Challenges in reforms of the professional mandate in public education

This dissertation is being written by Cyrill Kalbermatten and supervised by Adrian Ritz. 

Initial situation

In 2017/18, the reform "new defined professional assignment" (nBA) was implemented in Switzerland in the canton of Zurich. The intention of the reform is to modernize and quantify the professional mandate of teachers. The research project is interested in the challenges that arise during the implementation of such reforms. The focus is on the reactions of the people mainly affected by the reforms, teachers, principals, and school communities.

Research Questions

The goal of this project is to answer the following questions:

What job characteristics favor or diminish satisfaction with the implementation of a reform in public education among teachers?

How do explicit leadership decisions by principals and requirements by communities influence principals' resistance to reform implementation?

What factors influence teachers' evaluations of changes to the work schedule model in public schools?

Methodological approach

The levels of analysis school unit and municipality can be nested into hierarchical levels. In the data analysis we take into account that in such a data structure, individual observations are not independent from each other. Therefore, the questions posed are answered by means of a quantitative multi-level analysis.