Direction of Research in Educational Management

As expected, a Google search on “recent researches in educational management” returned almost 100 million entries. By recent, we mean anywhere between 2000 to the present. There are even topics as far back as the late nineties. A slight revision from “recent” to “direction” narrowed the search to 100k - still too many. From these, I glanced quite a few (about twenty) and what I noticed is the direction towards e-learning, or the transmission of learning through the internet – distance learning, education principles as applied to e-learning, classroom management in e-classroom, the status of IT promotion, status of education and training system, IT human resources required and e-learning market trends. Even the Conference Board of Canada and its Research Publications at http://www.conferenceboard.ca/education/reports/default.htm has this to say about Canadian direction - "Canada is on the verge of creating an e-economy and e-society that can fundamentally alter the way in which most Canadians live".

For Europeans, like the one I saw from Minsk, Nekrasova, direction includes improving qualification of educational administrators and specialists (problems of management by functioning and development of educational institutions, didactics and modern educational technologies); testing school pedagogical personnel. Basically, these are the same things that bear the same importance for us, Filipinos.

In America, as portrayed in “The Educator’s Reference Desk” at http://www.eduref.org/cgi-bin/res.cgi/Educational_Management, the following topics seem to be their priorities:
Attendance
Community Relationships
Compensatory Education
Discipline Policy
Dress Codes
Education Reform
Educational Facilities
Educational Finance
Gender--Sexuality
Grade Repetition
Grants
No Child Left Behind
Personnel
Scheduling
School Health
School Safety
Student Behavior

Blogs from teachers and educators in America, return complaints and more complaints over federal policies, prescribed modules and No Child policy. These are a bunch of negative people, I tell you. Makes you wonder why they are teachers in the first place. Also, I notice that most of them would rather just teach (science and math – these are fashionable and in-demand, as they say) than be administrators. One very vocal member of “Education” (what a title, huh?) in Tribe.net said there was no future in getting a PhD in Educational Management, and advised one confused graduate student to just focus on Science Ed.

Having all these in mind, I wondered about my set direction. I am already geared towards the following general (and rather vague) path in my research and thesis:
Effective Schools Movement in the Philippines. Whether the Effective Schools Model is already being applied here, and among the best schools, what is a parallel trait, as found also in the model. There is one dissertation (McMackin, 1991) I read in DLSU Library, although he surveyed a whole district in New York.

Pygmalion Effect in Educational Management. I did a preliminary survey with my group mates last term at our Instructional Leadership course under Dr. Muñoz, yielding interesting results. There have been serious gaps in the Pygmalion Effect historically, as I found in my researches last term. In the Philippines, I have yet to find something. The problem with Pygmalion Effect is that there have been no agreements as to the “expectation” and “intrinsic motivation”. And there appears a lot of intervening factors. Pygmalion effect for me is a topic on motivation. This will certainly help a lot of principals, especially beginning ones.

The above topics seem to be my direction in my research proposal, as of the moment. Of course, I expect my able professor to inspire me to tread unforeseen paths and realize more things as we go on.


References:

Chair of Management and Technologies of Education 22040, Minsk, Nekrasova
http://ape.edu.by/eng/struct/dcte.htm

Conference Board of Canada, Research Publications http://www.conferenceboard.ca/education/reports/default.htm

Educators’ Reference Desk
http://www.eduref.org/cgi-bin/res.cgi/Educational_Management

McMackin, Howard Michael. (1991). “The Influence of the Effective Schools Model on the Invention, Adoption, and Implementation of Innovations by a School Improvement Team: A Process Study”. Dissertation: The University of Connecticut

Vroom, Victor H. (1994). “Work and Motivation”. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass