The impact of school accountability laws on measures of trust between Indiana public school superintendents and teacher union leaders within the forum of mandatory discussion.

摘要

This study examines the impact of the school accountability laws "No Child Left Behind" and Indiana's Public Law 221 on Superintendents' perception of their relationship with the Teachers' Union Leader in their mandatory discussion meetings. Both school accountability laws contain provisions for the Indiana's Department of Education to take over poor performing schools if they fail to make Adequate Yearly Progress for five years. Two samples were constructed from Indiana's highest and lowest performing districts and the Superintendents in the two samples were surveyed. Results were compared in order to ascertain the impact of the sanctions on the low performing districts against those of the high performing districts.;There is much public discussion concerning the performance of public schools and the research, pro and con, spends considerable time discussing and measuring generalities. The review of the literature in this study argues for a new direction of study based on a framework of contracts as organizations and the importance of relational considerations by Smith and King (2009). It uses an instrument developed by Currall and Judge (1995) to measure trust between boundary role persons with additional questions, some of which are open-ended questions relating to specific information from each school district. The goal is to determine whether there is a difference between the high and low performing districts in Indiana through their Superintendents' perception of trust with their Teachers' Association Leader as well as through the impact of school accountability laws.;The survey revealed there is no statistically significant difference in the amount of trust between high and low performing school districts. It also found that high and low performing districts both view their relationships as slightly better than they were five years ago. However, when asked specifically whether school accountability laws had an impact on their relationships, low performing districts were statistically more likely to credit school accountability laws with having improved their relationships. Further qualitative analysis reveals those districts' Superintendents seemed to be able to leverage relationships to keep the nexus of stress outside their districts while developing a nexus of control within. The further study of these relationship skills would be beneficial.