Title: Good upper secondary school?
Language: Swedish
The aims of this licentiate thesis are to widen the knowledge within four
areas:
• The development of an instrument of criteria, which can be used
with the aim to describe what a “good upper secondary school”
can be.
• What upper secondary principals in the county of Stockholm in
the beginning of the 21st century express to be characteristic for a
“good upper secondary school”.
• What upper secondary principals in the county of Stockholm in
the beginning of the 21st century express to be the relation between
“good upper secondary school” and “upper secondary
school of high quality”.
• How criteria for “good upper secondary school” and “upper secondary
school of high quality” relate to views held by what in the
thesis is called “the quality business” and views held by the Swedish
state.
This thesis is an interview study with six upper secondary principals. The
interviews were semi-structured, starting with open questions and continuing
with questions based on an interview protocol constructed on the basis of
preparatory interviews with groups of students and groups of teachers, on the
author’s own professional educational experiences in different positions, and
on readings of different kinds of texts. Each question represented a possible
criterion for what may characterize a good upper secondary school.
The interview protocol in turn became the basis for the construction of an
instrument of criteria, which was used to analyze the interview transcriptions.
The analyzes of the interviews showed that the six principals agreed in
some respects and disagreed in others. All principals agreed that one of the
most important criteria of a good upper secondary school was the following:
The school is a pleasant place to be in, has a good spirit and a good common
value-system, is characterized by democratic values and has a good
psychosocial environment. The school is good at fostering the students. This
criterion was found to be regarded as the most important by the six principals
together.
The principals also agreed that everything in the following characteristics
of a good upper secondary school is very important or at least important: The
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school is characterized by good internal communication and good cooperation.
It is successful when it comes to reaching and striving towards
the objectives of the school. It has high and distinctly formulated expectations
of the students and it is good at preparing them for life after school. It
also fulfils the expressed and unexpressed expectations of the surrounding
society.
The principals had different views on the relation between “good upper
secondary school” and “upper secondary school of high quality”. One of
them expressed that the two phrases were synonymous. Three principals
principally expressed the same view, but also argued that many people think
differently, namely that “quality” is more “objective” and “quantitative” than
“good” is. Two of the principals expressed exactly that view: “good” is more
subjective and connected to feelings, while “quality” is connected to measurable
and quantitative results.
In the last part of the thesis criteria characterizing “good upper secondary
school” are discussed in relation to two different, but related, contexts, “the
quality business” and the views on “good school” and “school quality” expressed
by the Swedish state through steering documents, school inspection
documents, a quality development instrument and the regulations of a quality
award.
The theoretical framework of the thesis has basically a hermeneutic approach,
which has been combined with theories about categorization, with
the basic philosophy of research in the area of School Effectiveness and
School Improvement, with research in the fields of learning organizations
and quality and with elements from the scientific philosophies of Thomas
Kuhn and Jürgen Habermas.