Principal Impact

This paper explores an alternative principal development program that combines the development of shared leadership and individual leaders as schools pursue their learning-improvement agendas.

This review summarizes the evidence for the model’s efficacy in explaining how principals and teachers together influence school practices and effectiveness.

This review highlights major models that have been influential in the field and discusses evidence for their efficacy in explaining school leaders’ influence.  

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 paper offer a number of research findings and action steps drawn from policies and practices that have been shown to be critical to the success of educational reforms at the local, district and state levels.

This study examines the detrimental impact of principal turnover, including lower teacher retention and lower student achievement. Particularly hard hit are high poverty schools, which often lose principals at a higher rate as they transition to lower poverty, higher student achievement schools.

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.

Greater understanding about how variables mediate the relationship between leadership and achievement is essential to the success of reform efforts that hold leaders accountable for student learning. This multi-source, quantitative study tests a model of integrated transformational leadership including three important school mediators.

This paper seeks to estimate the effect that Career Leader (CL) program has had on teachers’ career decisions, specifically their decisions to stay in a specific school district or to remain in the teaching field.

This review of related literature and research prompted the development of a framework for understanding the role of the principal as an instructional manager. A number of links between school-level variables and student learning are proposed. The discussion includes consideration of instructional organization, school climate, influence behavior, and the context of principal management.

The purpose of this paper is to present a comprehensive review of 25 years of quantitative instructional leadership research, up through 2013, using a nationally generalizable data set.

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.

This study provides new evidence on the importance of school leadership by estimating individual principals’ contributions to growth in student achievement.

Although the scholarship on race in education is vast, the authors attempt to review some of the most pressing and persistent issues in this chapter. They also suggest that the future of race scholarship in education needs to be centered not on equality but rather on equity and justice. 

The articles in this special issue emerged from papers presented by the authors during a symposium at an annual meeting of the University Council of Educational Administration (UCEA). The authors’ intent then and now is to shed light on the perceptions, preparation, practices, and impact of teacher leaders in schools through presenting reports of research on leadership development conducted in diverse states and for diverse purposes.

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

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.

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.

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.

This small-scale pilot study investigated the role of school principals in the induction of new teachers in Ontario, Canada.

In this paper, we study how providing improved information to principals about teacher effectiveness and encouraging them to use the information in personnel decisions affects the composition of teacher turnovers.

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

A growing body of research recognizes the critical role of the school principal, demonstrating that school principals’ effects on student outcomes are second only to those of teachers. Yet policy makers have often paid little attention to principals, choosing instead to focus policy reform on teachers. In the last decade, this pattern has shifted somewhat.

This review summarizes the evidence for the model’s efficacy in explaining how principals and teachers together influence school practices and effectiveness.

This review highlights major models that have been influential in the field and discusses evidence for their efficacy in explaining school leaders’ influence.  

Principals are in a paradoxical position. On one hand, they're called on to use research-based strategies to improve student achievement. On the other, they're increasingly required to micromanage teachers by observing in classrooms and engaging in intensive evaluation. The authors point out that these two positions are at odds with each other.

Applying an analytic model to better understand collective leadership development, this study examines three high schools: one urban, one suburban, and one rural. Each school's unique structure and context tests the model's explanatory power.

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.

The Principal Follow-up Survey (PFS), first conducted in school year 2008-09, is a component of the 2011-12 Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS). The 2012-13 PFS was administered in order to provide attrition rates for principals in K-12 public and private schools. The goal was to assess how many principals in the 2011-12 school year still worked as a principal in the same school in the 2012-13 school year, how many had moved to become a principal in another school, and how many had left the principalship.

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 investigate the association between principal effectiveness and principal turnover using longitudinal data from Tennessee, a state that has invested in multiple measures of principal performance through its educator evaluation system.

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.

School leadership matters for school outcomes, including student achievement. This assumption has become commonplace since the publication of the highly influential Wallace Foundation–commissioned report by Leithwood and colleagues in 2004. Policymakers and researchers often quote the report's main conclusion that “leadership is second only to classroom instruction among all school-related factors that contribute to what students learn at school”.

this article identifies multiple conceptual approaches for capturing the contributions of principals to student test score growth, develops empirical models to reflect these approaches, examines the properties of these models, and compares the results of the models empirically using data from a large urban school district.

This study examines the associations between leadership behaviors and student achievement gains using a unique data source: in-person, full-day observations of principals collected over three school years. The study finds that principals’ time spent broadly on instructional functions does not predict student achievement growth. Time spent on informal classroom walkthroughs negatively predicts student growth, particularly in high schools.

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 chapter describes findings from a series of related quantitative studies in which we sought to understand how leadership contributes to school capacity for improvement and student learning.

