School Board Development Questionnaire

Abstract

The School Board Development Questionnaire (SBDQ) is an organizational psychometric instrument developed by Dr. D. K. Shoulders (2004) at the University of Kentucky to assess perceptions regarding the role of the public school district superintendent in facilitating the professional development, governance capacity, and systemic competence of local school board members. Composed of 35 primary survey items evaluated via a 4-point Likert-type scale ranging from 1 (Strongly Disagree) to 4 (Strongly Agree), alongside two qualitative inquiry items, the SBDQ evaluates the alignment and divergence between the administrative executive (superintendent) and the policy-setting body (school board chair). The theoretical foundation integrates role theory, educational governance frameworks formulated by the American Association of School Administrators (AASA) and the National School Boards Association (NSBA), and local political conflict theories such as Lutz and Iannaccone’s dissatisfaction theory.

Psychometrically, the SBDQ demonstrates exceptionally high internal consistency, exhibiting an overall Cronbach’s alpha coefficient of 0.98. Content validity was established via an extensive synthesis of empirical literature concerning superintendent-board governance dynamics and vetted by a five-member expert panel. Empirical deployment across 176 Kentucky public school districts yielded response rates of 86.9% for superintendents and 65.3% for school board chairs. Inferential analyses identified statistically significant perceptual divergences across 22 of the 35 questionnaire items, demonstrating the instrument’s high diagnostic sensitivity for detecting asymmetric role expectations, governance boundaries, professional development delivery, and board socialization practices.

Keywords

School Board Development Questionnaire, educational governance, superintendent leadership, school board training, role ambiguity, school board chair perceptions, professional development, organizational socialisation, educational administration, district leadership

Authors

The School Board Development Questionnaire was conceptualized, designed, and psychometrically validated by Dr. D. K. Shoulders as part of doctoral research conducted within the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at the University of Kentucky (Lexington, Kentucky, USA).

• Author: D. K. Shoulders, EdD
• Degree-Granting Institution: University of Kentucky, College of Education
• Major Academic Advisor: Lars G. Björk, PhD, Professor of Educational Leadership Studies
• Year of Development: 2004
• Context of Publication: Doctoral dissertation titled The Perceived Role of the Superintendent in School Board Member Development

Purpose

The primary purpose of the School Board Development Questionnaire is to capture, operationalize, and systematically compare the perceptual orientations of superintendents and school board chairs regarding executive-led board member professional development. In contemporary public education systems, the relationship between the local school board and the district superintendent is paramount to organizational efficacy, strategic planning, student achievement, and policy stability. However, this administrative-governance interface is historically characterized by structural tensions, unclear jurisdictional boundaries, and high rates of superintendent turnover.

Lay school board members frequently assume office through democratic elections without formal training in educational pedagogy, complex financial oversight, labor laws, state accountability mandates, or organizational governance. Traditionally, state school boards associations or outside educational service agencies have provided basic orientation; however, local contextual socialization inevitably falls upon the district superintendent. The SBDQ was engineered to answer critical research and clinical-administrative questions, including:

• To what extent do superintendents and school board chairs agree that superintendent-led capacity building is a primary professional responsibility?
• In what specific operational domains (e.g., policy development, high-stakes accountability, superintendent evaluation, public communication, team building) do superintendents actually provide structured training?
• Do significant discrepancies exist between what superintendents report providing and what board chairs perceive receiving?
• How do mutual perceptions of political interference, role confusion, and governance dynamics influence turnover and institutional stability?

In applied organizational and research settings, the SBDQ serves both as an evaluative diagnostic tool for districts experiencing governance dysfunction and as a benchmarking instrument for educational leadership researchers examining systemic governance reform, superintendent longevity, and board effectiveness.

