Entrepreneurial orientation in public schools

Abstract

Executive summary: Over the last twenty years, educational policy in the United States has attempted to introduce more competition into the public education system. Introducing more competition between schools presupposes that schools are able to respond to the challenges in innovative and creative ways. In reality, there is likely to be heterogeneity among schools in their level of entrepreneurial orientation, with the more entrepreneurially minded schools likely to perform better. An online survey was distributed by email to all principals in New Jersey through the state’s principal associations. The survey collected basic information from each school, administered a school-specific EO instrument, and collected subjective performance data. Each of the 89 useable responses was mapped to statewide assessment data and other statistics provided by the New Jersey Department of Education. The results indicated that aspects of entrepreneurial orientation, specifically proactiveness, innovativeness, and autonomy, were significantly associated with performance. Charter schools were also found to have a significantly higher entrepreneurial orientation than traditional schools on all dimensions except innovativeness. The results seem to indicate that EO is a useful construct for understanding performance heterogeneity between schools, explaining 6-8% of the variance in our sample. These performance gains are evident for all schools with an entrepreneurial orientation. That is, charter schools do not perform better than traditional schools in the aggregate. This lends support to the view that understanding the processes within a school are critical to understanding performance differentials. One does not have to be a charter school to realize performance gains through EO although charter schools as a class tend to be better placed to act entrepreneurially. Schools can improve their performance and more entrepreneurial schools appear to be doing just that.