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Teachers' Perspectives on Principal Mistreatment
Teacher Education Quarterly, Fall 2006 by Blase, Joseph, Blase, Jo
Our sample consisted of male (n = 5) and female (n = 45) teachers from rural (n = 14), suburban (n = 25), and urban (n = 11) school locations. Elementary (n = 26), middle/junior high (n = 10), and high school (n = 14) teachers participated. The average age of teachers was 42; the average number of years in teaching was 16. The sample included tenured (n = 44) and non-tenured (n = 6), married (n = 34) and single (n = 16) teachers. Degrees earned by these teachers included B.A./ B.S. (n = 7), M.Ed./MA (n = 31), Ed.S. (n = 11), and Ph.D. (n = 1). The mean number of years working with the abusive principal was 4. Forty-nine teachers resided in the United States and one resided in Canada. Fifteen of the teachers we studied were with an abusive principal at the time of this study; most others had experienced abuse in recent years. In total, these teachers described 28 male and 22 female abusive principals.
Examination of the personal and official documents (e.g., teacher journals, teacher evaluations, written reprimands, transfers) submitted to us and reports from those who had worked with and referred us to the veteran teachers we studied suggest that the teachers were highly respected, accomplished, creative, and dedicated individuals. In most cases, they had been consistently and formally recognized by their school and district not simply as effective teachers but also as superior teachers; in many cases, such recognition for their exceptional achievements as public educators extended to state levels.
We conducted between two and four in-depth structured and semistructured telephone interviews with each of our research participants. In total, 135 hours of interviews were completed. The personal and official documents we collected were used, in part, to confirm the credibility of teachersí interview data as well as their overall effectiveness as teachers. In addition, we used a variety of techniques to determine the trustworthiness and reliability of teachersí reports; for example, we used no a priori concepts to direct data collection, audio recorded all interviews, conducted several interviews with participants, probed for details on all responses, examined data for consistencies and inconsistencies within and between interviews, searched for negative cases, compared personal documents with interview transcriptions, produced low-inference descriptors, and examined data for re- searcher effects (Bogdan & Biklen, 1982; Glaser, 1978, 1992, 1998; Strauss & Corbin, 1998; Taylor & Bogdan, 1998).
All of the findings discussed herein, drawn directly from our data, focus on teachersí perspectives on principal abuse and its adverse effects. Individual profiles of principals and teachers are not presented. Thus, it is important to note that each principal identified by individual teachers engaged in a range of abusive behaviors described in this article, and each teacher, supervised by such a principal, experienced most of the major categories of deleterious effects we describe. It is also important to note that our study, being exploratory in nature, did not indicate the pervasiveness of the mistreatment problem in the United States. Given space limitations, only very brief descriptions of our findings are presented.
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