Volume 4 - Issue 1 - DBU Journal of K-12 Educational Research - Page 28

26 The Study A book entitled, Mission Drift , written by Greer and Horst (2014), centered around years of research and interviews of leaders from faith-based Christian NPOs regarding their organizations’ missions. The researcher obtained permission from Greer to use and modify the Mission Drift survey for Texas charter school leaders (P. K. Greer, personal communication, January 12, 2018). As of September 4, 2018, there were 175 active charter schools in the state of Texas. Out of the 175 active charter schools, 137 schools had been in operation for at least 10 years or more. For the current study, 85 schools participated. The quantitative data were analyzed using SPSS. The 20 Likert type questions were analyzed based on the categories of mission clarity and mission intentionality. Each question used a 10-point scale ranging from 1 = strongly disagree to 10 = strongly agree. The possible total score for both mission clarity and mission intentionality was a range of 10 to 100. The two separate scores were plotted on one scatterplot. The scatterplot provided a visual to see where each school fell on the Mission Drift graph. The closer to the top right-hand quadrant, the less risk the school had of drifting from their mission. Once the charter school was placed on the graph, a calculation was made to find the distance from each school’s point of origin to get a relative measure of drift that incorporated both measures. The farther a point was away from the origin, the less drift there would be thus creating a new variable, mission stability. The distance formula used to calculate mission stability was,  Mission Stability = √ ( Clarity Score ) 2 + ( Intentionality Score ) 2 Additional analyses were performed using the demographic questions from the survey by using Spearman’s rank order correlation for the relationship between the demographic responses and mission stability. An additional independent samples t -test was used to determine any differences in mission stability between superintendents who were founders of the charter and those who were not. The qualitative data was analyzed using NVivo . The four open-ended questions provided the data. The researcher coded the responses into themes that emerged from the data. Summary of Findings and Interpretation of Results Research Question 1 (RQ1) What are the perceptions of charter school superintendents regarding mission clarity and mission intentionality? A Pearson r correlation analysis was conducted to decide if a relationship existed between mission clarity and mission intentionality. The data revealed there was a large, positive correlation between mission clarity and mission intentionality, which was statistically significant, r (83) = .75, p < .001. The coefficient of determination, r 2, is .562, which suggested the mission clarity score explained nearly 56% of the variance in respondents’ mission intentionality score. The data showed when charter school superintendents have high scores on clarity, they generally also score high on intentionality. The results of each of the 85 charter schools and their potential for mission drift are shown in Figure 1. The researcher analyzed the data from each school’s mission stability score and the demographic questions to determine if there was a relationship between the two variables by using a Spearman’s rho correlational analysis. The researcher used SPSS to identify which of the demographic questions were statistically significant using an alpha level of .05. There were four demographic questions or variables having a medium, positive relationship with mission stability and were statistically significant. The analysis suggested a 14% variance in the respondents’ mission stability scores. A full summary can be seen in Table 1. The final demographic question used an independent samples t -test to analyze mission stability with being a founder to determine if there was a statistical significant relationship. While the results were not statistically significant, the data suggested that founders have lower mission stability scores than non-founders. Scott Fuller, EdD