Narrowing the Gap

The promise of the charter public school model offers flexibility and autonomy for leaders to enable them to experiment and innovate when running their school. This study examined the leadership of four Boston charter public high schools with predominantly Black and Hispanic, low-income populations that have shown progress narrowing the achievement gap. In-depth semistructured interviews explored the leadership’s success to improve student outcomes compared with the sending district and the state. Findings suggest that leadership is instrumental to the success of each charter public school in this study. Many common characteristics emerge among all four schools, however, the distinctiveness and success of each school is the result of leadership’s ability to orchestrate the characteristics and decisions that culminate to create each educational community. Three dimensions particularly emerged as essential to each school’s success according to leadership: (a) high expectations for student outcome as measured by college completion; (b) safe and orderly learning environment; and (c) an all-school adherence to leadership’s vision in the context of the school’s mission. Each dimension is interpreted and implemented differently depending on the school mission and the leader’s particular vision, experience, and personality resulting in distinct organizational cultures at each school

Autonomy · Charter · Charter school · Context (archaeology · Educational leadership · Optimal distinctiveness theory · Pedagogy · Political science · Public relations · Sociology · Transformational leadership · Higher Education Research Studies · Parental Involvement in Education · Psychology · School Choice and Performance · Social Psychology

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• Equality of educational opportunity

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• The Black-White Test Score Gap

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