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Charities are facing a crisis in recruiting board trustees. Additionally, boards have been criticised for lacking diversity and being unrepresentative of society. The purpose of this paper is to propose a solution to the problem of trustee recruitment, by considering university business students as trustees. Through an analysis of advertised trustee jobs, the proposal is evaluated against degree subject benchmark statements. The findings identify some key person characteristics specified by charities when recruiting trustees. The generic criteria could be met by most students and many of the personal skills are developed by students while at university. However, to address some of the experience criteria, may require additional training and some yielding by charities. The paper offers originality in its proposition of appointing university business students as trustees and in its approach to examining the feasibility of that proposition through an analysis of trustee jobs.

I study student characteristics and academic performance at the University of California, where consideration of an applicant's ethnicity has been banned since 1996 and SAT scores were used in admitting students to the university until fall 2021. I show the following: (1) SAT scores were more important than high school grades in predicting first-year university GPA; (2) the use of SAT scores alone or with high school grades in determining admission is biased in favor of admitting underrepresented minorities and students who are socioeconomically disadvantaged; (3) SAT scores are more important and high school grades are less important in predicting GPA for underrepresented minorities and/or those students from low-income families than they are for those students who are white and/or from high-income families; and (4) the University of California found ways to admit a significant number of underrepresented minorities despite many of them having low SAT scores.

The Gloucestershire Gateway Trust (GGT) is a social enterprise initiative in Southwest England focused on Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD). This article describes a six-year action research collaboration that has sought to support the GGT and its local non-profit organizational partners using a variety of action research methods, including community surveys, Group Level Assessment, Future Creating Workshops, and arts-based methods. The development of a community resident research team (CCRT) model has been a core aspect of this partnership that honours local knowledge and experience while providing training and employment opportunities to local residents. This initiative and the action research partnership described here offer an innovative approach for using AR to support effective community development that could be replicated in a variety of other contexts.

In recent years, higher education has faced what seems like endless crises, controversies, and conflicts related to the COVID-19 pandemic, financial constraints, sexual assault, high staff and leadership turnover, admissions policy changes, questions about the value and import of higher education, and inequity and injustice. These difficulties (and more) add extra pressure to the roles, responsibilities, and duties of higher education leaders. One group in particular--governing boards of higher education--requires intentional guidance and support to navigate the challenges facing colleges and universities. With intentional support, governing boards are in a unique position to ensure that higher education becomes a public good and continues to serve the public in direct and indirect ways. The authors' aim in this article is to present a governance ethos that, if embraced and operationalized, can assist governing boards--and those who work with them--in their efforts to navigate this crucible moment in a way that enlivens institutional commitments to the public good through a focus on equitable student success.

Changes to the structure of English education because of decentralisation policy, particularly since 2010, have resulted in the creation of large groupings of schools -- multi-academy trusts, organisations with multi-level governance structures, set out in schemes of delegation. Although the government has demanded absolute clarity on the role and remit of each part of the structure and the relationship and reporting between them, recent research suggests that there is little clarity or consistency in the role and function of board structures, with members often confused about their roles. This study draws on data from a funded project to examine: What level of consistency there is in multi-academy trust schemes of delegation, and what evidence is there that schemes of delegation align with sensemaking models of board members? The article concludes with a discussion on what the findings imply for use of schemes of delegation as useful tools for board member sensemaking in multi-academy trusts; revealing that although they can be useful tools for sensemaking, their usage varies a great deal between boards and board members.

In private law, fiduciary duties are in general linked to fiduciary relationships, i.e., when a fiduciary relationship exists, the parties are deemed to have corresponding fiduciary duties. However, this study shows that fiduciary relationships and fiduciary duties should not always be equated. This article seeks, first of all, to shed light on the interplay between fiduciary duties and fiduciary relationships, as well as to clarify which particular duties can be considered fiduciary. The authors then seek to reveal the specific cases in which fiduciary duties arise and explain their content to ensure the sustainability in these relationships governed by private law. Thereby, a conclusion is made that certain subjects of fiduciary relationships, such as, for example, the manager of the company, the bank and the trustee, have fiduciary duties, but this is not the case for, as an example, the insurer and the doctor.

