The influence of positivism and post-positivism in public education is critiqued. Post-positivism is identified with the movement extending from T. S. Kuhn (1962, 1970). Logical positivism is discussed as a paradigm based on the philosophy of Enlightenment, the age of reasoning, and the work of A. Compte. The critical theory of society, emerging…

Researchers attempted to predict the defeat of school board incumbents, using variables which had already been shown to account for incumbent defeat in statistical analyses performed after board elections in many different states. A global model was constructed based on 20 social, economic, and political variables as well as on school districts'…

Findings of this ethnographic study are the product of observations of the Capital Area School Board from January until September 1976. The data were fit into two models, the Dissatisfaction Theory of Democracy and the elite-arena model. "Elite" boards reach most decisions in private meetings and feel independent of the electorate.…

Raymond Callahan's superintendent vulnerability thesis suggests that school superintendent behavior is subject to the political winds of local school boards, in turn dominated by the economic values of American businessmen. This thesis inspired a body of research termed "dissatisfaction theory," which describes the sequence of events…

This paper examines the political behavior of local school boards in terms of two models of political governance. The first model discussed is the "sacred vs. secular" model that distinguishes between "sacred" governing bodies that reach consensus in private and generally support the sociocultural status quo and…

Using data collected in 95 Ohio school districts by Brock Hunt, this study reanalyzed those data, examined the reasons for Hunt's inability to predict a school board member incumbent's defeat, and developed a model that would have predicted those Ohio school board elections. Hunt attempted to develop a statistical model of socioeconomic-political…

Survey and observational research on educational lobbying organizations in the Pennsylvania state legislature yielded both data on influence processes and a set of seven guidelines for educational lobbyists. A survey of Pennsylvania legislators at the 1973-74 session examined their attitudes about education bills, educational lobbies and their…

This paper describes the relationship among statistical research, ethnographic research, and practice, all of which combine to generate an explanatory model of school board incumbent defeat and superintendent turnover. The research process that incorporates these variables involves (1) careful ethnographic descriptions of important educational…

Data on 70 independent school districts within the East Texas School Study Council were studied to develop a model, based on dissatisfaction theory, that would predict a target election of a school board member. It was hypothesized that: (1) standard variables from the dissatisfaction theory would account for a significant amount of the variance…

A survey of 47 Pennsylvania school districts examined the traits of deference and authoritarianism among educators and investigated the relationship between these two psychological qualities and school administrative promotion. Questionnaires returned by 493 school administrators and teachers measured each respondent's degrees of authoritarianism…

Legislated change in rural schools districts may be slow and painful. This paper describes the ambience of a rural Texas K-12 school through the eyes of a new science teacher with northern and urban education experience and through the observations of an outside researcher. Attitudes that learning is not important, that hard subjects need not be…

A mail questionnaire study involving 3,000 Texas educators was undertaken to describe the effects of certain Texas education reform policies as they relate to teacher burnout. Focus was on determining how the production of teacher-required paperwork and mandated student achievement testing influence teacher burnout. An initial mailing resulted in…

Recently there has been a resurgence in demand for citizen participation in public school decision-making. To directly assess the degree of this phenomenon, 30 public school districts were selected from Pennsylvania (excluding Philadelphia and Pittsburgh), based on a random sample, for a citizen attitude measurement questionnaire that yielded 320…

As Texas public schools undertake their third year of implementing site-based decision making (SBDM), it becomes increasingly important to examine the extent to which SBDM has achieved its purported goals. This paper examined how Texas public school districts might effect mandated governance changes through the political phenomenon known as…

School districts are cultural systems that may be classified along a continuum from homogeneous to heterogeneous according to the diversity represented in their cultural composition. School boards are the decision-making system that, given the competitive federal, state, and local demands, decides on the particular educational policies and…