Resourcing Strategically

This report presents selected findings from the school principal data files of the 2007-08 Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS).  It provides the following descriptive information on school principals by school type, student characteristics, and other relevant categories: number, race/ethnicity, age, gender, college degrees, salary, hours worked, focus of work, years experience, and tenure at current school.

This study examines how and why teacher quality is inequitably distributed, by reviewing research and examining data on school funding, salaries, and teacher qualifications from California and New York—two large states that face similar demographic diversity and educational challenges.

This issue is the second in a three-part series on quality teaching. The other two issues in the series focus on teacher recruitment and teachers' career structures and work environment. This issue examines research and expert consensus on teacher preparation,

This literature review aims to provide district leaders with an understanding of the research and best evidence regarding the components of effective principal talent management systems.

The first brief in this series, Teacher Shortages: What We Know, explores research on teacher shortages and highlights recent state task force findings. This report is one of five policy briefs examining strategies states are using to address shortages.

The Characteristics of Public and Private Elementary School Principals in the United States is a subsection of the NCES 2011-12 Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS). It provides descriptive statistics on K-12 school principals in areas such as: race, gender, education level, salary, experience, and working conditions.

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.

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.

Handbook of Response to Intervention in Early Childhood represents an ambitious undertaking: namely, to gather within a single volume all of the knowledge that exists on a topic that has attracted much attention in recent years.

Handbook of Response to Intervention in Early Childhood represents an ambitious undertaking: namely, to gather within a single volume all of the knowledge that exists on a topic that has attracted much attention in recent years.

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

Policy Brief 2018-1: Addressing the Importance and Scale of the U.S. Teacher Shortage

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

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.

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.

While anecdotal accounts of substantial teacher shortages are increasingly common, we present evidence that such shortages are not a general phenomenon but rather are highly concentrated by subject and in schools where hiring and retaining teachers are chronic problems. We discuss several promising, complementary approaches for addressing teacher shortages.

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

Research on teacher turnover has led to the identification of retention strategies to help advance the profession and improve the recruitment, preparation, and support of teachers. This report summarizes available research on these strategies and discusses potential barriers and research on their relative cost-effectiveness.

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.

Policy makers are concerned about reports of teacher shortages and the high rate of attrition among new teachers. Prior studies indicate that mentor-based induction can reduce the numbers of new teachers leaving schools or the profession

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 author summarizes four new strands in agency theory that help him think about incentives in real organizations. The author concludes by suggesting two avenues for further progress in agency theory: better integration with organizational economics, and cross-pollination with other fields that study organizations. 

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.

In this final report, we present findings on the implementation and impacts of an intervention
that identified school districts' highest-performing teachers and then used monetary
incentives to encourage them to transfer into the lowest-achieving schools.

This descriptive study examines the relationship between student teaching experiences and a teacher’s future effectiveness on the job. The primary finding is that teachers are more effective when the student demographics of their current schools are similar to the student demographics of the schools in which they did their student teaching. This study suggests that further experimental research be conducted to determine if the data hold up. If they do, the implication is that, in recruiting new teachers, school principals would be well served by choosing candidates whose student teaching experiences were in schools whose demographics match those of their own schools. Teacher preparation programs can also assist by assessing candidates’ preferences for where they plan on working and match student teaching placements to schools with similar demographics where new teachers are likely to be employed.

This article documents the mismatch between the supply and demand of STEM and special education teachers in Washington State, where almost 4,000 more STEM and special education teachers have left the profession than have been produced by in-state teacher training institutions over the past 25 years. 

This report presents analyses of data from semistructured interviews with central office personnel, principal supervisors, and principals, as well as data from surveys of supervisors and principals in each of the six PSI districts.

This paper provide some recommendations to increase the pool of potential teachers, make it tougher to award tenure to those who perform least well, and reward effective teachers who are willing to work in schools serving large numbers of low-income, disadvantaged children. 

Is dismissing poorly performing teachers truly feasible in America today? After all the political capital (and real capital) spent on reforming teacher evaluation, can districts actually terminate ineffective teachers who have tenure or have achieved veteran status?

This article critically reviews the recent empirical literature on teacher recruitment and retention published in the United States.

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

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 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 discussion provides a quantitative statement of one approach to achieving the governors’ (and the nation’s) goals – teacher deselection.

This volume is the third report in a series on the potential, promise, experience, and needs of career changers who are teaching in America’s classrooms today. It is based on a survey of a cross-section of such individuals conducted by Hart Research Associates in 2009.

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.

This report provides descriptive information on traditional public, charter, and private school principals over the period of 1987-88 through 2011-12. It includes comparative data on number of principals, gender, race/ethnicity, age, advance degrees, principal experience, teaching experience, salaries, hours worked, focus of work, experience and tenure at current schools, etc.

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 report summarizes a series of analyses that have investigated the possibility that there are other factors—tied to the organizational characteristics and conditions of schools—that are behind school staffing problems.

