Schools

This research study examined how the United Opt Out grassroots movement grew from a small listserv in 2011 into a national formidable organization, now referred to as the Opt Out movement, which rallied against the use of high stakes tests as the primary determinant of student achievement as defined in the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB, 2002). While educators and parents did not oppose testing, they rejected the focus on a singular assessment created at the state level and the blatant disregard of other school-based assessments. It was soon evident that educators and parents had minimal input, while private corporate foundations and think tanks exerted a tremendous amount of influence on education policy. To counteract the corporate reform movement and to gain voice in education policy, grassroots movements, started and led by educators, began to organize. The Opt Out movement was one such movement that called on students to engage in civil disobedience by opting out of high stakes tests.

This quantitative, non-experimental study was conducted to investigate the
relationship among the behavioral agility of school leadership teams, school culture, and
school performance. Additionally, the study sought to determine whether the influence of
these variables and/or their relationships are modified by alterable and unalterable
characteristics of the school. The study utilized Pisapia’s (2009) Strategic Leader
Questionnaire (SLQ) to measure school leadership team’s behavioral agility in using five
leadership influence actions (managing, transforming, bridging, bonding, and bartering).
Cameron and Quinn’s (2005) Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument (OCAI) was
used to determine if the school’s dominant organizational culture type (adhocracy, clan,
hierarchy, or market) mediated the behavioral agility of school leadership teams and
school performance.
The study included 65 schools and approximately 1,500 classroom teachers from a very large urban school district located in the Southeast United States. The results
indicate that behavioral agility, unidimensional and multidimensional factors, were
significantly correlated to each organizational culture type, with the exception of the
managing behavior subfactor in clan and adhocracy cultures. Student suspension
moderated the relationship between behavioral agility and school culture. There was no
relationship found between school culture and school performance; however, it was
found that minority percentage negatively correlated market culture and school
performance and student attendance negatively correlated both hierarchy and market
cultures and school performance.