The Political Consequences of School Closings: A Comparison of the Procedural Viewpoint and the Lutz-Iannaccone Theory of Dissatisfaction in Selected Illinois School Districts

218 p.Thesis (Educat.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1984.The major purposes of this study were to explore some political consequences of school closings on public school districts and analyze the disagreement concerning such closings between the Lutz-Iannaccone model of dissatisfaction and the procedural viewpoint proposed by the practitioner journals during the 1970's.The population of this study included all 147 elementary school districts in the northern Illinois counties of Cook and DuPage, excluding the city of Chicago, as listed by the State of Illinois in 1976-77.Information was gathered concerning school board election results and categorized according to several definitions of incumbent change and incumbent defeat. Additional information was obtained on superintendent turnover, assessed valuation, average daily attendance, size of district by number of buildings, and school closings. Prior instances of incumbent change and defeat were also determined.Hypotheses One and Two were proposed to explore the relationships among the several definitions of incumbent change and/or defeat and superintendent turnover. Hypothesis Three was used to analyze the relationships between school closings and the definitions of incumbent change and/or defeat on a single year basis. Hypothesis Four was used to explore the relationships between school closings and the definitions of incumbent change and/or defeat over a four-year period. Chi-square tests were used to determine significance, and contingency tables were constructed specifying each of the variables.Only the analysis of Hypothesis Four resulted in a rejection of the null hypothesis. The antecedent variable of SIZE, defined as the number of buildings in a district, produced the only consistent significant relationships (.05 level of significance) between school closings and incumbent change and defeat.A possible pattern, a dynamics of largeness, appeared to be functioning in the districts that closed schools. The number of buildings in a district seems to influence the positions taken by a district superintendent and school board when faced with closing a school building.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD