Commonplace and common language: Kentucky's district mission statements
| Pages | 321-340 |
| Date | 16 April 2020 |
| Published date | 16 April 2020 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/JEA-09-2019-0158 |
| Author | W. Kyle Ingle,Terra Greenwell,Justin Woods |
| Subject Matter | Education,Administration & policy in education,School administration/policy,Educational administration,Leadership in education |
Commonplace and common
language: Kentucky’s district
mission statements
W. Kyle Ingle
Department of Educational Leadership, Evaluation and Organizational Development,
University of Louisville, Louisville, Kentucky, USA, and
Terra Greenwell and Justin Woods
Jefferson County Public Schools, Louisville, Kentucky, USA
Abstract
Purpose –We sought to identify codes and themes in the mission statements of Kentucky’s school districts
and examine the relationship between district characteristics and the mission statements.
Design/methodology/approach –We undertook a mixed methods design, specifically, a sequential
transformative strategy with a theoretical lens overlaying the sequential procedures and guiding the analysis.
Findings –Analysis revealed a range of 1–7 codes per mission statement and a mean of 3.05. Generic student
success and individual attention represented the most frequently occurring codes in the mission statements.
Chi-square tests of bivariate association yielded no significant differences between districts by locale. Logistic
regression analysisrevealed that the percentage of students in the district scoring proficient or distinguished in
both reading and mathematics was associated significantly (p< 0.05) with the theme of student support.
Research limitations –Although we cannot establish causation between mission statements content and
student outcomes or vice-versa, district mission statement remain a visible and public expression of why an
organizationexists that should guideactions and decision-making,whether instructional,financial or otherwise.
Practical implications –Our study revealed shared institutional language within mission statements across
Kentucky’s school district, largely without regard to local context. Our analysis suggests that federal and state
policy makers are influencing mission statements more so than those at the local level.
Originality/value –Our analysis provides further evidence that suggests that federal and state policy
makers are influencing mission statements more so than those at the local level.
Keywords Mission statements, School districts, Organizational structures and operations
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
Mission statements are commonplace in organizations –big, small, public sector, private
sector or nonprofit. Their display occurs both physically in brick-and-mortar facilities and
electronically via organizational websites. The length and content vary as widely as the
organizations that develop them (Bart and Baetz, 1998;Campbell et al., 2002;Wallace, 2004).
Despite these variations, consistent among mission statements is the purpose of
communicating what an organization and its stakeholders do. As Duygulu et al. explained,
“The mission statement should answer these basic, yet essential questions: What is the
organization’s aim? Why does the organization exist?”(2016, p. 2). The omnipresent
development and display of mission statements in educational organizations trace back to the
diffusion of such documents in the private sector during the 1970 and 1980s (Drucker, 1973;
Peters and Waterman, 1982). This coincided with a time when policymakers were pressuring
public educational institutions to adopt private sector practices (e.g. Berends, 2004). By
clearly stating an organization’s mission, stakeholders can prioritize actions that support the
mission as well as provide a shared sense of purpose for those inside and outside of the
organization (Drucker, 1973;Fayad and Yoshida, 2014).
Commonplace
and common
language
321
The authors thank Joe Worth for his assistance in collection of mission statements for this project.
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
https://www.emerald.com/insight/0957-8234.htm
Received 13 September 2019
Revised 4 December 2019
13 January 2020
Accepted 17 January 2020
Journal of Educational
Administration
Vol. 58 No. 3, 2020
pp. 321-340
© Emerald Publishing Limited
0957-8234
DOI 10.1108/JEA-09-2019-0158
Educational leadership programs teach the importance of visioning and establishing a
clear sense of organizational and individual purpose and goals. Standard 1 of the Professional
Standards for Educational Leaders (National Policy Board for Educational Administration,
2015) focuses on the importance of educational leaders developing, advocating, and enacting
a shared mission, vision and core values as the means of ensuring high-quality education and
academic success and well-being of each student.
Mission statements articulate the purpose(s) of schooling. Local, state and federal contexts
shape the purposes of schooling (Arum, 2000;Boerema, 2006;Stemler et al., 2011;Weiss and
Piderit, 1999). Educational leaders find themselves seeking to balance the demands of local
constituents –students, parents, teachers, school board members, community members and
business leaders –with the demands of state and national policymakers. Researchers such as
Honig and Hatch (2004) note that policy actors shape “the terms of compliance”(p. 23),
including the selective and symbolic implementation of policy. Honig and Hatch (2004) posit
that implementation should be understood as a process in which district and school actors
negotiate multiple external demands in their efforts to achieve internal goals, facilitating a
top-down and bottom-up response to policies. Others (e.g. Ingle et al., 2015;Rutledge et al.,
2010) show how educational leaders bridge or buffer their schools and districts from state and
federal mandates. Scholars and practitioners alike are critical of mission statements for being
vague or overly ambitious (Keeling, 2013;Taylor and Morphew, 2010). Rozycki described
missions and visions as “happy talk: sweet slogans that enervate clear definitions of goals,
that obscure inquiry into their achievability, and that have provoked the ‘fad diet’of
standardized testing, teacher accountability, and lockstep curriculum”(2004, p. 94).
Cady et al. (2011) and Duygulu et al. (2016) note the paucity of research on mission
statements in the context of business. A similar lack of research exists in the realm of P-12
education also (Schafft and Biddle, 2013;Stemler et al., 2011). Stemler et al. (2011) state,
“Despite the prominent role that mission statements often play in education, educational
researchers have generally ignored mission statements as a source of empirical research
data”(p. 391). In 2013, Schafft and Biddle sought to add to this limited research, seeking to
understand the association between district urbanicity and the content of mission statements
for Pennsylvania school districts (N5480). They rationalized that, as an individual school,
one would expect to identify closer ties to the local community in a school’s mission
statements than in a district mission statement. Indeed, Schafft and Biddle found that in the
context of Pennsylvania, local schools largely did not have their own mission statements. To
the extent that schools had them, the mission statements tended to be reiterations of their
district mission statements.
Schafft and Biddle’s analysis yielded three themes in mission statements: school–society
relationship, student outcomes and the school environment. They found largely uniform
language and themes across district contexts, suggesting that broader institutional
discourses supersede local contexts. Chi-square tests of bivariate association by district
geographic type (excluding city districts due to subsample size) revealed no statistically
significant differences. Logistic regression analyses, using the coded themes –present or
not –as the dichotomous dependent variables, revealed that total district enrollments were
associated negatively and statistically (p< 0.05) with the inclusion of the individual attention
code. Schafft and Biddle suggest that smaller sized districts may be more likely to emphasize
individual attention than districts with larger enrollments. Schafft and Biddle also found
positive association between the coding of individual attention and 2010–11 district PSSA
reading scores, but a negative association between the coding of individual attention and
district 2010–11 PSSA math scores, making interpretation of these relationships difficult.
Schafft and Biddle conclude that Pennsylvania’s school district mission statements tend
to “represent rather generic recapitulations of stock educational tropes, but there was, at best,
limited evidence that mission statements meaningfully reflected differences in community
JEA
58,3
322
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