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

The authors use six years of data on student test performance to evaluate the effectiveness of certified, uncertified, and alternatively certified teachers in the New York City public schools. This study also evaluates turnover among teachers with different certification status and the impact on student achievement of hiring teachers with predictably high turnover

This report fills an important gap in the literature on school leadership by presenting an approach for understanding the resources and expenditures associated with efforts to prepare, hire, evaluate, develop, and support school leaders and by presenting estimates of those resources and expenditures. 

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,

Schools devote substantial resources to teacher professional development each year. Yet studies show much of this investment is directed toward ineffective short-term workshops that have little impact on instructional change or student outcomes. At the same time, more intensive job-embedded forms of professional learning, such as instructional coaching, require substantially more resources than traditional professional development.

This study present some of first evidence on the implementation and subsequent effect of discretionary layoff policies, by studying the 18th largest public school district in the nation, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools (CMS).

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).

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

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. 

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

This article provides a summary of measuring the fiscal impact of practices in education
educational policy.

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 demonstrates, for the first time, that providing all 20% of the nation’s three- and four-year-old children who live in poverty with a high-quality ECD program would have a substantial payoff for governments and taxpayers in the future.

This research summary focuses on aspects of the study’s results that are likely to be most useful for policymakers and school leaders as they strive to maintain and manage an effective teacher workforce.

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 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 article provides an analysis of factors influencing the supply of and demand for special education teachers

In examining recruitment and retention of teachers in rural areas, David Monk begins by noting the numerous possible characteristics of rural communities—small size, sparse settlement, distance from population concentrations, and an economic reliance on agricultural industries that are increasingly using seasonal and immigrant workers to minimize labor costs.

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.

The authors offer a new vision of teacher career pathways for the 21st century that holds promise for recruiting and retaining excellent teachers who further student learning. They showcase recent initiatives at the local, state, and national level that promote teacher role differentiation and create different models of teacher staffing and teacher career continuums.

To highlight principal shortage trends, examine school leader recruitment issues, and offer policy recommendations for improving school leader recruitment efforts at the federal, state, and local level.

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

This report reviews an extensive body of research on teacher recruitment and retention, and identifies five major factors that influence a teacher’s decision to enter, remain in, or leave the teaching profession, generally, and high-need schools, specifically.

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. 

This brief is intended to inform state leaders and others in the field about the participating states’ efforts to strengthen the recruitment, preparation, support, and supervision of school leaders.

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

The Teacher Shortages and Surpluses Databurst is an analysis of states' work to track teacher shortages and surpluses, and to implement the policy solutions to address these challenges. This resource includes an overview of promising practices currently being implemented, a snapshot of all 50 states' and the District of Columbia's efforts in addressing teacher supply and demand challenges, and noteworthy state policies by region across the country.

This study shows that the overuse of suspensions in California schools is harming student achievement and graduation rates, and resulting in billions of dollars in economic damage. The study quantifies the financial consequences of school suspensions down to the district level, reporting both the additional costs borne by taxpayers as a result of suspensions and the economic benefit lost to the state. 

Efficient use of educational resources is a perennial challenge for school systems. Maximizing the impact of education interventions to magnify student achievement is an important goal for all school districts. This guide examines the use of expenditure-to-performance ratios as a critical indicator for school systems to help decide which interventions make sense when education dollars are at a premium. It describes how states and districts can use available data on district expenditures and student academic achievement to calculate six district-level expenditure-to-performance ratios.

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.

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 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.

To contribute to the limited empirical literature on the principal labor market, this study explores the reasons for the disparity of turnover rates between charter school principals and their counterparts in traditional public schools (TPSs).

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

The National Teacher and Principal Survey is completed every four years soliciting descriptive information from principals and teachers across the 50 states. A few highlights include: Sixty percent of school principals have been at their schools for three years or less. 

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 purpose of this study is to examine the costs of replacing high school principals. 

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.

The third in a series of reports evaluating a multi-year Wallace initiative documents ways in which six districts are working to improve school leadership districtwide. 

This research looked at test score gaps for a range of populations: between boys and girls; between black, white, and Hispanic children; between the children and the mother’s education; between children in poor and nonpoor families; and the gaps between high-poverty and low-poverty schools. They wanted to know whether gaps grow faster during summer or the school year. They were unable to answer this question as the results were inconclusive. Although, von Hippel and Hamrock did find the total gap in performance from kindergarten to eighth grade, is substantially smaller than the gap that exists at the time children enter school. The conclusion is that gaps happen mostly in the first five years of life. study suggests students who are behind peers at the time they enter kindergarten should receive early remedial instruction as the most efficacious way to improve overall performance.

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.

The faux teacher shortage is of tremendous consequences. It routinely results in both states and school disricts lowering their standards for who is license and hired. But more important, it serve to distract us from fixing the chronic and persistent and alignment of teacher supply and demand. 

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.

This research addresses the problem of teacher shortages in urban, high-needs schools.