered greater autonomy resulting in higher student achievement and that the bureaucracy of public schools stifles autonomy limiting student achievement. The research undertaken here elaborates, elucidates, and fills in the framework of teacher and principal autonomy in public and private secondary schools. Interviews of more than thirty teachers and administrators in six high schools, observations, field notes, and analysis of documents collected in the field form the empirical base of this work. The sites included three private, independent, nondenominational secondary schools which are college preparatory and three public secondary schools noted for high graduation rates and offering numerous advanced placement courses.The feelings expressed by both public and private school participants in this study testify to equally high degrees of autonomy. Issues that emerged from data analysis in this study which mitigate and shape autonomy include the following: conflicting and contradictory demands, shared beliefs, layers of protection, a system of laws, funding constraints and matters of size of the institution. These issues challenge oversimplified assertions that differences of any importance exist between the autonomy experienced by professionals in public and private high schools. This study reveals the complexity of the concept of autonomy and challenges the myth that teachers and principals in private schools enjoy autonomy and freedom from democratic bureaucracy that their public school counterparts do not.