Principal Competencies

Districts usually implement principal performance pay systems at the urging of state policymakers or as part of grant-funded efforts. This briefing summarizes research about the efficacy of district approaches, describes state laws in place and offers three considerations for state policymaking.

This toolkit is designed to help structure principal’s thinking about the return to school, in whatever form that takes. The toolkits is structured to point and direct administrators to where to find help. The guidelines offer context for the use of the tools and tip sheets, and suggestions for actions you might consider. 

This well-written book on assertiveness clearly describes the non assertive, assertive, and aggressive styles of supervision. Each chapter provides numerous examples, practice exercises, and self-tests. The author identifies feelings and beliefs that support aggressiveness, non aggressiveness, or non assertiveness which help the reader "look beyond the words themselves."

This article outlines how far the community schools movement has come since the AFT made community schools a priority in 2008. It explains why the movement has grown, clarifies what exactly makes a community school different from other schools, lays out how community schools work, and shows the positive results that community schools are attaining.

The updated and expanded second edition of this classic text provides new research and insights into how principals can encourage the teacher development that enhances student learning.

This article explores the relationship between school contextual factors and teacher retention decisions in New York City and finds that school administration by far has the greatest influence on teacher retention.

The aim of this study was to examine the means by which principals achieve an impact on student achievement. 

Using 4 years of panel data constructed from the North Carolina Teacher Working Condition Survey, this study uses value-added modeling approaches to explore the relationship between teachers’ perceptions of four measures of their working conditions and their principal.

This article revisits the concepts of leadership and management, examines the impact of the ERA on management practice in schools and colleges, and discusses the notion of managerialism.

This paper examines how the hiring process is changing as a result of teacher evaluation reforms.

This report provides a practical “management guide,” for an evidence-based key indicator data decision system for school districts and schools.

A multilevel model of leadership, empowerment, and performance was tested using a sample of 62 teams, 445 individual members, 62 team leaders, and 31 external managers from 31 stores of a Fortune 500 company. Leader-member exchange and leadership climate-related differently to individual and team empowerment and interacted to influence individual empowerment. 

The goal of this article is to illustrate various strategies that the Hawaii Child and Adolescent Mental Health Division adopted to increase the use of empirical evidence to improve the quality services and outcomes for youth.

This study hypothesizes the following: Trust and leadership dimensions that support empowerment and involvement will predict an educational organization’s ability to minimize a threat–rigid response and flexibly negotiate new demands.

This book by organizational psychologist Aubrey C. Daniels is a guide for anyone who is required to supervise people and is particularly relevant to school principals. It is based on applying positive consequences to improve performance and offers strategies to reduce undesirable behavior so your school and employees can be successful.

Few studies have examined factors relating to ineffective school leadership. Such knowledge can help principals refine leadership behaviors and enhance job security. This study used experiences and perceptions from 99 California public school superintendents to examine the reasons why some principals lose their jobs. 

This article illustrates how successful leaders combine the too often dichotomized practices of transformational and instructional leadership in different ways across different phases of their schools' development in order to progressively shape and “layer” the improvement culture in improving students' outcomes.

This book examines the nature of successful school leadership: what it is, what it looks like in practice & what are the consequences for schools & pupils.

As school leaders, principals can influence student achievement in a number of ways, such as: hiring and firing of teachers, monitoring instruction, and maintaining student discipline, among many others. We measure the effect of individual principals on gains in math and reading achievement between grades 4 and 7 using a value-added framework

This report highlights the key research literature that addresses the principal competencies important for positive student and school outcomes.

The Institute of Education Sciences (IES) recently released a summary report of the impact of School Improvement Grants (SIG). The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 provided states and school districts with $3 Billion for SIG. By accepting SIG grants states agreed to implement one of four interventions to improve the lowest performing schools: transformation, turnaround, restart, or closure. The goals of SIG were to improve practices in four main areas: (1) adopting comprehensive instructional reform strategies, (2) developing and increasing teacher and principal effectiveness, (3) increasing learning time and creating community-oriented schools, and (4) having operational flexibility and receiving support. The report finds minimal positive effects from the grants and no evidence that SIG had significant impacts on math and reading scores, graduation rates, or increased college enrollment.

