Examining Elementary School Science Achievement Gaps Using an Organizational and Leadership Perspective

Abstract

There is the tendency to explain away successful urban schools as indicative of the heroic efforts by a tireless individual, effectively blaming schools that underperform for a lack of grit and dedication. This study reports the development of a research instrument (School Science Infrastructure, or SSI) and then applying that tool to an investigation of equitable science performance by elementary schools. Our efforts to develop a science-specific instrument to explore associations between school-level variables and equitable science performance are informed by James Coleman’s tripartite notion of social capital: the “wealth” of organizations is encompassed within their social norms, informational channels, and reciprocating relationships. Grounded in school effectiveness research and social capital theory, the instrument that we report on here is a valid and reliable tool to support meso-level investigations of factors contributing to school variations in science achievement

Clarifying and Capturing “Trust” in Relation to Science Education: Dimensions of Trustworthiness within Schools and Associations with Equitable Student Achievement

“…The development of a school organization and leadership survey for science followed a deliberate five‐phase process involving 18 months of effort and over 1300 K‐8 teachers. The outcome was a 64‐item instrument consisting of nine distinct factors regarding teachers’ perceptions about their schools’ organizational structures and leadership practices (Settlage et al., ). The School Science Infrastructure (SSI) instrument provides a reliable measure corresponding to Coleman's () social capital theory constructs of social trust, group norms and information channels: collaborative teacher learning in science, principal advocacy for equity, supports for science teaching, shared decision‐making, and so on.…”

“…We posited that trust was a potential candidate for explaining why some elementary schools performed better than others even with very similar student populations. Other factors being investigated but not reported here include leadership practices, relationships to families, and academic focus (Settlage, Butler, Wenner, Smetana, & McCoach, ). From the outset we recognized that existing instrumentation was insufficient for our purposes.…”

Meaning of work in a group of school principals: the role of organizational variables

“…At the same time, a growing body of research is tackling the idea of schools as organizations (for example, by defining them as professional learning communities, Leclerc et al , 2012; Antinluoma et al , 2018). Several authors, indeed, report that organizational variables have a leading role in determining the quality of schools as institutions (Van De Grift and Houtveen, 2006; Cosner, 2009; Scheerens, 2013; Settlage et al , 2015). The effect of such variables is confirmed even as an antecedent of school workers’ well-being and stress (Chang, 2009; Hall-Kenyon et al , 2014; Ramos et al , 2016; Buonomo et al , 2017; Fiorilli et al , 2017, 2019; Buonomo et al , 2019).…”