Psychological Construct

The SBDQ assesses a multi-faceted organizational-psychological construct: Perceived Superintendent Facilitation of Board Governance Competence. This overarching construct captures the cognitive models, role conceptualizations, and operational interactions that define how educational executives socialize, mentor, and instruct the political officials to whom they formally report. The instrument targets several interrelated psychological and organizational sub-dimensions:

1. Policy Formulation and Governance Legitimacy

This dimension operationalizes the delineation between governance (the school board’s legal responsibility to set policy) and administration (the executive’s authority to implement policy). Items evaluate whether the superintendent actively instructs board members in how to craft, interpret, and maintain board policy without crossing into operational micromanagement (e.g., Items 3, 7, 13). It gauges cognitive clarity regarding institutional jurisdiction.

2. Academic Accountability, Assessment, and Curricular Governance

Reflecting the accountability mandates of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) and state testing architectures such as Kentucky’s Commonwealth Accountability Testing System (CATS), this dimension measures the superintendent’s active scaffolding of board members’ instructional literacy. It measures how effectively superintendents demystify assessment data, student achievement metrics, and interventions for at-risk student populations (e.g., Items 6, 16, 17, 31).

3. Collaborative Team Dynamics and Internal Conflict Resolution

Local school boards operate as small decision-making groups prone to interpersonal friction, factionalism, and interpersonal conflict. This dimension captures the superintendent’s interventions as a process facilitator who fosters cohesion, builds trust, models communication protocols for grievance handling, and assists board members in cultivating productive working relationships with one another (e.g., Items 11, 12, 21, 22, 25).

4. Executive Evaluation and Performance Reciprocity

A core structural paradox of district governance involves the board evaluating the superintendent while simultaneously relying on that superintendent to guide them in evaluation design. This dimension examines whether the superintendent facilitates board training on evaluation metrics, objective performance criteria, and the establishment of fair, apolitical appraisal standards (e.g., Items 9, 10, 19).

5. Political Socialization and Institutional Role Boundaries

Rooted in sociological theories of organizational socialization, this facet assesses the superintendent’s efforts to orient board members toward professional, apolitical norms, community advocacy, and stakeholder mediation (e.g., Items 1, 4, 8, 18, 26, 33). It evaluates whether both actors understand how role ambiguity and politicized school board environments generate executive turnover (e.g., Items 2, 5, 30, 32).

Theoretical Framework

The conceptual architecture of the School Board Development Questionnaire draws upon an integration of political science, organizational psychology, and educational administration theories:

Role Theory and Role Ambiguity (Kahn et al., 1964; Gross et al., 1958)

Central to the SBDQ is role theory, which posits that an organization functions smoothly when actors maintain shared, congruent expectations concerning their respective behavioral domains. When role senders (e.g., board members) and role incumbents (e.g., superintendents) hold conflicting, ambiguous, or divergent expectations regarding boundaries, role conflict and role ambiguity emerge. Such misalignment produces heightened job stress, performance decrement, adversarial interaction, and managerial turnover. The SBDQ operationalizes the degree to which intentional developmental facilitation by the superintendent bridges this perceptual gap, creating normative role consensus.

Dissatisfaction Theory of Local Democracy (Lutz & Iannaccone, 1978)

Lutz and Iannaccone’s foundational work describes the socio-political lifecycle of school district governance. When communities undergo demographic, economic, or value shifts that the sitting board fails to reflect, public dissatisfaction builds, eventually triggering contested elections. Newly elected, ideologically charged board members unseat incumbents and frequently terminate the superintendent. The SBDQ reflects this dynamic by measuring how training in community relations, stakeholder advocacy, and policy responsiveness serves as an institutional buffer against catastrophic political destabilization.

Historical Conceptions of the Superintendency (Cuban, 1976; Brunner et al., 2002)

Larry Cuban famously categorized the American superintendency across three shifting historical roles: the teacher-scholar (instructional leader), the administrative-chief (scientific manager), and the negotiator-statesman (political mediator). Brunner, Grogan, and Björk expanded this discourse into the 21st-century context, emphasizing that modern superintendents must operate collaboratively rather than through top-down authoritarianism. The SBDQ encapsulates this modern paradigm: the superintendent functions not merely as an employee carrying out board directives, but as a pedagogical mentor who actively educates the governing board in effective educational leadership.

