Principal Standards

This report highlights the very important role that states play in cultivating principal leadership talent. This paper speaks concern about improving human resources management at the state and district levels, doing quality control at the entry requirements, and give states tools and strategies to re-frame policies to bolster the principal talent pipeline. 

This paper discusses the potential and challenges of a “cohesive leadership system” which coordinates leadership standards, training, and conditions at both the State and district levels. Effective coordination of these components, then, has the potential to both speed and make more permanent the benefits to the learning of all students.

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.

This report addresses the implementation of principal evaluation and related support as of 2015, viewing implementation in the context of districts’ aims, constraints, and capacity. Principal evaluation is part of the Wallace Principal Pipeline Initiative design, intended both as a means of assessing novice principals’ performance against clear standards and as a roadmap for tailoring professional development and one-on-one support to identified areas of need.

Standardized tests play a critical role in tracking and comparing K-12 student progress across time, student demographics, and governing bodies (states, cities, districts). One methodology is to benchmark the each state’s proficiency standards against those of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) test.  This study does just that.  Using NAEP as a common yardstick allows a comparison of different state assessments. The results confirm the wide variation in proficiency standards across states.  It also documents that the significant majority of states have standards are much lower than those established by the NAEP.

Districts and states establish minimum eligibility requirements for individuals serving as principals in public schools. The intent of these requirements—which include mandated degrees, prior teaching and/or administrative experience, and certifications—is to ensure a minimum quality standard in the principal candidate pool.

Heroic models of leadership based on the role of the principal have been supplemented by an emerging recognition of the value of ‘distributed leadership’. The work of effective senior leadership teams (SLTs) is an important manifestation of distributed leadership, but there has been only limited research addressing the relationship between this model and leadership teams in education.

In a time when public schools continue to be scrutinized, school leadership never mattered more in order to exercise school reform. This qualitative study examined how five principals working in an urban school district perceived their evaluation and how it contributed to their practice.

Principal evaluations can be important tools for improving leadership practice, but evaluations have often described by principals and researchers as unsystematic and lacking timely and actionable feedback. This study examines principal perceptions of the Texas Principal Evaluation and Support System.

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.

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

With this current study, the Bush Institute sought to go beyond sharing information about best practices in principal preparation and connect information about program graduates to student outcomes. Specifically, this study evaluated the impact of five Alliance to Reform Education Leadership Network programs on student achievement. 

This paper investigate the most commonly used exam, the School Leaders Licensure Assessment (SLLA), using 10 years of data on Tennessee test takers. This paper found that although candidates with higher scores are more likely to be hired as principals, we find little evidence that SLLA scores predict measures of principal job performance, including supervisors’ evaluation ratings or teachers’ assessments of school leadership from a statewide survey.

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

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 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.

Research demonstrating principals' impact on student learning outcomes has fueled the shift from principals as facilities managers to an emphasis on instructional leadership. Principals are under increasing pressure to carry out effective instructional leadership practices, including those needed to adopt college- and career-ready standards and more comprehensive teacher evaluation approaches.

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

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. 

Leading School Turnaround offers new perspectives and concrete, evidence-based guidelines for the educational leaders and administrators faced with the challenge of turning our low-performing schools around. Using the tools outlined in this groundbreaking book, school leaders can guide their schools to higher levels of achievement and sustained academic success.

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

In a distributed leadership model, responsibilities for providing feedback and support to teachers are shared by the principal and other school and/or district staff. This feedback may be given by a wide variety of educators—from peers to coaches to administrators—and be used formatively for self-reflection, collaborative planning, and/or formally used in evaluation. Implementing a distributed leadership approach creates an opportunity for districts to ensure all educators are receiving high quality feedback to improve their practice.

This paper describe four essential elements of effective principals: principal standards, high-quality training, selective hiring, and a combination of solid on-the-job support and performance evaluation, especially for new hires.

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

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. 

Founded in 2000 by a team of social entrepreneurs, New Leaders is a national nonprofit that develops transformational school leaders and designs effective leadership policies and practices for school systems across the country.

Using examples from states throughout the country, this guidebook from the National Conference of State Legislatures describes six key areas in which state legislators can take action to improve the quality of leadership in public schools

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.

Intended for state officials involved in the assessment and approval of university and other programs to train future school principals, this report describes five design principles for effective program evaluation.