The rationale for the principles of effective school governance in England, as set out in government regulations, has never been made explicit. This article addresses that issue and develops and proposes such principles. We argue that effective school governance secures the legitimacy of schools as institutions. Such institutional legitimacy is achieved through the institutionalization processes in which the institutional primary task is central. Effective governance is therefore concerned with overseeing and ensuring the processes of institutionalization. We identify two general principles that relate to ensuring the school's legitimacy and ensuring that the school's institutionalization processes enable it to be a legitimate institution. We also distinguish six specific principles that relate to: the school's work on the institutional primary task, the resources required and deployed for work on the institutional primary task; the school's compliance with the rules and regulations that apply to the institution; the school's conformance to the norms expected of a school; the way the school operates on a day-to-day basis in relation to wider society's expectations; calling the headteacher or principal (HT/P) to account for the functioning of the school; and ensuring the HT/P's development. Our analysis is relevant to school governance in other countries.

This paper draws on coupling and systems frameworks to investigate the relationships between two English Multi-Academy Trusts (MATs) and their member schools in how decisions are made around budgeting, recruitment processes, and curriculum and assessment. Findings demonstrate when and under what conditions executive leaders and specifically CEOs, as primary agents of coupling, created greater consistency across schools either through centralization or deliberate alignment of school improvement planning, while operating within their complex institutional environments. Implications for practice, policy, and research on system-wide reform are discussed.

In Zimbabwe, a range of actors are involved in education due to ongoing challenges of resourcing and funding schools. There are complex socio-political arrangements that result from private-public partnerships in the education system. Some schools are created and funded by individuals, and little is known about the tensions these funding structures create for school leaders and teachers. This qualitative study examined one school in Matabeleland North, using semi-structured interviews and observations across one term. It argues there are complexities created through the position of being a school 'founder' that shape a school's administration and leadership structures. Using the example of the school principal's role and two tensions that result from relationships between the principal and school founders, this paper argues that more attention needs to be made towards the arrangements of school funding and the conflicts and tensions that result from complex relationships of power between school founders and teachers.

This study explored the role of school superintendents and board of education trustees in closing the achievement gap, which can be defined as "the disparity in academic performance between groups of students" (Muhammad, 2015, p. 14). District leaders (superintendents and school boards) set the priorities and policies in their school systems and have the power to promote or thwart educational equity (Skrla et al., 2009). The purpose of this qualitative study was to highlight effective practices of superintendents and school boards that have prioritized closing achievement gaps and have succeeded in narrowing them. This study involved four case studies and made use of interviews, observations, and document review. The data revealed that the most formidable challenges to closing achievement gaps were increasingly diverse student needs, stakeholders' deficit-thinking about students, lack of family engagement, and financial obstacles. To overcome those challenges, the researcher found that superintendents used various strategies, including setting a vision for equity at the district level, using data to drive decision-making, hiring quality teachers and leaders, using district funds resourcefully, providing rigorous curricula for students, and creating innovative academic and non-academic programs for students. Although there is academic literature on the challenges that school superintendents face in closing achievement gaps and the strategies that they have used to overcome them, there is a lack of research on how superintendents and their school boards collaborate to narrow achievement gaps. The aim of the study was to address that gap in the literature. Data revealed that district leaders collaborated to narrow gaps by setting district visions, goals, and policies, sharing information, and partnering on the budgeting and hiring processes.

Through the lens of the school board, this essay examines school governance dynamics as a southern, historically white public school district struggled to implement school desegregation. In 1976, the city of Waco simultaneously elected its school district's first trustees of Color, Dr. Emma Louise Harrison and Rev. Robert Lewis Gilbert. Harrison and Gilbert used distinctly different political strategies to navigate the racially hostile school board environment, but ultimately, as this article demonstrates, neither strategy enabled them to overcome white supremacy in Waco. This seemingly obvious point reveals a notable yet underemphasized drawback of school desegregation: that it failed to upend structural racial injustice. The case of Harrison and Gilbert illustrates that this limitation was reflected in the token number of Black trustees on the boards of desegregated schools and the concerted white resistance they met in working to spur meaningful racial change.

