Hoy, Wayne & DiPaola, Michael (Eds.) (2008) Improving Schools: Studies in Leadership and Culture. Reviewed by Curtis Brewer, Clemson University

Hoy, Wayne & DiPaola, Michael (Eds.) (2008) Improving Schools: Studies in Leadership and Culture. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing Pp. vii + 276         ISBN 978-1-59311-911-9 Reviewed by Curtis Brewer Clemson University April 20, 2009 Improving Schools: Studies in Leadership and Culture is a volume in the series titled Research and Theory in Educational Administration. The goal of this series is to advance our “understanding of schools through empirical study and theoretical analysis” (p. vii). The editors of this volume, Wayne Hoy and Michael DiPaola, is frame the chapters with the two expansive concepts of “Culture” and “Leadership”. More specifically, the volume deals with a wide range of topics such as trust in schools, climate and culture studies and leadership for school improvement in specific contexts. There is a nice balance of summative reviews of growing empirical evidence on specific topics, the explanation of new measurement tools that will spur future research and more descriptive exploratory studies that expose areas that are understudied. Given the diversity of the chapters the bulk of this review is a brief individual review of each chapter. The first two chapters of the volume perform an important service to the field by offering two extensive reviews of trust in schools. Forsyth’s chapter, The Empirical Consequences of School Trust reviews three clusters of work on trust authored by Hoy and colleagues, Bryk and Schneider, and Forsyth and Adams. The review of these clusters allows Forsyth to list empirically based propositions about trust in schools. These propositions are then distilled into three important general findings, the most striking of which is that “Teacher trust of client is more important than SES in predicting academic achievement” (p. 23). Curt Adams, in Building Trust in Schools: A Review of the Empirical Evidence, reviews 31 studies that treat trust as the dependent variable between 1984 -2007. He notes that in that time concept of trust moved from an “individual belief based largely on expected outcomes of a relationship to a multidimensional organizational property that forms through a temporal process of intrapersonal discernment, interpersonal exchanges and collective consequences” (p. 30). Adams identifies the five forms of trust that have been examined in schools: teacher trust of clients, teacher trust of principal, teacher trust of teaching colleagues, and parent trust. For each of these Adams develops a model that includes “Trust mechanisms” and “Discernments of trust facets”. In the conclusion of this thorough investigation trust literature Adams rightly points out that while we have learned a great deal about trust in schools, future research must investigate the normative social conditions in which schools are nested and their affect on the possibilities for trust. The next two chapters deal with how we evaluate and measure the organizational culture and practices in schools. In Evaluating the Culture of High Schools in Relation to their Demographic Characteristics and Performance, Kowalski and Hermann examined “school culture in the context of a state accountability program” Specifically they administered the School Culture Quality Survey in nine high schools in one Ohio county. These scores were then tested for association with demographic and performance variables. The authors note that there was a strong negative correlation between percent of disadvantages students and the school culture scale score. In addition there was a strong positive correlation between performance on the Graduation Test and the school culture scale score. Kowalski and Hermann conclude that future research on these relationships might help us think about how to include school culture measures in our accountability systems. In addition to these findings, one of the most valuable aspects of this piece is the careful explanation they provide of the distinctions between school culture and climate. In Defining, Measuring, and Validating Teacher and Collective Responsibility LoGerfo and Goddard offer two measures designed to assess the degree to which teachers are willing to accept responsibility for student learning. The first measure attempts to assess teachers’ willingness to accept or reject responsibility for their own students’ learning. The second measure gauges the perceptions of the responsibility accepted by their colleagues. LoGerfo and Goddard show that both measures have adequate reliability scores. Given that so much of today’s education policy is predicated on the indictment of teacher’s as indifferent to student success these measures are likely to be important tools in future policy discussions and problem definition processes. In Systems Thinking and Culture Change in Urban School Districts, Leigh McGuigan points out that some of the United States greatest cities have some of the least successful public schools. Noting that within every district there are “urban public schools whose students achieve at high levels” she asks “What is it that prevents urban districts from bringing success to scale?” (p. 100). In response to this important question, McGuigan offers the pronouncement, based on the work of one “systems thinking expert”, that districts are complex systems that generate assumptions that are transformed into unquestioned practices (p. 112). She substantiates this argument with a description of how one school district, Seattle, was changed by systems thinking. While her focus on the dismissal of incompetent teachers provides an expedient example of the difficulties of working in a public system her approach does not deal with the important nuances of school culture or the exigencies of public systems. Overall, her effort would have been better served if she had a more robust literature-based definition of both systems thinking and culture. In chapter 6 DiPaola and Smith describe their development of a “reliable, parsimonious measure of school district climate” (p. 130). Through a review of the theoretical and empirical literature on school climate and successful school district reform and a subsequent factor analysis the authors developed a district climate instrument. In the instrument school district climate is operationalized in three ways: integrated superintendent leadership, enabling district structure teamwork