Date of Award

Spring 5-2017

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Educational Research and Administration

Committee Chair

Richard Mohn

Committee Chair Department

Educational Research and Administration

Committee Member 2

Kyna Shelley

Committee Member 2 Department

Educational Research and Administration

Committee Member 3

David Lee

Committee Member 3 Department

Educational Research and Administration

Committee Member 4

James Fox

Committee Member 4 Department

Educational Research and Administration

Committee Member 5

Lilian Hill

Committee Member 5 Department

Educational Research and Administration

Abstract

The Mississippi Association of Independent Schools was born out of the turbulent years of the Civil Rights Era. Plessey v. Ferguson in 1896 had established the doctrine of separate but equal facilities, including schools. While the decision in Brown v. Board of Education, handed down by the Supreme Court in 1954, ruled that no student could be denied admittance to public schools because of race, the state of Mississippi continued to maintain separate schools for Blacks and Whites. Even after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which was designed to end a number of racial inequities, was passed, Mississippi and the South as a whole resisted desegregation in the public schools. It was not until 1969, when the 5th U.S. District in Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education intervened to prohibit any further noncompliance with desegregation that Mississippi schools began to allow Blacks to attend school with White students en masse. The end of segregation brought about many changes in Mississippi’s system of education, one of them being the establishment of many new independent or private schools. The purpose of this study was to establish a baseline view of the organizational effectiveness of the Mississippi Association of Independent Schools from the school administrators’ perspectives and determine if there were statistically significant differencess between administrators’ beliefs of the organizational effectiveness with regard to school size, location and tenure.

The primary data for this study were obtained from MAIS administrators from Mississippi, Louisiana and Arkansas. For this quantitative study, the responses were analyzed using descriptive statistics and ANOVA. The study produced no major findings but suggested that MAIS administrators are generally satisfied with the organizational effectiveness of the Association. The respondents agreed that the MAIS maintains a certain level of organizational effectiveness regardless of school size, location or tenure of the administrator.

ORCID ID

0000-0001-6175-7646

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