The systemic changes in the education policy landscape in England under the academies reform movement have nurtured a growing prevalence of educational organisations such as Multi-Academy Trusts (MATs) operating as meso-level institutional actors that shape the implementation of policies and mediate between social structures and individual contexts and environments. This paper presents findings from an analysis of instructional improvement efforts in two MATs drawing on data from interviews with 13 executives and school leaders. Insights from neo-institutional theory provide an important lens for examining the ways in which logics of state, market and community influence executive leaders' decisions and practices towards system-wide instructional reform. Findings demonstrate the different ways in which executive leaders perceived these logics influencing their actions and how school leaders experienced the expectations from the executive leaders in the wake of multiple accountability demands. The contextual analysis of institutional logics provides new knowledge on the perceived impact of the macro level policy development and implementation at the meso- and micro-level structures, beliefs and practices revealing the complexity of instructional reform.

Concerns about racism and race equality have been widely reported in the first decades of the 21st century, following the Black Lives Matter protests and campaigns such as 'Rhodes Must Fall'. Yet 'race' remains largely absent from policy debate and research concerning further education colleges in the four countries of the UK, particularly in relationship to leadership and governance. The focus of this paper is on who governs and why it matters. Governors and trustees play an increasingly visible and significant role in public, private and charity sector organisations, but diversity on governing bodies of further education across the UK remains patchy and is seen as a major challenge. The paper reports on what is known about the composition of governing bodies and what this tells us about the involvement of governors from black and minority ethnic backgrounds at the present time, drawing on a three-year project which examined the processes and practices of governing in the four countries of the UK. The findings highlight the continuing absence of governors from black and minority ethnic backgrounds on college governing boards and suggest that normative, invisible assumptions of how governing gets done persist, with black and minority ethnic governors often little more than a token gesture of adding diversity to the faces on the board.

This chapter reflects on how the Michigan Center for Student Success (MCSS) has leveraged its position within a membership organization for community college presidents and trustees to engage in statewide student success efforts in a state with a unique higher education governance structure. With no formal higher education governing body to set policy or coordinate initiatives, the MCSS has relied on individual leaders and practitioners within institutions to create a coalition of the willing who have worked to move the student success agenda forward. The article provides a political and historical context for the center's founding, explores the center's accomplishments, and concludes by discussing considerations for coalition leaders in other states.

The goal of this article is to enhance understanding and appreciation of the current and potential role of trustees in urban community colleges. In working to make sure students are successful, trustees face numerous challenges in implementing high-impact policies and practices that center student success. This article establishes a node connecting an understudied topic (governance), and an understudied group (trustees), within an oft-forgotten context (community colleges). The focus is on the influential role that urban community colleges play in serving educationally, economically, and ethnically marginalized populations and how the trustees must necessarily govern with these groups in mind.

The 2007 Bondar Report, "Shaping Our Schools, Shaping Our Future," generated a vision for environmental curricula in Ontario. It has been the basis for the mandated framework introduced in 2009 by the Ministry of Education for environmental education (EE) in all Ontario schools. Based on our research and personal reflections, this paper provides a summary of the recent developments concerning EE curricula in Ontario's schools. It also identifies the key institutional elements which contribute to and influence the course of EE implementation and focuses on their role in the development of environmental curricula in the province.

