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Abstract
For decades, educational scholars have claimed that public schools are loosely coupled organizations, but research does not fully address how schools create the coupling structure. This dissertation addresses the causes of coupling, before turning to the consequences tight coupling has on both teachers and students. Throughout the dissertation, I rely on perspectives of neo-institutionalism and coupling to address three empirical questions: (1) how do federal policy, state characteristics, local factors, and principal attributes affect school-level couplings? (2) How do federal policy eras, state characteristics, local-level coupling, principal attributes, and teacher characteristics affect the formal relationships between principals and teachers? And (3) how does tight coupling in schools affects teachers social bonds and student deviance at the school-level? Utilizing six waves of the Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS), I rely on OLS regression and fixed effects regression models to analyze my research questions. At the school-level, findings suggest three major influences on coupling within schools. First, federal policies have had a non-linear effect on school-level coupling. Second, the relationship between the district and the school affects school-level coupling. Finally, principals play a key role in shaping the coupling within the school, and coupling is a gendered process. At the teacher-level, my results suggest that teachers who instruct in tested subjects report tighter coupling than those who teach in non-tested subjects. Further, the gender combinations of principal and teacher are important for understanding how teachers experience different degrees of loose-to-tight coupling. The final empirical chapter investigates the consequences of tight coupling for teachers and students at the school-level and draws upon insights from social control theory. Findings suggest negative effects for both teachers and students. First, tight coupling increases deviance among students within the school. Second, strong occupational social bonds among teachers reduce student deviance. Finally, tight coupling weakens teachers occupational social bonds.