A meta-analysis of after-school programs that seek to enhance the personal and social skills of children and adolescents indicated that, compared to controls, participants demonstrated significant increases in their self-perceptions and bonding to school, positive social behaviors, school grades and levels of academic achievement, and significant reductions in problem behaviors.

When schools form partnerships with families and the community, the children benefit. These guidelines for building partnerships can make it happen.

This paper explores the implementation of a professional development program (PDP) for school principals. Two methods for measuring fidelity of implementation of the PDP are examined

This article describes an innovative approach, developed by North Carolina State University,
to prepare leaders specifically for work in rural schools in high poverty districts. 

The purpose of this study is to reveal the extent to which different leadership models in education are studied, including the change in the trends of research on each model over time, the most prominent scholars working on each model, and the countries in which the articles are based. 

In this article, the authors put forth a new set of standards with equity at the core. They seek to advance the conversation about why standards centered on equity are needed—particularly in light of a proposed standards refresh—and what implications would follow from equity-focused standards.

Combining insights from multicultural education theory with real-life classroom stories, this book demonstrates that all students will perform better on multiple measures of achievement when teaching is filtered through students’ own cultural experiences. This perennial bestseller continues to be the go-to resource for teacher professional learning and preservice courses.

This paper highlights the limitations of district-level data on principals encountered during data collection for a study on principal preparation programs. 

This chapter progresses four specific components of “a practical application of time management”.

This paper provide a list of soft skills that are important for collaboration and teamwork, based on the authors own experience and from an opinion survey of team leaders. This paper also outline workable short courses for graduate schools to strengthen teamwork and collaboration skills among research students.

This book is written by Tom Gilbert who is one of the most influential theorists in building a science of performance management. Although not explicitly written for educators, it offers concrete examples principals can apply to improve the performance of teachers and other school personnel so student’s can ultimately be successful.

This Story From the Field examines how Denver and five other school districts have constructed and are using these systems as they seek to better train, hire and support school principals.

The article presents an overview of these tenets drawn from opinion positions, practical experiences, and empirical research studies. There is clear evidence that additional empirical research would be beneficial.

This book discuss how extrinsic incentives may come into conflict with other motivations and examine the research literature in which monetary incentives have been used in a nonemployment context to foster the desired behavior. The conclusion sums up some lessons on when extrinsic incentives are more or less likely to alter such behaviors in the desired directions.

This report describes the ongoing development and implementation of the SAM® process, which has the goal of increasing the capacity of principals to use time in instructionally focused ways while decreasing time on management tasks. 

An analysis by The New York Times of the city’s signature report-card system shows that schools run by graduates of the celebrated New York City Leadership Academy — which the mayor created and helped raise more than $80 million for — have not done as well as those led by experienced principals or new principals who came through traditional routes.

This study hypothesizes that school working conditions help explain both teacher satisfaction and turnover. In particular, it focuses on the role of effective principals in retaining teachers, particularly in disadvantaged schools with the greatest staffing challenges. 

Using multiple measures of teacher and principal effectiveness, the authors document that indeed more effective principals see lower rates of teacher turnover, on average

This study draws on data combining survey responses from principals, assistant principals, teachers and parents with administrative data to identify which principal skills matter most for school outcomes.

This study draws on in-person observations of principals collected over full school days over two different school years in a large, urban district to investigate how principals allocate their time across different instructional leadership tasks, and how instructional time use is associated with school effectiveness.

This principal's guide to implementing Response to Intervention (RTI) for elementary and middle school reading emphasizes the critical role administrators play in ensuring RTI success in their schools. The author makes recommendations for putting the RTI process in motion and helps school leaders:

Examines trends in the evolution of the principalship in the United States from the 1960s to the present.

