Volume 4 - Issue 1 - DBU Journal of K-12 Educational Research - Page 25

Journal of K-12 Educational Research 23 is supported by previous research. Schools with a high population of low SES students must provide additional opportunities for their students to access printed reading literature in order to be successful. This means that a superintendent must understand that the charter school’s SES predicts and impacts the overall academic scores. A charter school’s SES must not be ignored and must be considered when implementing strategies to improve student achievement and close achievement gaps. An interesting finding of the current study was that in the participating sample, the charter school superintendents with master’s degrees outperformed the charter school superintendents with doctoral degrees on STAAR Domain 1: Student Performance scores. However, this finding is not supported in other research studies and may be isolated to this sample. The results of the current study indicated that superintendent preparation paths are not correlated with student achievement. The results showed that a superintendent can use the preparation paths available to them, and still be successful as a superintendent. Conclusions The current study results showed that the SES of the students of the public charter schools is significantly correlated with student academic achievement. There was a negative correlation between SES and STAAR Performance and Closing the Gap scores. The findings of the current study agreed with an earlier research study where Hoff (2003) found that SES had a negative correlation with student achievement (p. 1372). The current study results also showed that superintendents with master’s degrees outperform superintendents with doctoral degrees in the public charter school setting. The current study did not determine that the preparation path of a public charter school superintendent had a significant correlation with student achievement. The current study results suggested that successful leadership in the public charter school superintendent role is not based on the preparation paths of the individual but on the skills and character traits that they have (Northouse, 2016, p. 40). The preparation path of the superintendent appears to be less important than the skillset that the superintendent brings to the position. References American Psychological Association. (2017). Socioeconomic status . Retrieved from https://www.apa.org/topics/ socioeconomic-status/ Anthony, D. (2012, September 26). Texas public charter schools: Do you really know them? [Blog post]. Retrieved from https://www.raiseyourhandtexas.org/ charter-schools/texas-charter-schools-do-you-really- know-them/ Ayre, C., & Scally, A. J. (2014). Critical values for Lawshe’s content validity ratio: Revisiting the original methods of calculation. Measurement and Evaluation in Counseling and Development, 47 (1), 79–86. doi:10.1177/0748175613513808 Baxter, A. (2007). Traditional and nontraditional urban school superintendents in the age of accountability (Doctoral dissertation). Available from ProQuest Dissertations and Theses database. (UMI No. 3261860) Education Commission of the States. (2018). Charter schools: What rules are waived for charter schools? Retrieved from http://ecs.force.com/mbdata/ mbquestNB2C?rep=CS1713 Evans, G. W. (2004, February/March). The environment of childhood poverty. American Psychologist, 59 (2), 77–92. doi:10.1037/0003-055X.59.2.77 Field, A. (2018). Discovering statistics using IBM SPSS statistics (5th ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Hodgkinson, H. L., & Montenegro, X. (1999). The U.S. school superintendent: The invisible CEO . Retrieved from ERIC database. (ED429352) Hoff, E. (2003, October). The specificity of environmental influences: Socioeconomic status affects early vocabulary development via maternal speech. Child Development, 74 (5), 1368–1378. Retrieved from http:// faculty.washington.edu/losterho/1467-8624.00612.pdf Kahlenberg, R. D., & Potter, H. (2014). A smarter charter: Finding what works for charter schools and public education . New York, NY: Teachers College Press.