Bra gymnasieskola?

Sammanfattning: Title: Good upper secondary school?Language: SwedishThe aims of this licentiate thesis are to widen the knowledge within fourareas:• The development of an instrument of criteria, which can be usedwith the aim to describe what a “good upper secondary school”can be.• What upper secondary principals in the county of Stockholm inthe beginning of the 21st century express to be characteristic for a“good upper secondary school”.• What upper secondary principals in the county of Stockholm inthe beginning of the 21st century express to be the relation between“good upper secondary school” and “upper secondaryschool of high quality”.• How criteria for “good upper secondary school” and “upper secondaryschool of high quality” relate to views held by what in thethesis is called “the quality business” and views held by the Swedishstate.This thesis is an interview study with six upper secondary principals. Theinterviews were semi-structured, starting with open questions and continuingwith questions based on an interview protocol constructed on the basis ofpreparatory interviews with groups of students and groups of teachers, on theauthor’s own professional educational experiences in different positions, andon readings of different kinds of texts. Each question represented a possiblecriterion for what may characterize a good upper secondary school.The interview protocol in turn became the basis for the construction of aninstrument of criteria, which was used to analyze the interview transcriptions.The analyzes of the interviews showed that the six principals agreed insome respects and disagreed in others. All principals agreed that one of themost important criteria of a good upper secondary school was the following:The school is a pleasant place to be in, has a good spirit and a good commonvalue-system, is characterized by democratic values and has a goodpsychosocial environment. The school is good at fostering the students. Thiscriterion was found to be regarded as the most important by the six principalstogether.The principals also agreed that everything in the following characteristicsof a good upper secondary school is very important or at least important: The4school is characterized by good internal communication and good cooperation.It is successful when it comes to reaching and striving towardsthe objectives of the school. It has high and distinctly formulated expectationsof the students and it is good at preparing them for life after school. Italso fulfils the expressed and unexpressed expectations of the surroundingsociety.The principals had different views on the relation between “good uppersecondary school” and “upper secondary school of high quality”. One ofthem expressed that the two phrases were synonymous. Three principalsprincipally expressed the same view, but also argued that many people thinkdifferently, namely that “quality” is more “objective” and “quantitative” than“good” is. Two of the principals expressed exactly that view: “good” is moresubjective and connected to feelings, while “quality” is connected to measurableand quantitative results.In the last part of the thesis criteria characterizing “good upper secondaryschool” are discussed in relation to two different, but related, contexts, “thequality business” and the views on “good school” and “school quality” expressedby the Swedish state through steering documents, school inspectiondocuments, a quality development instrument and the regulations of a qualityaward.The theoretical framework of the thesis has basically a hermeneutic approach,which has been combined with theories about categorization, withthe basic philosophy of research in the area of School Effectiveness andSchool Improvement, with research in the fields of learning organizationsand quality and with elements from the scientific philosophies of ThomasKuhn and Jürgen Habermas.