Background/context: A growing body of evidence indicates that trustees link the boards of research universities to organizations in other fields. It is less clear whether these board characteristics indicate distinct university contexts with which particular activities would be associated. Research questions: We ask three questions. The first two are descriptive and focus attention on the changing characteristics of university boards: How do boards tie universities to other sectors of society? How has the composition of these ties changed over time? The third is inferential and attends to possible relationships between board characteristics and university activities over time: Are there relationships between board ties to external organizations and university activities? Research design: We answered our first two questions using descriptive analyses. We answered the third question using regression analyses, inclusive of fixed board-level effects, which estimated the within-unit association among board characteristics, control characteristics, and the dependent variables associated with activities of interest. Data collection and analysis: Our sample consisted of the 54 boards that oversaw members of the Association of American Universities. Data were compiled in 10-year increments between 1985 and 2015. Historical data on university boards were created using Standard and Poor's Register of Corporations, Directors, and Executives and the Capital IQ Personal Intelligence database, both of which provided time-verified data about the affiliations of individual trustees at a given moment in time (e.g., 1985, 1995). We merged these data with information on university characteristics drawn from existing secondary data sources. Findings: Consistent with other analyses, sampled boards were increasingly connected to organizations in other fields over time. Connections grew especially rapidly between 1995 and 2015, with particularly notable growth in ties to the finance industry. In inferential analyses, the total number of ties to external organizations was associated with increases in total publications and with the share of publications in the biological sciences. Board characteristics were not associated with variation in other variables (e.g., endowment growth). Conclusions/recommendations: Our findings suggest that board characteristics are more likely to be associated with some university activities than others. It is less clear why this is the case. Our paper therefore lays important groundwork for future research on the ways in which individual trustees may directly coordinate, indirectly facilitate, or be selected because of their ties to particular external organizations.

The pressures and influences experienced by school leaders as school policymakers, during the first responses to COVID-19 pandemic, made their task of interpreting, translating and implementing school guidance both difficult and stressful. During COVID-19 pandemic, school leaders faced challenges to prioritise and balance ever-changing government policy advice with the limitations of school buildings, the welfare of students and staff, and the needs of communities, a task made complicated by the methods of communication used by government. By surveying and interviewing headteachers, senior leaders and governors, this article identifies the reactions and responses of school leaders who construct and enact policy in the context of COVID-19 pandemic. The article addresses the nature of, and factors affecting, pressures school leaders feel in authoring and implementing policy. These pressures are non-trivial and increase tension in already highly stressful work. The report draws on data collected from a randomised, stratified sample of primary and secondary school leaders from across England in early June 2020, during the time of national lockdown and remote learning. Findings suggest quality, quantity and frequency of top-down communication contributed to school leader stress, while horizontal communication and collaboration between school leaders and across school communities supported leaders during rapid change. We recommend that government and the Department of Education strengthen and streamline stressful communication systems while building cooperative communities, mitigating against the challenges identified by school leaders during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This replication-extension study (Earley & Galluzzo, 2015) examined the information seeking activities of British Columbia (BC) school trustees in an effort to understand the transmission of research. Trustees were asked to identify the sources they used for acquiring research and information in the process of decision-making. The frequency of use, believed most useful, and characteristics of information sources were examined as well as the influence of demographic and school district variables. One hundred and forty school trustees participated in this study. The most frequently used sources of information were briefing materials from the secretary treasurer, briefing materials from the superintendent, and members of the local school board. The source of information believed most useful was briefing materials from the superintendent. There were no differences between genders on most items, although females were more likely to consult with the community than their male colleagues. Trustees in smaller districts were more likely to turn to materials from provincial organizations and the Ministry of Education website whereas trustees in larger districts tended to turn to local and provincial newspapers. Research reports from university researchers or think tanks were not primary sources of information for BC school trustees who generally sought information that was in close proximity from their school board and community.

Using a legal framework, doctrinal analysis, critical legal analysis, and fundamental legal research and drawing upon legislation, case law, judicial, and scholarly commentary, this article defines the fiduciary duties of Canadian university governing boards given the unique features of the university as a legal entity. The legal analysis considers the Canadian university as a corporation, distinguishing it from other types of corporations, identifying the charitable, not-for-profit, public/private dimensions of universities in Canada, and significantly, considering the judicially recognized "community of scholars" and collegial features of universities. The article argues that all of these features shape the fiduciary duties of governing boards and have implications for shared collegial governance in Canadian universities.

This paper discusses participation in the pre-university education sector by reviewing three stakeholders: Local communities, the Boards of Trustees (BOTs) and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), their contributions to the sector, and their main challenges that prevent them from realizing more significant impacts from the perspectives of international organizations' officials. The paper adopts a qualitative method and builds on data gathered from semi-structured interviews with twelve international organizations' officials. The paper suggests that the lack of community participation has a lot of interactive factors within a very complex, complicated and demotivating context. It concludes with a set of recommendations that may be considered by the government of Egypt and the ministry of education for enhancing participation within the pre-university education sector.