What are the opportunities and challenges for establishing community partnerships among K-12 STEM education researchers and Black and Brown communities? CADRE partners interviewed five community partners from diverse backgrounds in STEM education to understand how STEM education researchers can better engage with communities and share their…

The field of critical studies recognizes that all knowledge is deeply embedded in ideological, cultural, political, and historical contexts. Although this approach is commonly applied in other subfields of psychology, educational psychology--which is the study of human learning, thinking, and behavior in formal and informal educational…

Organizational systematics were applied to a classification scheme for postsecondary institutions using a combined phyletic-phenetic approach. Nine characteristics of organizational structure were operationalized for the college setting: institutional autonomy, centralized decision making, functional specialization, effective participation,…

Modified versions of a family decision-making scale were administered to 291 students in grades 4, 5, 7, and 8 and 314 parents to assess their perceptions of the degree to which the child shares power and authority with parents and participates in making decisions at home. Study 1 found support for the hypothesis that parent-child authority…

After criticising the prevalent assumption of organizational theory that organizational behavior is based on common typological forms, this paper proposes a political analysis of schools as organizations as a practical theory general enough to be useful to practitioners. The first section reviews the basic elements of comparative structural…

Based on an institutional-contingency view, this study focuses on ways in which public and private school sectors in six San Francisco area counties embody different organizational logistics and authority principles, including rational-legal, traditional, and local-market. Results suggest that, among other characteristics, nonreligious private…

This essay reviews major trends in methodological and theoretical approaches to the study of organizations since the mid-sixties and espouses the political analysis of organizations, a position representing a middle ground between comparative structuralism and the loosely coupled systems approach. This position emphasizes micropolitics as well as…

This study of incumbent British Columbia school board members prior to election analyzes relationships between individual members' feelings of political efficacy and trust and their decisions to seek or not seek reelection. The 60 subjects, from 24 districts, represented candidates (those members seeking reelection) and retirees (members not…

Using techniques of the reputational method to study community power structure, this report identifies components of power structure in a Tennessee school district, demonstrates that proven methodologies can facilitate educational leaders' reform efforts, and serves as a pilot study for further investigation. Researchers investigated the district…

This study of the school board agenda-setting role among 30 Minnesota superintendents interprets their perceptions in relation to environmental contexts, group demands, issues control, and district enrollment size. A microperspective of David Easton's political systems model provided the guiding conceptual framework. Respondents were interviewed…