This paper ties together evidence drawn from several extensive reviews of the educational leadership literature that included instructional leadership as a key construct. 

This paper explores several types of school contexts (institutional, community, socio-cultural, political, economic, school improvement) and what we have learned about how they shape school leadership practice.

This article reviews the empirical literature on the relationship between the principal's role
and school effectiveness during the period from 1980 to 1995

This article reviews research from 1980‐1995 exploring the relationship between principal leadership and student achievement. The focuses is on the substantive findings that emerged from the review.

This longitudinal study examines the effects of collaborative leadership on school improvement and student reading achievement in 192 elementary schools in one state in the USA over a 4-year period

This article presents results from a study that examined the instructional management behavior of 10 elementary school principals in a single school district. The primary goal of the research was to describe the instructional management behavior of these principals in terms of specific job behaviors.

This article reviews the evolution of instructional leadership as a model for principal practice, examines barriers to its successful enactment, and proposes strategies

This article seeks to provide a comprehensive and detailed picture of reliability results. More specifically, the authors present a meta-analysis of reliability results derived from 52 data sets derived from 43 independent empirical studies in which the PIMRS had been employed for data collection.

This chapter of Handbook of The Economics of Education reviews research on teacher labor markets, the importance of teacher quality in the determination of student achievement, and the extent to which specific observable characteristics often related to hiring decisions and salary explain the variation in the quality of instruction.

This article takes a contemporary look at distributed leadership in practice by drawing upon empirical evidence from a large-scale project in the USA. Initially, it considers the existing knowledge base on distributed leadership and questions some of the assertions and assumptions in recent accounts of the literature. 

This Wallace paper summarizes a decade of the foundation’s research in school leadership to identify five critical roles for school principals to be effective.

Using findings generated from a large-scale survey of 1,400 Ontario principals, this paper reports on the influence of opportunities for school–community involvement on the work principals do on a daily basis and details how involvement in such activities influences and impacts their workloads.

This longitudinal study examines the effects of distributed leadership on school improvement and growth in student math achievement in 195 elementary schools in one state over a 4-year period.

Noting that the evidence of families' influence on their children's school achievement is consistent, positive, and convincing, this report examines research on parent and community involvement and its impact on student achievement.

This updated and substantially expanded edition reveals how to build strong collaborative relationships and offers practical advice for improving interactions between parents and teachers, from insuring that PTA groups are constructive and inclusive to navigating the complex issues surrounding diversity in the classroom.

The authors outline some of the mechanisms through which parental school involvement affects achievement and identify how patterns and amounts of involvement vary across cultural, economic, and community contexts and across developmental levels. Then propose the next steps for research. 

The specific purposes of this article are to identify and synthesize the empirical research on how leadership influences student achievement and to provide evidence on how school leaders should direct their efforts.

The authors conducted correlational analyses to examine the strength of the relationship between each of the seven competencies and found that the model appears to reflect the internal states of principals who orchestrate school turnaround. 

This article examines the relationship between the time principals spent on different types of activities and school outcomes, including student achievement, teacher and parent assessments of the school, and teacher satisfaction

This paper examines the relationship between the time principals spent on different types of activities and school outcomes including student achievement, teacher and parent assessments of the school, and teacher satisfaction.

This paper examines the relationship between the time principals spent on different types of activities and school outcomes including student achievement, teacher and parent assessments of the school, and teacher satisfaction.

This brief examines the mean (average) percentage of time that principals reported spending on these activities in the 2011–12 school year, both overall and by selected school, staffing, and principal characteristics.

This review critically examines 15 empirical studies, conducted since the mid1980s, on the effects of support, guidance, and orientation programs—collectively known as induction—for beginning teachers.

The authors propose a conceptual framework of equitable leadership practice, describing three drivers to catalyze organizational growth in 10 high-leverage equitable practices designed to mitigate disparities for non-dominant students.

the authors build on this body of work by further examining how working conditions predict both teachers‘ job satisfaction and their career plans.