AASA and NSBA Dual Governance Standards (1994)

The joint framework established by the American Association of School Administrators and the National School Boards Association provides the normative benchmark for the SBDQ items. This framework dictates that governance is a mutual, shared responsibility: boards concentrate on policy, values, goals, and systemic evaluation, while superintendents are granted the executive autonomy to administer programs, direct personnel, and oversee daily instructional operations.

Validity

The School Board Development Questionnaire underwent a structured validation protocol addressing content, face, and construct validity during its design and dissertation deployment:

Content and Face Validity

Content validity was established through an exhaustive literature mapping procedure. Item stems were directly derived from empirical studies and normative standards articulated by educational leadership scholars, the AASA, and the NSBA. To ensure domain coverage, semantic clarity, and institutional relevance, the preliminary instrument was evaluated by an expert review panel comprising five specialists in educational governance, psychometrics, and executive leadership studies. This panel conducted an item-objective congruence analysis, refining terminology to reflect both superintendent administrative lexicon and school board governance phrasing.

Pilot Study Validation

A formal pilot study was administered to a targeted cohort of 30 former public school district superintendents and 30 former school board chairs across Kentucky. This retired sample was selected to avoid political contamination, fear of professional reprisal, or social desirability biases. Seventeen fully completed surveys were returned. Feedback from the pilot group verified clarity, face validity, and functional accessibility of the item stems, resulting in minor grammatical revisions before statewide dissemination.

Construct and Discriminant Divergence

During the primary administration across 176 school districts (yielding 153 participating superintendents and 115 participating board chairs), the instrument demonstrated robust sensitivity in detecting perceptual discrepancies between administrative incumbents and board leaders. Independent samples t-tests revealed statistically significant differences between superintendents and board chairs across the aggregated scale scores. Subsequent chi-square analyses revealed that 22 of the 35 individual items (62.9%) exhibited statistically significant response divergences ($p < .05$). Specifically, superintendents consistently rated their developmental assistance at a higher frequency and intensity than school board chairs perceived receiving it, providing empirical evidence of the scale’s construct sensitivity to perceptual asymmetries in governance relations.

Reliability

The reliability of the School Board Development Questionnaire was evaluated using internal consistency metrics based on classical test theory:

• Overall Scale Alpha: The omnibus internal consistency reliability for the 35-item scale was exceptionally high, yielding a Cronbach’s alpha ($lpha$) coefficient of 0.98.
• Implications of Scale Consistency: An alpha coefficient exceeding .90 demonstrates strong item covariance and minimal error variance attributable to item heterogeneity. While coefficients approaching .98 can occasionally indicate slight item redundancy within short scales, in a comprehensive 35-item organizational assessment covering diverse operational domains, it underscores that the items coalesce around a unified, coherent psychological and behavioral latent construct.
• Item-Total Correlations: The pilot and main administration iterations confirmed positive, robust item-total correlations across the inventory, indicating that each operational item aligns with the overarching construct of superintendent-directed board development.

Factor Analysis

In the original validation study by Shoulders (2004), a formal exploratory factor analysis (EFA) or confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was deliberately omitted due to specific statistical and methodological conditions:

• Sample Size Constraints: Although the response rate was high (86.9% for superintendents, $n = 153$; 65.3% for board chairs, $n = 115$), the absolute number of participant pairs fell short of the recommended participant-to-item ratio (commonly $10:1$ to $20:1$) needed to reliably conduct stable factor extraction and orthogonal/oblique rotations across 35 independent parameters.
• Latent Unidimensionality: The exceptionally high overall Cronbach’s alpha coefficient ($lpha = 0.98$) indicated strong inter-item collinearity, pointing toward a single dominant general factor of “Perceived Superintendent Facilitation of Governance Competence.”

