Examining hiring patterns that inform selection of principals: representative bureaucracy and how human resources practices can impact student outcomes
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Bello, Julianne M.. Examining hiring patterns that inform selection of principals: representative bureaucracy and how human resources practices can impact student outcomes. Retrieved from https://doi.org/doi:10.7282/t3-wbtk-jt80
TitleExamining hiring patterns that inform selection of principals: representative bureaucracy and how human resources practices can impact student outcomes
DescriptionThe scholarly application of representative bureaucracy (RB) theories to research on public school systems has explored the connections between the race of teachers and administrators to policy outputs and student outcomes, suggesting own-race effects between teachers and students positively impact student outcomes accepted as susceptible to racial differences. Own-race effects between principals and students show inconsistent and sometimes contradictory results. However, principals do have clear impacts, since findings between principals and teachers have suggested representation in the supervisory ranks supports retention and job satisfaction, which may keep veteran representative teachers in front of students. Therefore, the selection of principals, and who principals select to teach, are of critical importance when leveraging representation to address the opportunity/achievement gap. This quantitative research used one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) to: first, examine the relationship between the racial/ethnic match across principal/teacher/student populations, and secondly, to explore both the hiring practices that put principals in their roles and those practices used by principals to hire their staff to determine whether homosocial reproduction was occurring in New Jersey (NJ) schools. This inquiry was guided by three research questions: (1) How representative are New Jersey schools? (2) What are the hiring practices in New Jersey school districts? (3) Does a relationship between a district's representation and hiring practices suggest a cloning culture exists? Findings suggested schools in NJ are largely staffed by White principals and White teachers and become more homogeneously White as district wealth increases, which may, in part, be caused by uninformed, colorblind hiring practices. This study found that a majority of principals did not agree racial match was important. Moreover, when principals who saw the importance of hiring representative teachers had the opportunity to do so, they did not. Findings on the hiring practices that placed principals in their roles suggest the tendency of districts to hire those already in their buildings when formal pipeline process was absent, which may generate a leadership cloning culture. These findings can contribute to future study of representative effects on all students, and can inform the hiring process for careers in education to attract and retain increased numbers of racially/ethnically diverse professionals who are able to influence positive outcomes in classrooms, and who may become those future principals able to influence positive outcomes for entire schools.