This comprehensive review provides a framework for the expanding body of literature that seeks to make not only teaching, but rather the entire school environment, responsive to the schooling needs of minoritized students

The study explored the following overarching question: What does it take for leaders to promote and support powerful, equitable learning in a school and in the district and state system that serves the school? The study pursued this question through a set of coordinated investigations,

In this report, the development of altering concepts of school leadership over a period of about 4 decades is sketched.

This study is among the first to address the empirical limitations of prior studies on organizational contexts by leveraging one of the largest survey administration efforts ever conducted in the United States outside of the decennial population census.

This quantitative study examines the relationship between teachers’ perceptions of their working conditions and their intended and actual departures from schools.

Instead of looking at the principal alone for instructional leadership, we need to develop leadership capacity among all members of the school communities.

This study addressed teachers' and parents' perceptions of the meanings and functions of parent involvement. 

This study examines the relationship between two dominant measures of teacher quality, teacher qualification and teacher effectiveness (measured by value-added modeling), in terms of their influence on students’ short-term academic growth and long-term educational success (measured by bachelor’s degree attainment).

This article describes a 4-year program of research about transformational forms of leadership in schools
responding to a variety of restructuring initiatives.

For purposes of the Ontario Leadership Framework (OLF), leadership is defined as the exercise of influence on organizational members and diverse stakeholders toward the identification and achievement of the organization’s vision and goals. For aspiring leaders, this framework provides important insights about what they will need to learn to be successful. Those already exercising leadership will find the framework a useful tool for self-reflection and self-assessment.

For aspiring leaders, this framework provides important insights about what they will need to learn to be successful.

This study aimed to improve our understanding of the nature, causes, and consequences of school leader efficacy, including indirect influences on student learning.

The purpose of this paper is to provide one perspective on this question, focusing in particular on findings that may be applicable in the Nordic context.

This study aimed to estimate the impact of collective, or shared, leadership on key teacher variables and on student achievement. 

This chapter of "A New Agenda for Research in Educational Leadership" book presents a broad agenda to help strengthen the extent, quality, and clarity of the latter source of knowledge -- empirical research on leadership. 

Using meta-analytic review techniques, this study synthesized the results of 79
unpublished studies about the nature of transformational school leadership (TSL) and its
impact on the school organization, teachers, and students.

In 2008 the authors published an article in this journal entitled Seven Strong Claims about Successful School Leadership (Leithwood, Harris, and Hopkins 2008). This article revisits each of the seven claims, summarising what was said about each in the original publications, weighing each of the claims considering recent empirical evidence, and proposing revisions or refinements as warranted.

The authors begin with eight basic understandings, assumptions, or starting points for our subsequent account of how to lead the successful turnaround of underperforming school. 

This report by researchers from the Universities of Minnesota and Toronto examines the available evidence and offers educators, policymakers and all citizens interested in promoting successfulschools, some answers to these vitally important questions

Guided by a synthesis of theory on human motivation and evidence about teachers’motivation to implement school reform, this study aimed to better understand the responses of teachers and school administrators to government accountability initiatives and to assess the extent to which leadership practices had a bearing on those responses

The purpose of this paper is to examine relationships between principal leadership, dimensions of school capacity, and teacher professional learning in 32 Hong Kong primary schools.

This meta-analysis finds a positive relationship between school principals spending time on five commonly assigned roles and student achievement. 

Recent studies concerned with goal choice and the factors that influence it, the function of learning goals, the effect of goal framing, goals and affect (well-being), group goal setting, goals and traits, macrolevel goal setting, and conscious versus subconscious goals are described.

The purpose of this study was to develop an understanding of the relationships among principal transformational leadership, school leadership-team transformational leadership, and school culture.

This study investigates teacher empowerment in schools that have at least four years of experience with some form of decentralized or school-based management. 