for student success. As the authors point out, the development of this measure allows the researchers to understand the ways in which school and student success are related to the districts practices. In U-Turn Required Daniel Duke and colleagues describe a school improvement strategy devised in Virginia. The intervention consists of the “recruitment, training and ongoing support of school turnaround specialists” and is modeled on the former governors’ experience with turnaround specialists in the private sector (p. 138). The multicase study describes five “turnaround specialists” and their reactions to their training and their struggles to implement change in their schools. Duke and colleagues note that the all the turnaround specialists focused on the systemization of reading instruction and that this commonality is most likely related to their training which stressed the importance of “benchmark testing, teacher engagement in analyzing test results [and, among others] the targeting of students requiring assistance” (p. 164). The chapter concludes with a discussion of three possible lessons that the study has provided. Unfortunately, none of the lessons speak directly to the overarching framework of the relationship between culture and leadership. However, one lesson does offer an important concrete lesson, which is that school administrators do not get enough training in literacy and reading. In Encouraging Teacher Leaders, Shelton, Birky and Headley report the results of three studies of teacher leadership that were done between 1993 and 2004. The review of these studies allows the authors to offer lists of what encourages and what discourages the development of teacher leadership. While they point out that the chapter cements the notion that teacher leaders are truly critical for school reform they acknowledge that “the actual practice in many schools does not seem to be all that common” (p. 172). There hope is that their chapter can help in a broader development of school cultures that are collaborative. Curriculum and Instruction Policy in the Context of Multiple Accountabilities offers key piece information in the quest to understand the exercise of leadership in public schools that are beset by layers of state and federal accountability policies. The authors use a large national sample of principals’ and teachers’ responses to the school and staffing survey to develop two models that examine principal and teacher influence on instructional and curriculum policy. The most salient finding from their structural equation model suggests that as state influence increases principal and teacher influence decreases. This chapter offers very important empirical evidence that bear not only on policy debates about school governance but also helps us understand the ways in which educational leaders are in the precarious position of bounded autonomy as they try to generate a positive and safe school climate. African American Female Superintendents Speaking the Language of Hopedescribes the ways in which four successful “African American women superintendents acquire, sustain and demonstrate hope in their leadership platforms” (p. 224). Simmons and Johnson argue that bringing this previously overlooked knowledge to the educational leadership community can help us think differently about the importance of passion in the establishment of open systems of communication that are necessary for reform. The authors conclude that the experiences of the four women suggest that their passion is the result of suffering that has been stabilized by spirituality and hope. The chapter provides an important counter balance to the other chapters that treat trust and communication as monolithic concepts. This is especially evident in Simmon’s and Johnson’s discussion of their results. They use a wide range of theoretical literature to carefully explain the ways in which the African-American female leaders risk being characterized by others through a “racially-derogatory [and/or] socially inferior” lens when they express passion. Thus the potentials for trust and risk are functions of subjectivity. Ann Allen and Dwan Robinson offer an exploratory study of the relationship between charter schools and the community in which they are imbedded. Specifically, in Charter Schools, Communities, and Local Newspapers: New Questions to Examine they describe the study of the coverage of charter schools in the local newspapers in the eight cities with the highest concentration of charter schools. Pointing to the fact that the “public is largely confused about what charter schools are and who they serve”, Allen and Robinson conclude that newspapers cover democratically controlled district schools much more than autonomous charter schools despite the fact that charter schools are also public institutions. The exploratory content analysis and the adept weaving in of political science and communications research presented in this chapter points to a number of important issues that need further study with regards to how the flow of information shapes our abilities to be democratically involved in our public schools. However, I felt the authors’ normative views on the actions of newspapers were a bit strong given the exploratory nature of this piece. Overall the volume provides many resources for researchers in the field of educational administration. It lives up to the charge of the series, which is to improve our understanding of schools. However, I wish the editors had provided a bit more scaffolding with regards to how the ideas of culture and leadership were being used to frame the book. Treating each of these concepts as objects of study raises methodological tensions and philosophical dissonance (Allix & Gronn 2005; Yanow 1996). Dealing with these ideas in a more substantial way would have strengthened an already useful volume. References Allix, N., & Gronn, P. (2005). "Leadership" as a manifestation of knowledge. Educational Management Administration & Leadership, 33(2), 181-196. Yanow, D. (1996). How Does a Policy Mean? Interpreting Policy and Organizational Actions. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. About the Reviewer Curtis Brewer is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Educational Leadership, Counselor Education, and Human and Organizational Development in the Eugene T. Moore School of Education at Clemson University. His research interests include federal education policy, political action by educators and issues of inequality.