Chair of the Supervisory Committee:
Dr. Margaret L. Plecki
College of Education
School districts are increasingly focused on instructional practice in classrooms.
Many urban school districts have shifted decision-making responsibility to school
principals in order to improve instruction. This reform strategy has been referred to as
decentralization or school-based management. Decentralization has a significant
influence on principal's human resource activities as it creates new opportunities for
principals to recruit, hire, assign, support, and evaluate staff. Districts that have
adopted a decentralized reform strategy have largely assumed that principals are
equipped to deal with these new responsibilities. However, the uneven success of their
reform efforts suggest this assumption may be inaccurate. In this study, I use a
modified grounded theory design