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In this article, the authors use original survey data to test the determinants of priority conflict on urban school boards in the United States. The results indicate that school district demographics, including the percentage of English language learners and education spending per pupil, impact the extent to which urban school board members hold conflicting priorities. In addition, boards whose members indicate they engage in continuous strategic planning exhibit comparably lower levels of priority conflict. The results are of interest to scholars studying the nexus of urban governing boards and performance, as well as practitioners serving on urban governing boards.

In this paper we match originally collected survey data from school board members in the state of Michigan with hard measures of school district outcomes to test two hypotheses regarding the relationship between strategic planning prioritization and organizational performance. We find that school board members who place a higher priority on strategic planning oversee school districts with comparably higher levels of academic performance. The findings demonstrate a correlation between board governance behaviors and organizational outcomes broadly, and between strategic planning prioritization and outcomes specifically. The results are of interest to practitioners and scholars of strategic planning and public sector governance.

In this article, we use originally collected survey data to determine how nonprofit charter school board members in the states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Minnesota define accountability. We find that charter board members generally define accountability downward toward student achievement and staff performance, inward toward board performance, or upward toward authorizer compliance. We use the results of the survey to make a series of public policy recommendations to help charter school boards look outward in their accountability orientation as a means of addressing the calls for increased public accountability for the charter school sector. The results add practical value to policy discussions regarding charter school accountability and theoretical value to scholars studying public and nonprofit governance reforms.

In this article we seek to understand the impacts of a third party governance reform implemented by the nonprofit organization, Partners Advancing Values in Education (PAVE), on school-level performance in Milwaukee's maure school choice environment. Specifically, we compare the performance of PAVE and non-PAVE schools on Wisconsin state tests, and explore the relationship between school advancement on PAVE's internal indicators and performance. We show that generally positive findings for schools with longer exposure to PAVE programming exist independent of school size, history, religious affiliation, or reliance on voucher revenues. The article speaks to the potential of third party governance reforms to improve school performance in mature choice environments.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to determine the differing ways in which nonprofit charter and traditional public school board members define the concept of accountability in the school or schools they oversee. The findings speak to the governing consequences of shifting oversight of public education from democratically elected bodies to unelected nonprofit governing boards. Design/methodology/approach: The authors use originally collected survey data from democratically elected school board members and nonprofit charter school board members in Minnesota to test for differences in how these two populations view accountability. Open-ended survey questions are coded according to a previously used accountability typology. Findings: The authors find that charter school board members are more likely than traditional public school board members to define accountability through high stakes testing as opposed to staff professionalization and bureaucratic systems. Originality/value: The results speak to the link between board governance structure and accountability in the public education sector, providing new understanding on the way in which non-elected charter school board members view their accountability function.

The study aims to describe council member perceptions of representational and service delivery effectiveness of local governments in Wisconsin. It is assumed that variables from different categories are associated with perceptions of service delivery effectiveness, showing a strong relation between the two variables.

In this article, we use data collected from Wisconsin superintendents to determine the extent to which the curtailing of collective bargaining facilitated local public management reform adoption. The results show the near elimination of collective bargaining did spur substantial reform adoption in areas of performance pay and recruitment, and that longer serving superintendents and those with partisan ideologies were more likely to adopt management reforms. However, the results also indicate that curtailing collective bargaining appeared to hurt employee morale and made it more difficult to recruit and retain quality teachers. The results contribute to the public human resource literature by providing a real life case study of how public management practices change when collective bargaining is eliminated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Community conflict has been the domain of social science researchers for decades. However, the systematic study of conflict on city councils has received scant attention in this literature. In this study the authors explore the extent to which conflict is present on city councils in Wisconsin communities with populations greater than 10,000. By using the literature on nonprofit and local government boards, the authors develop a set of hypotheses for testing in the analysis of the survey data. The multivariate model used in the analysis reveals certain demographic characteristics of council members, community characteristics, and board practices and behaviors explain a significant amount of the variance in city council conflict in Wisconsin local governments.

In this article, we present a theoretical framework for understanding public governance based on human perceptions. We argue that governance is at its core a human enterprise, and concepts such as effectiveness, accountability, and legitimacy cannot be measured without considering the perceptions of both the governed and those involved in governing. The shortcomings of existing governance research are discussed, and five propositions related to the link between micro- and macro-governance, small group dynamics, accountability, and public performance are offered. We conclude by describing how the framework can be applied in future research in the fields of public and nonprofit governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines elected officials’ opinions on Wisconsin’s controversial 2011 collective bargaining reform. Survey results from elected officials serving on city councils and village boards with less than 10,000 residents demonstrate that Act 10 is still viewed through a partisan lens, making its overall impact on municipal governance unsettled. We also find that officials who first came to office prior to Act 10 generally think the law has had a positive fiscal impact. Overall, the authors conclude that Act 10 cannot yet be viewed as a successful governance reform because it is still viewed by local policymakers through a narrow fiscal and partisan lens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the attitudes of elected local officials toward the use of privatization of public services by local governments. We examined a number of factors to see whether they are significantly associated with elected officials’ attitude toward privatization as a method of cost savings and service delivery. The survey examined the elected officials’ perception of community support for privatization, the perception that the private sector is more efficient with regard to both cost and quality of service delivery, the perception that administrators faithfully carry out policy, the relationship to general revenue sharing dollars, and the type of city. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, survey data collected from nonprofit charter school board and elected public school board members in Minnesota is used to test three hypotheses relating to theories of New Public Management, democratic governance, and small group dynamics. We find that nonprofit charter school board members perceive lower levels of conflict, place less priority on the general public, and perceive a higher degree of governance responsibly in the area of financial management, than elected board members. We conclude that the increased use of nonprofit charter schools has potentially substantial implications on accountability and effectiveness in the delivery of public education. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The most prominent set of school board governance best practices used in the United States is the National School Boards Association’s (NSBA’s)Key Work of School Boards.In this article, we operationalize adherence to theKey Work of School Boardswith multiple survey items answered by Wisconsin school board members. Using multivariate regression models, we find that adherence to the best practices results in improved achievement in districts represented by board members who have served for five or more years. The findings support the idea that school board governance behaviors are linked to district-level academic outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]