School Leadership
Overview
One of the most important factors in whether schools improve is if principals know how to build a school culture of collaborative teachers and staff who continually learn and improve.
Photo by New America, courtesy of Creative Commons
Background
For decades the education world has sought answers to what helps schools improve. Lots of fads and fashions have been adopted with great initial fanfare only to peter out in disappointment, from the “small schools” movement to investments in “ed tech.”
But careful research has established a few factors that genuinely lead to better schools and better outcomes for students. One key is teacher collaboration. Another is principals’ ability to lead improvement through school-wide collaboration. For many in the research world, this finding was initially counter-intuitive. One prominent researcher, when faced with the evidence of the importance of principals, said ruefully: “I always thought of principals as interchangeable middle managers.” In contrast, teachers have always known that principals are important. When teachers are asked why they leave their schools or the profession, “lack of administrative support” often tops the list.
What do expert principals do to lead improvement?
Establish a school-wide culture of high expectations for students and teachers. This means establishing school-wide expectations for behavior, work ethic, and academic effort. Far too often teachers are expected to build their own “classroom cultures” without the support of a school culture. This fractures their efforts.
Marshal time, money, and people to support instruction. For example, they establish master schedules (school-wide schedules) to:
Minimize interruptions of instruction. Far too many schools have schedules where, for example, students are pulled out of core classroom instruction for special services such as counseling, which means they fall behind.
Ensure that teachers have time to collaborate on instruction, data, and problems of practice so that they can expose and share expertise.
Ensure that students who falter are provided immediate help before they fall behind–and if they do fall behind they get the extra help they need right away.
Help teachers make better and better decisions. Teachers make thousands of decisions every day, from how to greet students at the beginning of class to how to assess what students have learned from that day’s lessons. No one can expect any teacher to always make the right decision. But, through collaboration with their colleagues, studying student work and data, and high-quality professional development, teachers can make better decisions over time, leading to better student outcomes.
Of course, all of this is in addition to the “regular” things we expect principals to do expertly, such as ensuring that the school is safe, that the cafeteria runs smoothly, that parents are informed of what is going on in the school, and a myriad of other things.
In other words, principals are important leaders and should be thought of as such. One of the key responsibilities of superintendents is to appoint principals who understand how to lead improvement and understand how to work with a particular school community.
Far too often superintendents think of principals the way the researcher cited above used to: as interchangeable middle managers whose job is to simply carry out district directives. Too many superintendents do not spend sufficient time and attention on appointing principals. They tend to simply promote assistant principals who have put in time without ever having led school improvement. Although this is not good for any school, it is disastrous for high-need schools, which tend to have higher turnover of principals–many of whom say they were not prepared to lead high-need schools and did not have sufficient support.
As research has established, effective superintendents and effective principals share in common a three-part formula for success: they lead the shaping of a vision for school improvement; they build systems to help achieve that vision; and they develop people who are able to make those systems work. When superintendents consciously build careful systems of training, selection, and support for principals, we see lower teacher attrition and better student outcomes.
Note: School board members do not choose or evaluate principals. However, they need to ask superintendents what factors they weigh in hiring principals and what steps they take to ensure that principals have the knowledge, skill, and support necessary to lead improvement in their schools. This is important for all schools, but absolutely critical for high-need schools.
Key School Leadership Literature
“Organizations that improve do so because they create and nurture agreement on what is worth achieving, and they set in motion the internal processes by which people progressively learn how to do what they need to do in order to achieve what is worthwhile.”
–Building a New Structure for School Leadership, by Richard Elmore, Albert Shanker Institute, 1999
The Wallace Foundation has led the field in focusing on school leadership as a factor in school improvement. They commissioned foundational research establishing school leadership’s importance in the early 2000s and later established that there are better ways to ensure high-quality principals than the semi-random appointments that typically happen in districts.
“Leadership is widely regarded as a key factor in accounting for differences in the success with which schools foster the learning of their students. Indeed, the contribution of effective leadership is largest when it is needed most; there are virtually no documented instances of troubled schools being turned around in the absence of intervention by talented leaders. While other factors within the school also contribute to such turnarounds, leadership is the catalyst.”
–How Leadership Influences Learning, Kenneth Leithwood, Karen Seashore Louis, Stephen Anderson and Kyla Wahlstrom, commissioned by The Wallace Foundation, 2004.
“Principals really matter.”
–How Principals Affect Students and Schools: A Systematic Synthesis of Two Decades of Research, by Jason A. Grissom, Anna J. Egalite , and Constance A. Lindsay, commissioned by The Wallace Foundation, 2021.
“Schools in large districts that built comprehensive principal pipelines markedly outperformed similar schools in comparison districts in reading and math.”
–Principal Pipelines: A Feasible, Affordable, and Effective Way for Districts to Improve Schools, Susan M. Gates, Matthew D. Baird, Benjamin K. Master, and Emilio Chavez-Herrerias, Rand Corporation, commissioned by The Wallace Foundation. 2019.
“Because principal effectiveness strongly affects school functioning and influences a broad set of school, teacher, and student outcomes, states and districts have a vested interest in ensuring that principals have access to high-quality learning experiences.”
-Developing Effective Principals: How Policies Can Make a Difference, by Linda Darling-Hammond, Marjorie Wechsler, Stephanie Levin, Melanie Leung-Gagne, and Steve Tozer, The Learning Policy Institute, 2023.
For examples of how expert principals marshal the full power of schools, see Karin Chenoweth’s Schools That Succeed (2017). For examples of the ways expert superintendents affirm the importance of principals and support them, see Districts That Succeed (2021), both published by Harvard Education Press.
Please Note: This is a living document that may be edited and changed from time to time.
