Principals play an important role in determining the quality of their schools by the selection of teachers. A preponderance of evidence from the economic and education policy literature indicates that teachers with stronger academic backgrounds produce better student outcomes. This article hypothesizes that school principals with certain attributes are likely to favor teachers with similar attributes to their own. This study uses the Schools and Staffing Surveys from 1993 to 1994 to test whether school administrators who attended more selective universities are more or less likely to hire teachers who attended more selective undergraduate institutions. Findings suggest that principals' undergraduate background matters when it comes to their recruitment, selection, and perhaps retention of teachers with strong academic undergraduate backgrounds, especially in high-poverty schools. Principals in high-poverty schools who attended highly or the most selective undergraduate institutions were 3.3 times more likely to hire teachers who attended similar institutions.

Supporters of public education fear attempts to privatize schools, while the private sector has always struggled against the monopolistic power of the public schools that educates almost 90% of all K-12 students. This trepidation has recently been intensified by the creation of a “third sector” that includes charter schools, voucher programs, and the increased diversity of private education. This article looks at the dynamics of fear as shaped by increased competition among public, private, and privatized schools. In fact, both public schools and their private school counterparts, fear privatization of education because it draws students and resources away from traditional schools. And recently, the opening of new “religious charter schools” has crossed the lines between church and state, and between private and public education. Thus, the politics of education have become somewhat more confused and unnerving as the distinctions between public and private education are virtually disappearing.

This study examines the longevity in office of superintendents in 292 school districts, using data from the period 1975-99. Random samples of districts from across the United States, as well as all school districts from North Carolina, were studied. Data were analyzed by survival analysis techniques, using information on superintendents, districts, and school boards as predictors. Superintendent tenure has not changed significantly since 1975-79, averaging 6–7 years over the whole period. Significantly related to survival in office were level of school board involvement in management, support for needed construction, merger of school systems, district poverty level, and superintendent postgraduate education.

Teacher supervision and evaluation are fundamental responsibilities of the principal. Yet principals and teachers find their supervisory interactions to be difficult and unsatisfying experiences. This article explores the micropolitical context in which supervision and evaluation take place. Highlighting specific examples in New York City, the article argues that the environment in which teacher-principal interactions occur is shaped by union contracts, state and district personnel policies, and precedents set by local experiences with teacher dismissals. These historical and structural factors and others converge to create three traps of supervision.

The usual view is that truants are lost and troubled juveniles with psychological problems. While the authors agree that many well-known sociological and environmental factors promote truancy, they also confront more disconcerting causes: curriculum and pedagogy. Truancy is much too widespread to continue classifying it as the behavior of social and educational misfits. In recent years new assertions have been made that most truants aren’t social deviants; rather they’re students who become truant as a rational decision. In other words, these rational decision makers are wandering from the appointed place — the school and the classroom — because in their perceptions these places aren’t beneficial for them.