Legitimacy and school reform: Implementing and sustaining democratic school governance.

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

School reforms throughout the twentieth century in the United States had a pattern of cycling into fashion and then out again, only to return a decade or two later. In this dissertation I analyzed one, currently popular school reform, shared decision making. My purpose was to chart the reform's trajectory and thereby discover what factors made implementation and sustainability of shared decision making possible or impossible.
I asked five questions in my research: three looking strictly at the form shared decision making took in schools over time; one on the values and frustrations participants found in working with the reform and; one on what constrained and enabled the implementation and continuation of the reform.
To answer my question I applied a case study design. I interviewed administrators, teachers, students and parents, collected documents and observed decision-making meetings at three different public high schools. The theoretical framework that guided my research was based on democratic and organizational theories.
In analyzing my data and comparing the three schools' experiences I found that implementation and duration of shared decision making varied across the three schools but that in all three schools the reform went through similar stages. I also found that democratic theory was useful in understanding and analyzing shared decision making. Though organizational theories have been applied by other researchers who examine shared decision-making, democratic theories have not. My fourth finding was that sustainability of shared decision making depended on participants' perceptions of the reform as legitimate. I assert that there were two sources of delegitimation (intrinsic problems and constraining structural features) and two sources of legitimation (principled commitments and enabling structural features). Lastly, I found that shared decision making both relied on and had the capacity to build community.
This study makes two main contributions to research, policy, and practice in education. First I suggest a framework informed by democratic theory for researchers, policymakers, and practitioners to consider in their work with shared decision making. Second, I provide an explanation based on the concept of legitimacy for why school reforms cycle in and out of schools.