Saatcioglu, ArgunKilgore, Eric Shane2015-10-132015-10-132014-12-312014http://dissertations.umi.com/ku:13730https://hdl.handle.net/1808/18637This dissertation asks: how do certain stressors differently impact educational leadership in charter and public schools? In order to answer this research question, this dissertation focuses on four elements of administrator stress: governance, organizational legitimacy, financial responsibility, and personnel management. The goal of this study is to examine the degree in which these stressors are felt differently by charter school and public school principals. It also seeks to determine whether the organization of the schools (public school bureaucracy and charter school market economy) offers an explanation as to why these differences might occur. For example, traditional public schools frequently operate in a bureaucratic fashion where teachers report to principals who report to directors who report to executives who report to the superintendent. In many charter schools, though, the bureaucratic structures are less defined. For this reason, it is entirely possible that the job of a charter school principal may be more stressful than a traditional school principal, less stressful, or just stressful in different ways. A fundamental insight found within this study is that public and charter school principals tend to be stressed by different factors. While both groups feel some levels of stress related to the four elements studied: personnel management, governance, organizational legitimacy, and financial responsibilities, these levels of stress tended to differ based on whether a principal was in the charter school setting or the public school setting. In particular, public school principals seem to be most stressed by governance and personnel management as opposed to charter school principals who appear most stressed by organizational legitimacy and finances.81 pagesenCopyright held by the author.Educational leadershipEducational administrationCharter SchoolGovernanceLeadershipPrincipalPublic SchoolStressDissertationopenAccess