Poverty is increasing (NCES Digest of Education Data & NCES Common Core of Data), and a school’s academic success is highly correlated with how impoverished its students are (Audas & Wilms, 2001; Swaby & Cai, 2019; TEA, 2018a; 2019d; 2019e). But there are exceptions.

Leaders frequently attribute high-poverty schools' exceptional academic performance to culture (Marquez, 2019; Morath, 2019), but fail to explain what is meant by cuture or how it might be shaped to improve student outcomes.

Each circle represents a campus. Free and Reduced Lunch is the rate of students receiving free or reduced lunch on a campus. Math Proficiency and Reading Proficiency are the rates of students on grade level at each campus based on 2019 state academic assessment results. Math R² = .36, p < .001; Reading R² = .43, p < .001; n=2,612. 1,566 campuses with masked or binned assessent data in either subject are excluded.. USDoE EdFacts, NCES Common Core of Data.

Organizational culture is widely accepted as essential for achieving sustainable success (Kotter & Heskett, 1992; Jung, et al., 2009; Deal & Peterson, 2016; US Department of Education, 2019), but what is meant by culture varies (Jung et al., 2009), and identifying culture qualities for the purpose of improving academic performance is elusive (Wang & Degol, 2016).

Engagement culture is the shared underlying assumption that intrinsic motivation creates energy that drives growth (Wang & Degol, 2014) and that dissatisfaction depresses that energy (Herzberg, 2011). 

The best way to motivate is by increasing satisfaction and decreasing dissatisfaction—not by coercion into compliance.

Organizational culture expert Edgar Schein (2017) has refined a list of primary and secondary embedding mechanisms that can guide leaders working to embed engagement culture. This includes regular focus, measurement, resource allocation, and organizational rituals that support the underlying assumption that intrinsic motivation is better than coercion.

Culture is the “shared webbing of beliefs, informal folkways, and traditions that infuse work with meaning, passion, and purpose” (Deal & Peterson, 2016, p. 2). It comprises three levels: artifacts, espoused beliefs and values, and basic underlying assumptions (Schein & Schein, 2017, p. 18).

The Engagement Culture construct, though latent, is discerned through a set of key variables that encapsulate systemic indicators of intrinsic motivation, overall satisfaction, minimal dissatisfaction, and minimal coercion.

They were informed by Frederick Herzberg’s research and use data already collected by schools. The aim is to identify nuanced cultural qualities that, though not directly observable, play a pivotal role in shaping academic performance.

Aggregate campus-level data came from school year 2019 and come from the Texas Education Agency & Dallas ISD. The scope extends beyond student perspectives and  includes school records and feedback from  parents, teachers, administrators, and staff, as recommended by Berkowitz et al (2017).

The target population for the original study was urban, public school campuses with over 80% of students receiving free or reduced lunch. The representative sample comprised 172 high-poverty public school campuses in Dallas ISD. There were no direct participants. 

Dallas ISD was selected because of its large size; the availability of valid and reliable engagement culture data for each campus; and the demographic makeup of its urban, high-poverty campuses, which have similar demographics to other urban, high-poverty campuses in the United States.

Although this study focuses on Academic outcomes, non-academic variables associated with the presence...of engagement culture should also be studied. 

They might include school shootings, suicide rates, reports of bullying, program funding, and teacher turnover.

Qualitative, phenomenological analyses with the aim of understanding people's lived experiences within an engagement culture could provide guidance for practitioners.