Abstract

Florida and Alabama are the only two states in the United States of America with school districts led by either elected superintendents or appointed superintendents. The other 48 states only have appointed superintendent-led school districts. The current study was conducted to examine the impact of the superintendent governance structure on student learning by analyzing differences in student achievement between Florida school districts led by elected superintendents and Florida school districts led by appointed superintendents. The conceptual framework of the study was the tension between democratic localism and professionalism. Dynamics associated with the conceptual framework are relevant to the current debate. This quantitative study included cross-tabulations of the superintendent governance structure by regions and by locale codes. Descriptive statistics were used to define differences between school districts with elected or appointed superintendents in the areas of enrollment, free/reduced lunch, ELL populations, test scores, and graduation rates. An independent samples t-test was used to further analyze the demographic variables. A one-way ANCOVA was employed to determine if the superintendent governance structure or the demographic variables were associated with variances in student achievement. Research findings indicated that appointed superintendent-led school districts performed slightly higher than elected superintendent-led school districts. However, the superintendent governance structure did not have a statistically significant relationship with student achievement. Instead, poverty, as measured by free/reduced lunch rates, had a statistically significant relationship with student achievement.

Notes

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Graduation Date

2019

Semester

Summer

Advisor

Johnson, Jerry

Degree

Doctor of Education (Ed.D.)

College

College of Community Innovation and Education

Department

Educational Leadership and Higher Education

Degree Program

Educational Leadership; Executive

Format

application/pdf

Identifier

CFE0007727

URL

http://purl.fcla.edu/fcla/etd/CFE0007727

Language

English

Release Date

August 2019

Length of Campus-only Access

None

Access Status

Doctoral Dissertation (Open Access)

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