Trust in Schools

A Core Resource for Improvement

Publication Year: 2002

Most Americans agree on the necessity of education reform, but there is little consensus about how this goal might be achieved. The rhetoric of standards and vouchers has occupied center stage, polarizing public opinion and affording little room for reflection on the intangible conditions that make for good schools. Trust in Schools engages this debate with a compelling examination of the importance of social relationships in the successful implementation of school reform. Over the course of three years, Bryk and Schneider, together with a diverse team of other researchers and school practitioners, studied reform in twelve Chicago elementary schools. Each school was undergoing extensive reorganization in response to the Chicago School Reform Act of 1988, which called for greater involvement of parents and local community leaders in their neighborhood schools. Drawing on years longitudinal survey and achievement data, as well as in-depth interviews with principals, teachers, parents, and local community leaders, the authors develop a thorough account of how effective social relationships—which they term relational trust—can serve as a prime resource for school improvement. Using case studies of the network of relationships that make up the school community, Bryk and Schneider examine how the myriad social exchanges that make up daily life in a school community generate, or fail to generate, a successful educational environment. The personal dynamics among teachers, students, and their parents, for example, influence whether students regularly attend school and sustain their efforts in the difficult task of learning. In schools characterized by high relational trust, educators were more likely to experiment with new practices and work together with parents to advance improvements. As a result, these schools were also more likely to demonstrate marked gains in student learning. In contrast, schools with weak trust relations saw virtually no improvement in their reading or mathematics scores. Trust in Schools demonstrates convincingly that the quality of social relationships operating in and around schools is central to their functioning, and strongly predicts positive student outcomes. This book offer insights into how trust can be built and sustained in school communities, and identifies some features of public school systems that can impede such development. Bryk and Schneider show how a broad base of trust across a school community can provide a critical resource as education professional and parents embark on major school reforms.

Published by: Russell Sage Foundation

Contents
Search Inside This Book
Book Details

The Chicago School Reform Act of 1988 remains one of the most far-reaching efforts at school reorganization ever attempted. At a time when national attention was building around school restructuring to improve student learning, Chicago chose a particularly...

Acknowledgments

pdf icon Download PDF (591.8 KB)
pp. xviii-xx

Part I: Framing Themes and Illuminating Theory

pdf icon Download PDF (47.0 KB)
pp. 1-2

Chapter 1: The Social Foundations of Schooling: An Overlooked Dimension for Improvement

pdf icon Download PDF (1.5 MB)
pp. 3-11

Almost daily, some major conference, research report, or pronouncement from an important public official calls for fundamental change in schooling in the United States. A casual inspection of most any issue of Education Week may well leave the...

Chapter 2: Relational Trust

pdf icon Download PDF (4.5 MB)
pp. 12-34

Our interests in the role of social trust in improving schools emerged out of field observations in Chicago elementary schools as they engaged in a decentralization reform. Comments about trust arose frequently as school leaders sought to explain...

Part II: Relational Trust in Three Urban School Communities

pdf icon Download PDF (313.7 KB)
pp. 35-36

As noted in chapter 1, our interest in relational trust grew out of an intensive field study in the early 1990s of Chicago's school decentralization reform. This study focused on the micropolitical dynamics of twelve elementary school communities, the local forces that shaped...

Chapter 3: Ridgeway Elementary School: The Costs of Conflicted Leadership

pdf icon Download PDF (3.1 MB)
pp. 37-54

Ridgeway Elementary School is located in the northeast section of Chicago. The neighboring community had been in transition for some time. Beginning in the 1950s, an influx of newcomers initially from Appalachia and the rural South and later from...

Chapter 4: Thomas Elementary School: Cultural Diversity as an Obstacle to Trust

pdf icon Download PDF (3.6 MB)
pp. 55-74

Thomas Elementary School is located in a neighborhood that has been a port of entry for Mexican immigrants for the past thirty years. Beginning in the 1980s, immigrants came increasingly from more rural and impoverished areas of Mexico. Most of...

Chapter 5: Holiday Elementary School: Dedicated to the Welfare of the Children

pdf icon Download PDF (2.4 MB)
pp. 75-88

In a well-known book, There Are No Children Here, Alex Kotlowitz chronicled the experiences of two brothers, their family, and friends who lived in a public housing project on Chicago's west side.¹ A poignant episode describes the family's turmoil when the Department...

Part III: Effects and Implications

pdf icon Download PDF (146.6 KB)
pp. 89-90

We concluded from our field-based study of school change in Chicago that the relational dynamics in each school community significantly influenced whether meaningful improvement efforts emerged. The cases presented in part II analyze how these dynamics actually...

Chapter 6: Relational Trust and Improving Academic Achievement

pdf icon Download PDF (4.9 MB)
pp. 91-121

Key to evaluating a claim about the importance of relational trust for school improvement is the ability to reliably measure differences in this organizational property across school communities and over time. Developing measures of this sort entails a...

Chapter 7: Analytic and Policy Implications for School Reform

pdf icon Download PDF (4.5 MB)
pp. 122-144

Throughout this book we have probed the nature of relational trust in urban elementary school communities. We have described how trust is rooted in the microdynamics of day-to-day social interactions among teachers, principals, and parents and the...

Appendix A: Description of the Field Study

pdf icon Download PDF (1.7 MB)
pp. 145-154

The three cases presented in this book were drawn from a larger field study involving intensive work in twelve elementary schools over a three-year period. The design consisted of interviews, school and classroom observations, focus groups, and...

Appendix B: Measures and Other Variables Used

pdf icon Download PDF (1.9 MB)
pp. 155-167

All of the organizational measures used in our research were derived through Rasch Rating Scale Analysis (Wright and Masters 1982). This method involves an item response latent trait model. Survey items are used to define a measure based on the...

Appendix C: Analysis Details

pdf icon Download PDF (1.0 MB)
pp. 168-176

We conducted a three-level hierarchical linear model (HLM) analysis that decomposes the variability in teachers' survey responses from the Consortium's 1997 teacher survey into measurement error, variation among teachers within schools, and between...

Notes

pdf icon Download PDF (4.1 MB)
pp. 177-200

References

pdf icon Download PDF (1.6 MB)
pp. 201-210

Index

pdf icon Download PDF (1.1 MB)
pp. 211-217

E-ISBN-13: 9781610440967
Print-ISBN-13: 9780871541925
Print-ISBN-10: 0871541920

Page Count: 240
Publication Year: 2002

Series Title: American Sociological Association Rose Series