Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Purpose.Schools serving large populations of low-income students and students of color face substantial challenges in recruiting and retaining effective teachers. Districts have employed retention and recruitment bonuses and other policies targeting individual teachers, which largely ignore the role of organizational context that account for these challenges and inequities. In particular, schools with strong professional communities marked by a culture of trust and shared responsibility improve more than schools lacking these features. While we know the organizational context in which teaching and learning occurs can constrain or promote teachers’ success, we know less about how to develop supportive school culture. This paper examines the influence of teachers’ instructional improvement relationships on teachers’ perceptions of trust and shared responsibility for student learning -- two elements of school culture linked to positive student outcomes.

Method.This study draws on social network theory as a theoretical frame and builds from the literature on the social organization of schools. Survey data were collected from approximately 400 teachers in 20 small site-managed charter and pilot high schools located in Los Angeles. Hierarchical linear models (HLM) were used to estimate individual collective responsibility and relational trust as functions of teacher- and school-level network measures of the instructional improvement relationships.

Equations [1] and [2] represent the teacher-level and school-level models:

[1]       (organizational culture)_ij = β_0j + β_1j (teacher background)_ij + β_2j (teacher network
measures)ij +β_3j (collaboration experience)_ij + r_ij

[2]       β_0j = γ₀₀ + γ₀₁(school characteristics)_j + γ₀₂(school network measures)_j + u_0j
β_1j = γ₁₀
β_2j = γ₂₀

Results.I find that the distribution of support among teachers to improve instruction influenced perceptions of organizational culture. Uneven distribution of advice and support among teachers was detrimental for the sense of shared responsibility for student learning. In the case of trust, focused sources of support appear to be better for trust than more diffuse support. For individual teachers, their collaborative activity conditioned the perceptions further: those teachers most often approached for support by colleagues held weaker perceptions of the group’s overall shared responsibility.

 Implications. Through a social network approach, this examination contributes to our understanding of potential social mechanisms for how schools can promote an organizational culture of shared responsibility for student learning and trust among colleagues -- the foundations of strong teacher professional community. This study also makes an important contribution through disaggregating organizational culture to account for internal variation in perceptions of culture.