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 study examines how local school leaders make sense of complex programs designed to evaluate teachers and teaching. New standards-based teacher evaluation policies promise to provide school leaders and teachers with a common framework that can serve as a basis for improving teaching and learning in schools.

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.

Because principal turnover may occur in response to or contemporaneous with a downturn in student achievement, the effect of a turnover is confounded with unobserved school-level factors. We employ a novel identification strategy that blocks each potential source of endogeneity to isolate plausibly causal effects of within- and between-year principal turnover.

States and districts across the country are implementing new principal evaluation systems that include measures of the quality of principals' school leadership practices and measures of student achievement growth. Because these evaluation systems will be used for high- stakes decisions, it is important that the component measures of the evaluation systems fairly and accurately differentiate between effective and ineffective principals.

In this study the relationship between school leadership and teachers'
organizational commitment is examined by taking into account a distributed leadership
perspective.

The purpose of this paper is to estimate the relationship between principal effectiveness (which we capture with a principal quality measure) and turnover. Specifically, we assess whether higher quality principals are more or less likely to leave their schools in New York City (NYC) as well as at the national level.

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 purpose of this paper is to focus on the way in which principals in different countries are securing successful organisational change through systematically building social capital. It argues that how a school works as a cohesive unit and how people collaborates will ultimately define organisational performance.

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.

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 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. 

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.

This report examines the evidence on: How leadership matters and how important those effects are in promoting the learning of all children.

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

The authors use longitudinal data from one large school district to investigate the distribution of principals across schools. They find that schools serving many low-income, non-White, and low-achieving students have principals who have less experience and less education and who attended less selective colleges. This distribution of principals is partially driven by the initial match of first-time principals to schools, and it is exacerbated by systematic attrition and transfer away from these schools.

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.

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

This study analyzed three urban districts' efforts to improve the instructional quality and performance of their schools. The study also assessed the efforts made in four: (1) promoting the instructional leadership of principals; (2) supporting the professional learning of teachers, in particular through school-based coaching models; (3) specifying curriculum; (4) and promoting data-based decision making for planning and instructional improvement.

This study uses twelve years of administrative data from North Carolina to examine the impact of school principals on school quality. The study finds that principal departures are followed by a decrease in a school’s performance.

Using twelve years of administrative data from North Carolina public schools, this paper explores the relationship between principal turnover and student achievement. 

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 study examined the impact of EDP on student achievement in Pennsylvania schools
from 2006-2010. It updates and extends a prior evaluation (Nunnery, Ross, & Yen, 2010a) study
of this same cohort from 2006-2009.

The purpose of this chapter was to trace the place of “social justice” in the field's discourse since the early 1960s, the decade in which the first academic journals of the field appeared. More specifically, the chapter aims at (1) presenting the emergence of “social justice” as an area of study in the field's journals from a historical perspective and (2) analyzing the major topics related to this area of study and its types of publication. 

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

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.

The Howard County school board agreed to pay nearly $1.65 million in salary and benefits to persuade Renee Foose to retire as schools superintendent.

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.

Often principals in urban school districts report to a central office staff person whose primary function is to supervise principals. Over the past decade, the principal supervisor role has shifted away from administrative oversight toward developing principals’ instructional leadership capacity. As principals are increasingly responsible for driving improvement in their schools, the demands of supervising principals similarly have changed.

The bulk of the study is dedicated to an analysis of the empirical research literature on leadership effects. This includes the presentation of results from an earlier meta-analysis carried out by the authors, a summary of other meta-analyses, and a new meta-analysis based upon 25 studies carried out between 2005 and 2010.

This report examines the evidence and analyses to substantiate the claim that leadership and principals in particular have a significant impact on students and schools.

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.

The authors use principals’ self-ratings to construct typologies of effectiveness in both domains and compare their relationship to student achievement. Results show that principals view themselves as either strong or weak on instructional leadership and organizational management skills simultaneously. They also find that learning gains vary significantly across the principal profiles.

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.

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

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.

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. 

This paper provides evidence on how school leaders used their new autonomy and its impact on school performance. 

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

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.

This study used Hierarchical Multivariate Linear models to investigate relationships between principals' behaviors and district principal evaluation purpose, focus, and assessed leadership activities in 13 school districts in Michigan. The study found that principals were more likely to engage in learning-centered leadership behaviors when the purposes of evaluation included principal professional development, school restructuring, and accountability; when the focus of evaluation was related to instructional leadership; and when evaluation addressed leadership in school goal setting, curriculum design, teacher professional development and evaluation, and monitoring student learning.

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.

This study examines whether principals' movements and school achievement are associated with their salaries.

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.

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.