Accountability has placed immense pressure on principals leading K-12 public charter schools to increase standards for success. Overwhelmingly, principals accept the charge to produce promising results every day, despite the public scrutiny principals may ensue for not meeting the state’s standard of excellence. Principals are expected to drive high academic standards, initiate instructional vision, interact with parents, oversee policy mandates, address students’ needs, and foster relationships with teachers. The daily demands requiring principals’ attention stimulate stress and may cause principals to wrestle with prioritizing trusted relationships. The purpose of this qualitative descriptive study was to understand how principals foster relational trust with teachers in an urban Title I public charter school in Texas. Thirteen principals participated in semistructured interviews. Principals provided an operating mechanism chart and core calendar to triangulate the development of trust with teachers. The findings of this study show that when principals identified a personal or professional experience that drove their mission, incorporated the organization’s goals to direct their daily priorities, and built interactions with teachers using operating mechanisms, they increased trusted relationships with teachers. In addition, as a result of the systems principals designed, principals perceived accountability stimulated teachers to actively invest in the mission of the school, establish stronger relationships between managers and direct employees, and enhance teacher relationships by making it a normal practice to celebrate and reward teachers for their commitment to the mission. Keywords: accountability, public charter school, principal pressure, trust, relational trust, school culture, leader-member exchange, systems thinking, and systems design

This book samples recent and emerging trust research in education including an array of conceptual approaches, measurement innovations, and explored determinants and outcomes of trust. The collection of pathways explores the phenomenon of trust and establishes the significance of trust relationships in school life. It emboldens the claim that trust merits continued attention of both scholars and practitioners because of the role it plays in the production of equity and excellence. Divided into four parts, the book explores trust under the rubrics of learning, teaching, leading and bridging. The book proposes a variety of directions for future research. These include the simultaneous investigation of trust from the prospectives of various trusters, and at both the individual and group levels, longitudinal research designs, and an elaboration of methods.

Within the broader context of accountability imposed from beyond our schools, this mixed methods, multi-site case study investigated the development of relational trust and trustworthy relationships as internal accountability structures within three independent schools replicating responsible independence on the scale of the school as trustworthy freedom on the scale of the individual. Interviews, observations, artifacts, sociograms, and surveys were analyzed to identify teacher and administrator perceptions of structures supporting relational trust, accountability to community standards, and sustainable trust-based cultures. Survey data were also analyzed for corresponding evidence of organizational conditions associated with school improvement: teacher orientation to innovation, teacher commitment to school community, peer collaboration, reflective dialog, collective responsibility, focus on student learning, and teacher socialization. Structures found to support responsible freedom at these schools included their historic honor systems, programs for character education, strategic planning, and policies and schedules guiding daily life. Neither structure nor freedom alone was found to be sufficient to sustain cultures built on relational trust and mutual accountability. Inflexible structures or inauthentic, coercive, or incompetent leaders diminished social capital over time at all three schools. Schools enjoying the best organizational conditions for school improvement built capacity by fostering macro-micro feedback loops of honor and trust between the scales of the individual and the school as a professional learning community. Findings were applied to develop a model for individual and organizational capacity building, relating the dimensions of relational trust and accountability to standards. The two-dimensional model for capacity building identified four categories of school capacity based on levels of both relational trust and accountability to standards: low capacity schools, compliant schools, complacent schools, and high capacity schools. The model further developed associated strategies for moving schools in each category towards developing or sustaining high capacity.

LEADING SCHOOL TURNAROUND Leading School Turnaround offers new perspectives and concrete, evidence-based guidelines for the educational leaders and administrators faced with the challenge of turning our low-performing schools around. Using the tools outlined in this groundbreaking book, school leaders can guide their schools to higher levels of achievement and sustained academic success. Based on research conducted in the United States, Canada, and England, Leading School Turnaround addresses in three parts the dynamic context of the turnaround environment, what turnaround leaders do, and the incredible challenges of moving from turnaround to "stay around." Filled with illustrative examples, the book outlines the best practices and behaviors successful turnaround leaders exercise. The authors include detailed information for applying the four main categories of turnaround leadership: direction setting, developing people, redesigning the school, and managing the instructional program. This important resource can help any school leader get their school back on the track to academic success.

The purpose of this research was to determine the degree to which antecedents to trust impact teacher-administrator trust and to determine what impact that trust or a lack of trust had on student educational outcomes as mediated by school characteristics such as school type (elementary or secondary), percentage of minority students, and percentage of low socioeconomic students as measured by free and reduced lunch rates. A sample of 109 teachers and 46 administrators from 49 schools in rural school districts located throughout Southwest Tennessee participated in the study. Subjects completed an online version of the School Leader-Member Trust Survey which measured existence of trust and the frequency of trust-development activities occurring in the school based on the four trustee antecedents and the one trustor antecedent. Multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) testing revealed no statistically significant difference in teachers' and administrators' perceptions of the trust antecedents at the multivariate level. At the univariate level, however, statistically significant differences between administrators and teachers were observed for the four trust scales of benevolence, integrity, competence, and predictability. The second test, a multiple regression correlation, revealed moderate statistically sinificant relationships between all four constituent scales of the Leader-Member Trust Survey and the measure of propensity to trust for all 155 respondents, as well as for the administrator and teacher subgroups. Comparing the administrator and teacher subgroups, however, indicated no statistically significant difference. The next test run, an independent samples t-test, revealed no statistically significant difference in the means on AGI obtained for the low trust and high trust groups. Finally, a multiple regression test with added interactions was run. Using the Fisher r to z transformation, the correlations observed for each of these groups of schools was compared, but no difference in the strength of the correlations was found.

Understanding the dynamics of trust is an imperative undertaking for educational leaders. In this book, using an ecological perspective of the lifecycle, the authors situate trust as an essential ingredient of school leaders’ moral agency and ethical decision making. Based on their 15 years of research on trust in education, the authors describe the nature and dimensions of trust, its importance and imperative, and its fragility and usefulness for school leaders, positioning them as trust brokers in school organizations.