Some observe that the shift to providing more public services through charter schools is accelerating the hollowing out of the state, wherein more traditional public services are now being provided by nongovernmental actors (Ford & Ihrke, 2018). This autonomy and flexibility extend to curriculum, pedagogy, and management, and is believed by its advocates to increase responsiveness and accountability to stakeholders and produce better student performance (Miron & Nelson, 2002 Shober et al., 2006).įrom academic years 2000–2001 to 2016–2017, charter schools grew from two percent to seven percent of all public schools in the United States, and in number from 2000 to approximately 7000 charter schools collectively serving over three million students (McFarland et al., 2019) This proliferation prompted heated debates and numerous studies assessing the merit of diverting public dollars from traditional public schools to these private nonprofit entities (Ladd & Singleton, 2020).
Charter schools typically avoid strict bureaucratic controls and rules associated with traditional public schools. These nonprofits provide public education and emerged from calls to give schools more autonomy and flexibility (Frazier, 2011). One rapidly growing type of nonprofit engaged in the public service delivery chain is charter schools.
As nonprofits have taken on larger roles in delivering essential public goods and services, they have faced increased calls for accountability and heightened scrutiny over their performance. This trend was accentuated by recession-induced austerity measures in public funding over the last decade (Peck, 2014). Nonprofits are increasingly responsible for delivering key public services as governments continue to outsource the production and delivery of many goods and services (Milward & Provan, 2000). Our findings suggest that charter school boards may be recruiting board members who can relate to multiple stakeholder groups across accountability environments rather than selecting for members who operate in distinct accountability environments. Alternatively, selecting board members because they are friends/acquaintances of current board members is associated with lower levels of activities across all three accountability environments.
Selecting board members because of their knowledge of the organization, have membership in the group being served and for their willingness to give time is all associated with higher levels of inward, upward, and outward accountability activities. Controlling for internal organizational characteristics and external conditions, we examine how board member selection criteria is related to levels of board boundary spanning in inward, upward, and outward accountability environments. In this manuscript, we use a national study of nonprofit charter school boards to answer this call. Previous literature establishes a contingency-based framework of external conditions, internal organizational characteristics, and board attributes and composition that impact board effectiveness and calls for more industry-specific nonprofit studies to build the field's knowledge of the factors that lead to nonprofit board effectiveness.
0 kommentar(er)
