In light of the backdrop of change processes within the education system in recent years, including the enlarging of school boundaries and parents’ increasing involvement in school life, this study aspired to understand how parents perceive parent–teacher relations alongside their self-efficacy as influencing their help-seeking from teachers in two main dimensions: learning and socio-emotional. Using the quantitative method, 192 Israeli parents answered a questionnaire measuring parent–teacher relations, parental self-efficacy, help-seeking orientation from teachers, and socio-economic status. Regression analysis found that help-seeking in the socio-emotional dimension was mainly influenced by collaborative relations and by parents’ high self-efficacy. Help-seeking in the learning dimension was mainly (but not only) influenced by parents’ socio-economic status. In addition, positive significant correlations were found between parent–teacher collaborative relations and autonomic help-seeking from teachers by parents dealing with both learning and socio-emotional aspects. Negative significant correlation was found between collaborative parent–teacher relations and parents’ avoidance of help-seeking from teachers. The results highlight the importance of teacher–parent collaboration and illuminate the factors influencing parents to ask for help from teachers, in different dimensions.

Following the intensification and ambivalence of parent-teacher relations, this study examined the collaborative or conflictual relations, and teachers’ professionalism as perceived by both teachers and parents: 325 teachers and 655 parents from 21 Israeli Jewish primary schools answered a questionnaire. Using a structural equation modelling (SEM) analysis, similarities were found in teachers and parents’ perceptions of teachers’ work efficiency in increasing collaborative relations and decreasing conflicts. Teachers’ responsibilities and influence in schools reduce conflicts to varying extents for parents and teachers. The findings highlight the importance of developing professional competencies for building parent-teacher relations in schools. Emphasising the preparation of teachers for establishing their relations with parents is mainly important during in-service and pre-service teachers’ training, as it can contribute to increasing teachers’ professional confidence in their efforts to build collaborative rather than conflictual relations with teachers and schools.

This study aimed to explore the rigor strategies and ethical steps reported in qualitative research of educational administration journals in the recent decades. Using a focused search procedure, 321 relevant empirical qualitative articles were identified. Results suggest that qualitative educational administration, management, and leadership research frequently reported using some rigor strategies and greatly underreport on using ethical steps. Moreover, we found stability in the number of strategies and steps reported over a period of two decades. Thus, it is unclear whether rigor and ethics norms in the field have been crystallizing over time. The findings and their implications are discussed.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to understand how primary school principals in Israel cope with the gaps between authority and responsibility in their work, deriving from partially implemented decentralization processes, and how this relates to school-based management (SBM) and accountability principles.Design/methodology/approach: Using the qualitative method, 20 semi-structured interviews were conducted with school principals from one district in Israel. Thematic analysis was used in order to identify themes in the interviews that enable creating codes for the characteristics of authority and responsibility and for the principals’ strategies.Findings: Gaps were found between authority and responsibility, with particularly low levels of authority alongside high levels of responsibility. Coupled with the demand for accountability, those gaps led principals to adopt three strategies – active, partly active, and passive – to help reduce the tension resulting from them. The SBM definition has links to the specific strategy that principals used.Originality/value: The results indicate the importance of clear definitions of authority and responsibility in principals’ work. The current study deepens the understanding of the gaps between these concepts as key for understanding accountability at decentralized schools; tensions that principals cope with as a result of those gaps; and the strategies that enable principals to ease the tension for the benefit of all those involved in the principals’ work.

The current study aims to test the ideas that parental self-efficacy is associated with parenting style, parents’ help-seeking orientation from teachers, and subjective well-being. Based on the literature background presented, two hypotheses were examined: First, autonomy help-seeking orientation, the authoritative parenting style, and high subjective well-being would be positive predictors of parental self-efficacy. Second, dependent help-seeking orientation and non-authoritative parenting styles are negative predictors of parental self-efficacy. One hundred and thirty-two parents of school-age children answered questionnaires measuring the research and background variables. A multivariate regression analysis found that the independent variables explain about 53% of the variance of the parental self-efficacy scores, with subjective well-being and the authoritative parenting style being uniquely associated with high parental self-efficacy, and the permissive parenting style being uniquely associated with low parental self-efficacy. The present study focuses on parental self-efficacy as an important parental component, demonstrating the personal characteristics of parents that may affect their perceived efficacy, and offers an integrative portrait of factors that can describe parents’ attitudes and behavior toward their competence as parents. Implications for intervention are discussed.