Transformational Leadership Practices of New York State Charter School Principals

This thesis is being archived as a Digitized Shelf Copy for campus access to current students and staff only. We currently cannot provide this open access without the author's permission. If you are the author of this work and desire to provide it open access or wish access removed, please contact the Wahlstrom Library to discuss permission.The purpose of this study was to investigate transformational leadership practices of New York State charter school principals. A review of related literature found that research to date on charter schools has focused primarily on: the examination of state policy, issues of start-up and implementation, student populations served, teacher and parent satisfaction, governance, authorizing process, funding, student achievement, and accountability. Few studies have examined the leadership practices of charter school principals. The data generating sample consisted of 44 charter school principals in New York State. The Leadership Practices Inventory-Self [LPI-S] was employed to collect self-perceived principal leadership data in five domains: Modeling the Way, Inspiring a Shared Vision, Challenging the Process, Enabling Others to Act, and Encouraging the Heart. In addition, a questionnaire was used to collect principals' demographic data. Three research questions were asked in this study and 10 corresponding hypotheses were tested for significance at the .05 level. Descriptive statistics and multiple regression were employed to analyze the data. The results of the study indicated that the transformational leadership practices of charter school principals in New York State were in the moderate to high categories when compared to a normative database of LPI scores. The gap between this sample of charter school principals and the national sample was the greatest for Inspiring a Shared Vision leadership practice. Also, this study suggested that there were no statistically significant relationships between the leadership practices of charter school principals and the demographic variables of: gender, age, ethnicity, and level of education of principals. However, a positive relationship was found between both the Modeling the Way and Encouraging the Heart leadership practices and the educational level of New York State charter school principals. Furthermore, this study suggested that there was very little relationship between the leadership practices of charter school principals and the independent (predictor) variables of: founding status, years of experience in the current position, and the number of reported work hours per week devoted to the job. The research, however, found a significant relationship between the Inspiring a Shared Vision leadership practice of New York State charter school principals and prior experience as a school principal