Educational Administration Quarterly

This article applies the economic model of utility maximization to two important controversies in the area of faculty performance evaluation: the relationship between teaching effectiveness and research productivity and the validity of student evaluations of teaching effectiveness. It is argued that the economic model provides plausible explanations for many seemingly anomalous results from the empirical literature and, at the same time, suggests appealing avenues for improving the statistical methodology used in estimating relationships required in order to formulate genuinely optimal performance evaluation methods.

The effects of organizational size on school processes are studied in this article through the use of a resource allocation model. The model stresses the importance of including nonpurchased resources provided outside of school in the calculation of educational costs. Distinctions are drawn among various conceptions of school district size, and resource allocation implications for each are derived. Empirical evidence from New York State is used to test the proposition that the consequences of differences in size are distributed unequally among categories of students. This within district inequality could be viewed as a potentially serious denial of equal educational opportunity.

The purpose of this article is to present evidence against the use of regional cost adjustments in state schoolfinance plans. Basic assumptions underlying proposals to compensate for the presumed effects of differences among districts in the prices paid for educational resources are contrasted with research evidence.

Research on administrative behavior in schools has been limited in a number of fundamental ways. This article reviews criticisms of structured observation recently published in EAQ and describes a new methodology which addresses many of these weaknesses. This approach draws upon script theory (a form of schematic structure hypothesized by cognitive and social psychologists) and speech act theory (a form of linguistic discourse analysis) to capture the nuance, dynamism, and pattern of verbal interaction. An interpretive method for coding verbal behavior into speech act categories and a computer-augmented system for mapping scripts across instances of similar administrative activities are described.

This is a reply to D. J. Willower's piece, "Analogies Gone Awry: Replies to Hills and Gronn. "In addition to reaffirming the Tayloristic basis of structured observation, it suggests an alternativeframework for the study of administrative work in addition to the ethnographic and ethnomethodological bases already suggested by the author in a previous article. This second approach is a psycho-social one in which, using the concept of work style, it is possible not merely to describe observed patterns of administrative work but as well to explain differences in work performance and trace the organizational consequences of those variations.