| Sang-Jin Kang
Yongsei University
Effects of academic departments on secondary school management: A crossed multilevel analysis
FINAL REPORT:
The second wave of school reform studies advocates that organizational management features such as supportive form of administrator leadership, staff collaboration and collegiality, and participative form of teacher control over classroom and school policy can enhance the effectiveness of schooling. Studies on school organization, however, are mostly centered on elementary schools and have largely ignored the more complex internal differentiation of high school organization. This paper studies the internal differentiation of organizational management features in secondary high schools by investigating the effects of academic departments as a context for school restructuring. The study uses the data files of Administrator and Teacher Survey (ATS84) and High School and Beyond (HSB) study. In the analysis, variances of the three organizational management scales are decomposed into teacher- , department- , and school-level variances. Then the constraints on the development of organizational management were examined at both within- and between-school levels.
The results found that large variances of the management variables are attributable to individual teacher differences rather than teachers' different departmental and school memberships. The variances at organization level, however, are also substantive. Given the organization-level variances, larger variances were accounted for by school differences rather than teachers' different departmental membership in a school. The results also show that the school-to-school differences in organizational management features are strongly related to the institutional constraints such as private or public status and the location of schools. The development of the school climate for management is also conditioned on teachers' within-school location in the division of labor such as curriculum track and academic departments as well as their different social backgrounds. The methodological advantages of the analysis and psychometric properties of the aggregated measure or organizational climate are also discussed substantively.
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