Focusing on school leadership relations between principals and teachers, this study examines the potential of their active collaboration around instructional matters to enhance the quality of teaching and student performance

The authors show school and district-level administrators how to set the priorities and support the practices that will help all teachers become expert teachers. Their five-part framework is based on what research tells us about how expertise develops. 

The present paper is an attempt to formulate a positive theory of motivation which will satisfy these theoretical demands and at the same time conform to the known facts, clinical and observational as well as experimental. It derives most directly, however, from clinical experience. 

This research suggests that the effectiveness of principals in managing the recruitment and advancement of teachers will contribute to improvements in student learning. One of the key ways these managers influence performance is through human capital management: the attraction, development and retention of the employee talent the organization needs.

This report examines the evidence about the emerging approach, Integrated student supports (ISS), from multiple perspectives. 

This book introduces the foundations of the recently revised professional educational leadership standards and provides an in-depth explanation and application of each one.

This paper presents the research base and conceptual framework for a new principal leadership assessment tool: the Vanderbilt Assessment of Leadership in Education (VAL-ED™).

This article presents findings from the authors' exploratory study of 12 instructionally effective
school districts (IESD) in California. 

The purpose of this analysis is to describe the research base that undergirds the emerging concept of learning-centered leadership.

This document updates a set of voluntary school leadership standards first developed in 1996, then revised in 2008 and long known by the initials of the creator of the original document, ISLLC. The 2015 document differs from its predecessors by focusing more strongly and clearly on students and student learning. 

This report uses findings from individual school across the country and principals to inform a new definition of principal effectiveness. It makes recommendations for school leadership policies geared toward dramatically increasing the number of successful principals. 

There are a number of vehicles federal policymakers can use to create or encourage effective leadership policies. Throughout this series we will describe an ideal policy and then suggest potential vehicles policymakers could use to pursue that policy.

This book offers a comprehensive and strategic approach to address what has become labeled as "talent and human capital."

This report reviews studies that have investigated the relationships between principal characteristics (including precursors, behaviors, and leadership styles) and student achievement.

This book provides essential information to better understand and improve the nature and quality of school and family partnerships for the benefit of all children

The purpose of this paper is to identify common roles played by principals, how these roles differ across types of schools, and finally, how effectively are preparation programs training principals in these roles.

Administrator support has been identified as a key factor in deterring teacher turnover. Yet, the specific ways school principals directly or indirectly influence teacher retention remain underexamined. The paper aims to discuss this issue. 

This booklet focuses on parents—the child’s first and most powerful teachers.

This study examined the school-level effects on tested student achievement in 129 high poverty elementary schools that implemented a common set of comprehensive parent engagement strategies over a 2-year period. 

Drawing on normative, empirical, and critical literatures, this review explores the role of school administrators in responding to the needs of diverse students. Three administrative tasks are highlighted: fostering new meanings about diversity, promoting inclusive school cultures and instructional programs, and building relationships between schools and communities. 

This paper is a synthesis of the evidence-base on school leadership and its impact on student performance.

The purpose of this study was to examine the relative impact of different types of leadership on students' academic and nonacademic outcomes.

The purpose of this study is to examine the relative impact of different types of leadership on students’ academic and nonacademic outcomes.

This brief describes: (1) The need for more and better principal professional development to improve principal effectiveness, decrease principal turnover, and more equitably distribute successful principals across all schools; (2) The research on the importance of principals and how professional development can improve principals' effectiveness; and (3) Options and examples for leveraging current policies to revisit and refocus efforts concerning principal professional development.

This study examines the influence of principal leadership in high schools on classroom instruction and student achievement through key organizational factors, including professional capacity, parent–community ties, and the school’s learning climate.

This report sets forth a framework of essential supports and contextual resources for school improvement, examines empirical evidence on its key elements and how they link to improvements in student learning, and investigates how a school's essential supports interact with community context to affect student learning.

