A Call for Help?: How Public School Principals’ Subjective Report of Institutional Weakness Relates to Disciplinary Incidents

ABSTRACT

Disciplinary incidents at U.S. public middle- and high-schools are a public policy concern. Although businesses popularly give credence to leaders’ subjective intelligence, principals’ reports of their schools’ strengths and weaknesses are questioned. To determine whether principals’ reports carry legitimacy as indicators of student offenses, the current study utilized a nationally representative survey of principals who reported on their sense of the institution and the number of disciplinary incidents in the past year (N = 1,872; replication cohort, N = 1,833). Findings showed that the more institutional shortcomings a principal endorsed, the higher total number of incidents occurred, even after controlling for institutional strength and several indicators of school crime. These findings have policy and intervention implications for improving student outcomes, and so would be of interest to funding agencies, school administrators, teachers, and parents.     

Cross-state learning and service delivery in India’s federal system

ABSTRACT

This paper attempts to place the issue of cross-state learning and borrowing experiences in service delivery in India in the specific context of political incentives in India’s federal democracy as well relating it to the findings of the comparative literature on subnational policy diffusion in federal systems. It presents four types of borrowing experiences from a selection of six case studies of the past few years, and point towards ways in which learning/borrowing across states can be usefully incorporated into policy.     

Navigating the dilemmas of politically smart,locally led development: the Pacific-based Green Growth Leaders’ Coalition

Abstract

Iterative approaches to development under banners such as ‘thinking and working politically’ and ‘doing development differently’ build upon decades-old commitments to fostering locally led and -owned development. These approaches are increasingly popular with academics and development practitioners. In this paper we argue that outsiders seeking to deliver locally led, politically smart programmes need to either accept that competing priorities, results and values will work to limit the extent of true local ownership, or be sufficiently committed to true local leadership to accept that this may well cut against organisational imperatives. Using the example of the Pacific-based Green Growth Leaders’ Coalition, we discuss how politically tricky partnerships challenge tenets of local leadership and ownership.     

‘Sometimes fear gets in all your bones’: towards understanding the complexities of risk in development work

ABSTRACT

In the context of increasing risk for aid workers, a growing body of scholarship is focused on risk management in contexts of humanitarian assistance and development work. Much less attention, however, has been given to how staff and volunteers experience such risks. This paper adopts a feminist geographical approach to explore how development workers make meaning of risk in specific contexts. Adopting a qualitative approach, it draws upon 14 semi-structured in-depth interviews with international (7) and local (7) staff of an international educational and sporting non-governmental organisation (NGO) in Afghanistan. After exploring differences between local and foreign staff perceptions of risk, it also offers a gendered analysis of risk for women development workers in Afghanistan. In so doing, this paper contributes to the growing body of literature in ‘Aidland’ studies by revealing the complex understandings of risk and fear by both foreign and local staff in the same geographical and organisational context. For NGOs seeking to make life-saving decisions based on the calculation of risk, this paper evidences the need to also create space for the voices of local and foreign staff whose experiences of risk will be highly relational, embodied, gendered and context specific.