Subsequent psychometric commentary and theoretical parsing suggest that should a large-scale confirmatory factor analysis be executed across a multi-state sample, the SBDQ would likely map onto four or five correlated latent factors:

1. Instructional and Accountability Mentorship (e.g., Items 6, 16, 17, 24, 31);
2. Policy Formulation and Structural Governance (e.g., Items 1, 3, 7, 13, 14, 15, 23);
3. Interpersonal Facilitation and Team Dynamics (e.g., Items 11, 12, 21, 22, 25);
4. Executive Evaluation and Professional Autonomy (e.g., Items 9, 10, 19, 26); and
5. External Systems and Political Mediation (e.g., Items 4, 8, 18, 27, 28, 29, 33).

Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Instrument Name: School Board Development Questionnaire (SBDQ)
• Author: D. K. Shoulders, EdD (2004)
• Primary Application: Evaluates superintendent and school board chair perceptions of superintendent-led professional development, governance capacity building, and collaborative role definition.
• Target Population: Public school district superintendents, school board members, board chairs, and educational governance researchers.
• Structure:
  • Section I: Quantitative Items: 35 items presented in declarative statement format.
  • Section II: Qualitative Inquiries: 2 open-ended narrative response prompts addressing primary training sources and tactical advice for superintendent-board relations.
• Response Scale (Quantitative): 4-point forced-choice Likert-type scale:
  • 1 = Strongly Disagree
  • 2 = Disagree
  • 3 = Agree
  • 4 = Strongly Agree
• Scoring Procedures:
  • Individual item scores range from 1 to 4.
  • A composite total score can be calculated by summing all 35 items (theoretical range: 35 to 140 points), where higher scores denote higher perceived involvement and effectiveness in superintendent-led board development.
  • Item-by-item comparative analysis between superintendent responses and board chair responses is typically conducted using independent samples t-tests and chi-square tests of independence to identify organizational blind spots and perceptual divergence.
• Administration Time: Approximately 15 to 20 minutes for the complete questionnaire.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The School Board Development Questionnaire was published in 2004 as part of Dr. D. K. Shoulders’ doctoral dissertation at the University of Kentucky. Under standard academic distribution principles, the instrument is accessible for non-commercial research, academic inquiry, district diagnostic assessment, and dissertation studies provided proper scholarly attribution is maintained. No commercial testing fee is required for academic usage. Researchers intending to replicate the questionnaire in full or integrate it into empirical studies should reference the original dissertation (Shoulders, 2004) and ensure compliance with institutional review board (IRB) ethical standards regarding the collection of data from executive public officials.

References

• American Association of School Administrators, & National School Boards Association. (1994). Roles and relationships: School boards and superintendents. American Association of School Administrators.
• Björk, L. G., & Gurley, D. K. (2005). Superintendent contributions to board development: Implications for district governance. Journal of School Leadership, 15(4), 412–441. https://doi.org/10.1177/105268460501500403
• Brunner, C. C., Grogan, M., & Björk, L. G. (2002). Shifts in the discourse defining the superintendency: Historical and current foundations in the position. In J. Murphy (Ed.), The educational leadership challenge: Redefining leadership for the 21st century (pp. 211–238). University of Chicago Press.
• Cuban, L. (1976). The urban school superintendent: A century and a half of change. Phi Delta Kappa Educational Foundation.
• Gross, N., Mason, W. S., & McEachern, A. W. (1958). Explorations in role analysis: Studies of the school superintendency role. John Wiley & Sons.
• Kahn, R. L., Wolfe, D. M., Quinn, R. P., Snoek, J. D., & Rosenthal, R. A. (1964). Organizational stress: Studies in role conflict and ambiguity. John Wiley & Sons.
• Lutz, F. W., & Iannaccone, L. (1978). Public participation in local school districts: The dissatisfaction theory of democracy. Lexington Books.
• Shoulders, D. K. (2004). The perceived role of the superintendent in school board member development (Doctoral dissertation, University of Kentucky). ProQuest Dissertations and Theses Global. (UMI No. 3133604).

13. Items of the Scale (Questionnaire)