The goal of this paper is to provide a general understanding for teachers and administrators of the concepts of validity and reliability; thereby, giving them the confidence to develop their own assessments with clarity of these terms.

This paper reviews evidence from six recent studies, which collectively suggest that teachers who leave high-poverty schools are not fleeing their students, but rather the poor working conditions that make it difficult for them to teach and their students to learn. They include school leadership, collegial relationships, and elements of school culture.

The purpose of this paper is to integrate statistically the results of the literature on teacher expectations. 

This articles describe details about principal's long work hour. 

This 4-year longitudinal study, funded by the National Science Foundation and the Spencer Foundation, is designed to make the “black box” of leadership practice more transparent through an in-depth analysis of leadership practice. This research identifies the tasks, actors, actions, and interactions of school leadership as they unfold together in the daily life of schools. 

The report examines the internal and external conditions that matter for students’ and teachers’ feelings of safety.

This paper examines the critical issues that need to be addressed if value-added modeling is to be effectively used in education.

Based on a synthesis of unpublished transformational school leadership (TSL) research completed during the last 14 years, this study inquired into the nature of TSL and its effects on student achievement using review methods including standard meta-analysis and vote-counting techniques. 

This study reviews evidence about the overall influence of direction-setting leadership practices (DSLPs), 1 of 4 major categories of practices included in a widely known conception of effective leadership (e.g., Leithwood & Louis, 2011) and a focus of many other such conceptions, as well.

The first-ever standards meant to clarify what principal supervisors should know and be able to do to help principals improve teaching and learning in schools were released on Monday.

New research has found essentially no positive correlation between how would-be principals perform on a widely used licensure exam and their success as school leaders.

This paper examines the effects of principal leadership and peer teacher influence on teachers' instructional practice and student learning.

This empirical study of the practice of five elementary school principals whose student achievement gains were three times the expected rate of progress redefines some capabilities identified in the literature as central to leadership for learning.

The hypothesis that guided this study was that the degree of teacher professionalism in a school would be related to (a) the professional orientation of principals in their exercise of administrative authority—especially, the extending of adaptive discretion to teachers in the conduct of their work—and (b) the trust evident among various actors in the school community.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationships among faculty trust in the principal, principal leadership behaviors, school climate, and student achievement.

This report looks at New York City's efforts to create an evidence-based and collaborative teaching culture.

This is the fifth report from an evaluation of the Principal Pipeline Initiative (PPI), in which six large urban school districts have received support for strengthening novice principals' capabilities through specific strategies. The report details the implementation approaches, accomplishments, and challenges of participating districts; identifies factors that helped or impeded their progress; highlights lessons learned; and presents implications for policymakers and other districts. 

Latent class analysis (LCA) was used to identify different types of principals across the U.S. The authors analyzed the 1999-2000 Schools and Staffing Survey as it presents a unique opportunity to study the different types of U.S. principals since it contains leadership measures not found in other national surveys or administrations. A final sample of 7,650 public schools and principals were included in the analysis.

The purpose of this study was to examine various factors that are often present in principal–teacher interactions and teacher–teacher relationships to see how those may have an impact on teachers’ classroom instructional practices.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss findings from Learning from Leadership. This study was designed to identify and describe successful educational leadership and to explain how such leadership can yield improvements in student learning.

The purpose of this Handbook on Restructuring and Substantial School Improvement is to provide principles for restructuring and substantially improving schools.

This article offers practical suggestions on how to build a data-based culture in schools.

This paper considers issues surrounding the use data and data based decision-making in schools. It describes the state of the field and possible future directions in school based technology.

This is an analysis of a district-wide evaluation of data uses and procedures for data-based decision-making.

The article examines the tensions one superintendent in the USA experienced as he evaluated principals in a high-stakes environment that had undergone numerous transformations at the central office. Using qualitative methods, primarily, shadowing techniques, observations and debriefing, the following tensions emerged and were examined in light of the work of the superintendent evaluating principal performance.